This event is co-sponsored by the Center for South Asia and the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

About the event
What does it mean to describe statues as phallic objects? Taking this everyday observation as a point of departure, in this talk I ask what political performative work the putative phallicity of statues does. I will explore the landscape of iconographic rivalry along religious and caste lines in contemporary India before homing in on the Statue of Unity – currently the tallest statue in the world – in the state of Gujarat. Built in the Narmada Valley, the location of one of the most iconic struggles against the predatory ‘developmental’ state, I will suggest that the statue should be read as the triumphant capstone of a long running extractive project that is emblematic of postcolonial settler-colonial capitalism. In doing so, I will attempt to offer a reading of the place of statues in ongoing processes of racial capitalism.  

Speaker's biography
Rahul Rao is Reader in International Political Thought in the School of International Relations at the University of St Andrews, and Professorial Research Associate at SOAS University of London. Prior to this he taught at SOAS and University College, University of Oxford. He has a law degree from the National Law School of India University and read for a DPhil in International Relations at Balliol College, University of Oxford. He is the author of three books: The Psychic Lives of Statues: Reckoning with the Rubble of Empire (London: Pluto Press, 2025), Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), and Third World Protest: Between Home and the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). His work has been supported by fellowships awarded by the Leverhulme Trust and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study. He is a member of the Radical Philosophy editorial collective. His work has appeared in The Caravan and Himal Southasian.