Sukhpal Singh Bhullar

My research asks how experience gets translated into meaningful semiotic content — linguistic, symbolic, historical —  and how identity is formed through said translation. In my M.A. thesis, I examined how historiography translated the experiences of Sikh revolutionary laborers in the 20th-century U.S. and Punjab into the category "anarcho-Marxist", a label that captured the real dimensions of their politics but left out an equally important history of Sikh revolutionary praxis motivating their resistance.

My project extends this question from the narrativity of historiography specifically to narrativity broadly, asking: how is self-identity constructed through the self-translation of "experiences of excess" — moments of mystical, ecstatic, traumatic or otherwise overwhelming experiences that exceed ordinary language — into linguistic and narrative form? I'm interested in why experiences that seem to threaten or destabilize identity so often produce, in their aftermath, more rigid and consolidated forms of identity rather than looser ones.

I approach these questions first through the standpoint of Sikh subjectivity and identity before turning to subjectivity and identity more broadly; e.g. how does the mythos of Sikh martiality and masculinity instruct modern formations of masculinity and piety, particularly as the two are interpellated within broadly androcentric and Abrahamic devotional frameworks — and do ostensibly secular vocabularies of New Age Mysticism meaningfully depart from the same logic of interpellation, or do they remain shaped by a common semiotic inheritance around selfhood and piety?

Research interests: 
Sikh studies, Identity and South Asian Diaspora, Theories of Religion and Religious or Mystical Experiences, Theories of Self, Translation theory, Critical Theory / Philosophy, Psychoanalysis

Languages: 

• Punjabi (modern, classical)
• Reading Urdu/Hindi
• Persian (beginning)
• Russian (elementary)