tgiFHI | Preeti Singh, Asian & Middle Eastern Studies
tgiFHI is a weekly series that gives Duke faculty in the humanities, interpretive social sciences and arts the opportunity to present their current research to their departmental and interdepartmental colleagues, students, and other interlocutors in their fields.
On Friday, February 20, 2026, we will host Preeti Singh, Assistant Professor of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies.
"But the Trains Ran on Time:" Infrastructures of the Emergency in 1970s India
How does infrastructure mediate historical and aesthetic crisis in the Global South? What new modes of approaching postcolonial literature, cinema, and history does an infrastructural reading open up? This paper examines the cultural politics of the national Emergency declared in 1970s India by turning to railway infrastructure as a site for reading the longue durée of the emergency in colonial and postcolonial India. Moving beyond culturalist readings of postcolonial authoritarianism informed by Cold War epistemologies, the paper shows how an attention to railway infrastructures in their material and narrative iterations brings to light the political economy of the emergency while highlighting a history of emergence-challenges to the emergency state from below.
Preeti Singh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke. Her research examines literary expression of political and social crises at the intersection of decolonization and the global Cold War. Her wider research and teaching interests include postcolonial and South Asian literatures, political theory, South-South solidarities, and the urban and environmental humanities. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in South Asian Review, Philosophy and Global Affairs, Global South Studies, The International Journal of Comic Art, Public Books, and Modern Fiction Studies.
Free Food and Beverages, Humanities, Lecture/Talk, Research