Dr Paroma Ghose completed her PhD at the Department of International History and Politics at the Geneva Graduate Institute in 2020. Her doctoral research looked at the experience of the ‘other’ and the notion of belonging in France (1981-2012) through the lyrics of French Rap songs. She was awarded the Pierre du Bois Prize 2020 for the best doctoral thesis in International History at the Graduate Institute. Paroma will soon rejoin the Department of International History and Politics at the Geneva Graduate Institute as post doctoral researcher.
What is your research focused on?
My research interests centre on the nexus between a few overarching themes: history, culture, and politics. In particular, I have long been fascinated by the way in which cultural sources can capture the overlooked details of the ordinary past and reveal a very different narrative of history than one derived from political polemics. I look to cultural sources, increasingly in a contemporary timeframe, to study the longue durée history of different societies and their encounters.
While my doctoral work was bound by the legal and political ambit of the nation-state of France, my postdoctoral work has a wider lens, aspiring to an eventual foray into global history. Similarly, while I focused exclusively on the use of rap songs as my primary archive in my doctoral work, I am now in the process of widening the spectrum of cultural material to move beyond a genre-focused approach, and to include more audio-visual (videos, film, television, etc.) sources. Using these, I hope to look at the meetings, clashes, and collisions of different national representations on the global popular culture stage, and how decades if not centuries of history can unravel in a single moment or through a single word. These instances can reveal the geopolitical distribution of power, and demonstrate that the nature of these instances of encounter is the culmination of long histories that continue to define our contemporary world.
How is your research linked to the Department of International History and Politics and what added value has the Department brought to you?
Without a doubt, my doctoral research would not have been possible without the unrelenting support of my PhD supervisor, Dr. Davide Rodogno. He enabled the conditions that allowed me to go beyond the usual areas of study at the Graduate Institute, and encouraged me to explore and push the boundaries of what is traditionally constructed as history, both in method and time period. I also received a great deal of encouragement from several others affiliated with the International History Department, including Prof. Ribi-Forclaz, Prof. Balachandran, Prof. Mohamedou, Valérie von Daeniken, and Prof. Biltoft. This collective interest in my work was the most crucial ingredient in the construction of my thesis. It made the challenging journey of uncovering a subject that was unfamiliar to us all, a far less lonely one than it might otherwise have proved to be.
The international and transnational scope of the research conducted within the department of International History and Politics provided an effective and stimulating intellectual space where I was able to learn in no small way from the ideas and themes of the research of my colleagues. The International History and Politics department has an exceptionally collegial environment that encourages collaboration and discussion, which is rare within the research world.
History as a discipline is incredibly malleable and open, it allows for a great deal of intellectual adventuring, and I was able to try new (to me) methodologies and develop an alternative perspective to the study of politics through cultural sources precisely because my topic was slightly controversial (within the classical academic framework) in nature.
For your doctoral research you adopted an innovative approach studying history through rap music, what do you think this added to your research?
The study of the past through music, particularly jazz and western classical music, has been the premise of many cultural histories. However, rap, as a controversial genre that has yet to reach its zenith even in the contemporary world, was an unusual choice for a historian’s archive because it is still very much in process, and a staple feature of all that is current. Rap has therefore remained a subject of study for those disciplines that favour the present.
Yet, rap - which is an acronym for ‘Rhythm And Poetry’ (Rakim & Eric B, ‘Follow the Leader’, 1988) - is inextricably linked with both the long historical past and the innovative musical present. From its beginnings, it has been a music form that has been variously associated with minority communities and their rights, politics and the expression of social discontent, and the formation of a multiplicity of identities, local, national, and international. All of these have deep-seated causes in the pasts of the countries in which they are formed; rap is one means of their showcase and often an effective manner of their articulation when other forms of demonstration or societal engagement are not easily accessible to those wanting to have their equal say. As a musical genre therefore, it affords an unusual amount of space to words, and therefore easily lends itself to discourse, whether political, societal, or otherwise.
Moreover, in most places where rap has travelled, it has tended to be performed by those within a similar societal repository, usually those who are on the socio-economic margins of their respective national spaces. Often, this economic marginalisation is coupled with another kind of ostracism, most commonly racial or ethnic discrimination. Thus, rap very naturally offers a vast array of voices that often remain unheard in other social and national discourses. In France in particular, rappers have a keen sense of their dues and rights, and when these are selectively distributed by the state and society. Since so many rappers in France have immigrant origins or descent, their musical discourse becomes immediately a meeting point of a past, which society will not let them forget, and a present that they seem to be unable to access. For all these reasons, rap seemed a living historical archive that historians had not so far chosen to explore.
What is the current project you are leading on?
As a postdoctoral researcher in the Graduate Institute's Department of International History and Politics (IHEID), I am currently working on several articles and interdisciplinary projects, including a collaborative research grant proposal, an edited volume, and a podcast series. My academic work can be divided into three main themes: first, aspects of ostracism and the selective implementation of promised universal ideals in France, which derive from my PhD thesis; second, the inversion of the traditional relationship between the historian and her sources through the use of contemporary popular culture archives to cast a longue durée perspective on the study of the evolution of societies; and third, the construction of a global, cross-cultural lens for the writing of intellectual and socio-political history. I am currently preparing a few articles on all of these themes, some with co-authors, and am also writing the historical chapter for the Cambridge Companion to Global Rap (2023).
Collaboratively, I am currently implicated in two cross-disciplinary projects. Within the research frame, I am currently in the process of drafting a collaborative research proposal with colleagues in the UK, France, and the USA on conceptions and experiences of discrimination in different national spaces. This is an interdisciplinary project (history, sociology, literary studies) where our different areas of expertise are brought together by a common thematic interest in manners of ostracism in different countries. My second collaborative project is a creative one entitled Utopia3. I work with Dr. Davide Rodogno, Dr. Jonathan Schmitt, David Brun Lambert, and Martial Mingam to produce a podcast series which brings an academic and global perspective to questions on human rights and culture. Most recently, we collaborated with the Geneva Human Rights Film Festival (FIFDH) in March 2022, and our next series of podcasts will be based on the interviews conducted during this period. The aim of this project is to try to bridge the divide between the academic and practical worlds so that they may engage more easily with each other.