A Prosopographic Celebration:
Arjun Appadurai and the Lives of Books 

It is with great pleasure that we are inviting you to an evening of jubilation to celebrate the launch of Arjun Appadurai’s archive at SAVVY Contemporary. As our friend, supporter, and ally since the early days, Arjun Appadurai has consigned more than 5000 books from his archive to our space, with the intention of making them available and accessible to the public and to the communities animating SAVVY Contemporary. 

As Arjun Appadurai recently wrote in Traces of the Future (2021),:"Traces of the future are unconscious, untheorized hints about future possibilities embedded in the midst of the daily life of ordinary people, and across a range of sites, practices and scenes. The challenge for the historian and the anthropologist is how to recognize these moments or signs or hints in what they encounter in the archive of experience or the textual archive, without the benefit of hindsight about the moves towards the not-yet that succeed and those that fail." 

Together with the SAVVY Contemporary team who has been working for many months on the archive (Cecilia Bien, Elena Agudio, and Bonaventure Ndikung), with exceptional speakers – Faisal Devji, Dilip Menon, Vyjayanthi Rao, and Julia Roth –, we will engage in a prosopographic reflection, discussing and pondering a collective biography, binding together the lives of books, and those of the people in many ways entangled to the multidirectional paths inscribed in and opened by these books. 

We are happy to celebrate this moment of generosity together with you.