A #PresentingACCUTE Interview

With the upcoming 2025 ACCUTE Conference at George Brown College from 30th May- June 2nd, we have been having an interview series of #PresentingACCUTE which focuses on some of the presenters in conversation with Gladwell Pamba, ACCUTE’s Coordination and Communications Assistant. Next up on the series is Rajarshi Banerjee, who is a PhD candidate, working primarily on Romanticism and the History of Sciences. While his work is invested in Deconstruction, History of Ideas, and Posthumanism, he is also interested in Animal Studies, Biopolitics, as well as Reading and Readership. He loves exploring what it means to be or become ‘human’, what constitutes ‘humanity’, and, by extension, what the modality of ‘humanities’ is. He is the President of the Graduate Student Caucus of ACCUTE and looks forward to meeting all of you during the conference.

Tell us a little bit about what you’ll be focusing on in your presentation.

My paper is titled “Contrary to Contraries: Theorising Blake’s Fungal Suspension”. Mapping the Romantic Blake along a Posthumanist axis, my paper re-reads and recalibrates what Blakean good and evil may look like when we study his contraries through the lens of a suspended ‘fungus’. Today – in the Genetic/Genomic and Digital/Digitised era – we are fond of category-defying Mycelial modalities that challenge straightforward binaries of good/evil, inside/outside, human/nonhuman, life/death, science/art, and so on. I am keen, however, on pondering how disruptive a fungus could be to Blakean thought. Curiously, perhaps, (and I need a bit more time to confirm this with conviction), the only ever utterance of a ‘fungus’ in the entire gamut of canonical English Romantic literary texts occurs in Blake. Therefore, the archaeology of this Romantic fungal suspension is what my paper aims to unpack in the age of Posthumanism and the Anthropocene.

How did you come to work on this or where did this work come from?

I love Blake; all my passwords revolve around his quotes (please don’t try to guess any: haha). It is not a surprise, then, that he creeps, seeps, and leaps into my work often. Not only the literary world, but also other arts have gained so much from his legacy. If Jim Morrison can set up a rock band under the ‘influence’ of Blake, then, I can, at least, write a paper today, right?

Frivolity aside, though, this paper’s inception is owed to the panel organisers – Adam Mohamed & Liam Rockall – whose captivating pitch on Romanticism allowed me to make several different strands of my weirdly wired brain finally converge. Firstly, given my thrill in parsing the thresholds between the humanities and the hard sciences, and that between the humanities and the posthumanities, I have been thinking of a fungal hermeneutics for some time now. Secondly, in the globally polarised socio-political milieu, what I call a fungal imperative is paramount. Thirdly, debunking conventional and conservative notions associated with both Romanticism and deconstruction, my interest in upholding what Blake – even if he is a dead white male thinker – has to offer us today is what led me to this paper.

What have you been reading or watching lately that you can recommend to your ACCUTE colleagues?

Oh; Tár, of course!!! The timely questions of gender, art/istry, parenting, and the ever so slippery public/private spheres are impeccably addressed in the work indeed. Cinematography and editing, alongside sound design, are right on the mark too; but what makes this piece so starkly and remarkably stand out for me are its narrative supremacy and its commentary on the nature, relevance, and pitfalls of Pedagogy. 

What do you love to do when you’re not researching, teaching, or studying?

I love connecting with other scholars and learning from their work and experiences. The GSC allows me not only to remain in touch with grad students across institutions but also to keep learning from the ACCUTE board members who are established scholars across fields/generations. I also keep trying and widening my vision by organising panels at conferences: for instance, I am keenly looking forward to chairing the “Beyond the State” as well as “Speculative Bodies” panels during this Congress. Some of my dearest friends are avid readers of philosophy, grad students, and/or recent graduates too; bouncing off ideas, regardless of re-search per se, is sheer fun.