Dr Yasmeen Narayan

Overview

Biography

Yasmeen Narayan is a postcolonial theorist, cultural historian and short story writer who is based in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. Yasmeen convenes the Culture Diaspora Ethnicity MA programme and the Race Forum at Birkbeck. 

Web profiles

• Bluesky

Professional memberships

• Caribbean Philosophical Association

• Postcolonial Studies Association

Honours and awards

• Vice Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, Birkbeck, University of London, March 2024

Research

Research interests

• racialised subjectification
• colonial histories of the Caribbean and India
• transcontinental histories of creolization and hybridity
• colonial and postcolonial systems of categorisation
• histories of state and corporate negligence and violence such as police violence in Britain in the 1970s and 80s
• contemporary antinationalisms and internationalisms
• sexual categorisation and sexual violence
• urban cultures
• postcoloniality
• reparative pedagogy

Research overview

Yasmeen's research interests lie in the transdisciplinary areas of the colonial histories of the Caribbean and India particularly across the nineteenth century; colonial and postcolonial systems of categorisation; transcontinental histories of creolization and hybridity; histories and cartographies of state and corporate negligence and violence such as police violence in Britain in the 1970s and 80s; contemporary antinationalisms and internationalisms; sexual categorisation and sexual violence; urban cultures; postcoloniality and reparative pedagogy. 

 
Yasmeen’s current book, under contract with Manchester University Press, draws these threads together through a transdisciplinary theory of racialised subjectification.

 
'Towards a reparatory theory of creolization' will be published in a special issue of Open Cultural Studies on violence in 2025. This transtemporal analysis examines the transconjunctural, transcontinental tributaries of specific elements of Greek thought and Islam through the Greek Arabic Translation Movement in Iraq and academic cultures in Timbuktu. It then explores how these syncretic cultural forms were further creolized in the Caribbean to produce practices of subsistence land cultivation and counter-taxonomies to modern racial typologies of humans and subhumans. This discussion leads to an antinationalist, reparatory theory of creolization during a conjuncture defined by new wars, ultranationalisms and internationalisms. 

Yasmeen is currently working on a project that synthesises genealogies of colonial categorisation in British India across the nineteenth century and presents the beginnings of a transcontinental theory of biocolonisation. This analysis joins conversations on anticolonial counter-taxonomisation and subterranean histories of cultural invention that are erased by hegemonic forms of categorisation. It further shows how nineteenth century colonial typologies shape postcolonial taxonomies that are central to contemporary histories of state and corporate negligence and violence.

 

Research Centres and Institutes

• convenor, Race Forum
• member, Centre for Research on Race and Law

Supervision and teaching

Teaching

Yasmeen designed the open access BSc Social Science programme and is Director of the interdisciplinary, postgraduate Culture Diaspora Ethnicity programme.

Yasmeen teaches the postgraduate modules ‘Race’, Empire, Postcoloniality and Culture, Community, Identity and received a Vice Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching and Learning in 2024.

Publications

Business and community

Outreach

Yasmeen is convenor of the Race Forum which hosts lectures, seminars and symposia on ‘race’ and racism in relation to transcontinental histories and legacies of colonisation and the global geopolitics of the twenty-first century.

It also holds public reading groups on postcolonial and decolonial thought. 

Events at the Race Forum are continuing to focus this year on different forms of violence such as historical and contemporary forms of state and corporate negligence and violence.