Interview with Sushmita Chatterjee

In this interview with Dr. Sushmita Chatterjee, Chair of Ethnic Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies in Colorado State University, we discuss her past and present research. Across all of her work, Chatterjee explores the processes of subject formation; in particular, she has asked questions related to the politics of meat, animals, and transnationality, examining how words, concepts, and categories travel (or not) through different sociocultural and geographic contexts. Chatterjee’s scholarship is located at the intersections of gender, food, and nature. Her work is guided by her playful curiosity and interest in the deconstruction of political and philosophical issues. At the beginning of the conversation, Chatterjee explains how she configures and undertakes the figure of the animal as both man and as a political entity within nationalist frames, thinking through how the animal expands towards, what she names, transnationalism. Our conversation with Chatterjee also turned towards her intellectual and professional journey that led her to the politics of animality, and her upcoming project, which concerns what she conceptualizes as the “new woman.” In sum, Chatterjee demonstrates how thoughtful scholarship can be achieved through critical interdisciplinary inquiry, as she explains her theoretical engagement with themes around animality, transnationalism, methods of framing, and the democratic imagination.