Accidental Gods w/ Anna Della Subin

Anna Della Subin joins PTO to talk about her book Accidental Gods:
On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine. The book tells the stories of men
who have inadvertently been turned into living Gods - from Gandhi
and Haile Selassie to Prince Philip and Narendra Modi. In the book
Anna shows how deification and violence were intertwined in the
colonial enterprise and in the present day cult of the political
strong man, yet - she argues - it's also a process that's been
central to struggles of liberation. In our conversation we focussed
on the chapters of the book on Haile Selassie and the emergence of
the Rastafari in Jamaica in the 1930s, and on the history of
deification in the British Raj - regarding both the colonial
authorities and the iconic leaders of the independence movement.