- Room 2.23
School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures
University of Edinburgh,
50 George Square
Edinburgh EH8 9LH
Sourit Bhattacharya
University of Edinburgh, English Literature, Faculty Member
- Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, Cultural Studies, Graduate StudentIndian Institute Of Technology, Roorkee, Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty Member, and 3 moreadd
- South Asian Studies, Critical Realism, Disaster Studies, Materialist Aesthetics, Marxist theory, World Literatures, and 32 moreModernity, Ecocritical Theory, Post colonial studies, Realism, Bengali Literature, Crime fiction, Global South, World Systems Analysis, Uneven and Combined Development, South Asian History, Postcolonial Studies, Marxism, Subaltern Studies, South Asian Literature, South African Literature, Southern Africa, Cultural Studies, Colonialism, Third world Marxisms/Tricontinental Marxisms (Mao, South Asia, 'Third Cinema' Theory and Third World Radical Films, Cultural Materialism, Postcolonial Literature, Globalization and literature, M. N. Roy), Modern Indian History, Critical Theory, Tribal studies, Transnationalism, Nationalism, Globalization, and Indigenous Politicsedit
- Lecturer in Global Anglophone Literatures, University of Edinburgh Former: Lecturer in Postcolonial Studies, Universi... moreLecturer in Global Anglophone Literatures, University of Edinburgh
Former: Lecturer in Postcolonial Studies, University of Glasgow
Former: Assistant Professor in English, IIT Roorkee, India
Books:
* Postcolonial Modernity and the Indian Novel: On Catastrophic Realism (Palgrave, June 2020): https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030373962
* Nabarun Bhattacharya: Aesthetics and Politics in a World after Ethics (co-edited; Bloomsbury, July 2020): https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/nabarun-bhattacharya-9789388630511/
* Postcolonialism Now (Orient BlackSwan, 2023)
Co-editor, Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry 2014-edit
ABSTRACT The 1943 Bengal famine had severely changed the social landscape in rural Bengal. Thousands of peasants who mortgaged or sold their lands to the economic elite to migrate to Calcutta for food had to start over landless and... more
ABSTRACT
The 1943 Bengal famine had severely changed the social landscape in rural Bengal. Thousands of peasants who mortgaged or sold their lands to the economic elite to migrate to Calcutta for food had to start over landless and precarious. Married women who were forcibly repudiated by their husbands (“talaq”) during the famine had to abide by the religious law of purdah (of keeping women at home) and accept death by hunger. Abu Ishaque’s 1955 novel, Surja Dighal Bari (The Ominous House) evocatively captures these harrowing moments of hunger and poverty in the majority rural population through the life-events of Jaigun and her family. The novel shows how a resilient single mother’s will to work and provide for her children is crushed by the male elite through religious injunctions and social alienation. In this essay, I will comment on the intersection of land, hunger, purdah, and patriarchy, reading them together as an instance of “postcolonial disaster,” which conspires to produce an endless condition of precarity for the socio-economically vulnerable in post-independence rural East Pakistan, and consequently a raw esthetic of realism in the postcolony.
The 1943 Bengal famine had severely changed the social landscape in rural Bengal. Thousands of peasants who mortgaged or sold their lands to the economic elite to migrate to Calcutta for food had to start over landless and precarious. Married women who were forcibly repudiated by their husbands (“talaq”) during the famine had to abide by the religious law of purdah (of keeping women at home) and accept death by hunger. Abu Ishaque’s 1955 novel, Surja Dighal Bari (The Ominous House) evocatively captures these harrowing moments of hunger and poverty in the majority rural population through the life-events of Jaigun and her family. The novel shows how a resilient single mother’s will to work and provide for her children is crushed by the male elite through religious injunctions and social alienation. In this essay, I will comment on the intersection of land, hunger, purdah, and patriarchy, reading them together as an instance of “postcolonial disaster,” which conspires to produce an endless condition of precarity for the socio-economically vulnerable in post-independence rural East Pakistan, and consequently a raw esthetic of realism in the postcolony.
Research Interests:
This review essay reads literary-critical works of what is broadly understood as ‘postcolonial disasters’. It outlines how literary critics in the last decades have drawn upon cultural-geographical and anthropological readings of... more
This review essay reads literary-critical works of what is broadly understood as ‘postcolonial disasters’. It outlines how literary critics in the last decades have drawn upon cultural-geographical and anthropological readings of disasters to develop critical frameworks around how literary writers have used style, form, and aesthetics to represent postcolonial catastrophes. It then offers a detailed review of Pallavi Rastogi’s 2020 monograph, Postcolonial Disasters: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century. Through an engaged and critical reading, the essay attends to Rastogi’s insightful theorizing of the topic of ‘Disaster Unconscious’ and her wide-ranging interrogation of fiction from South Asia and Southern Africa. Her committed exploration of the dialectic of story and event, the review offers, is a fine example of materialist literary criticism indicating the ethical and aesthetic urgency for close and comparative readings of postcolonial literatures of disaster.
Research Interests:
Despite the wide availability of "regional novels" in India, academic scholarship in this area has been surprisingly lacking. For environmental literary scholars, this is unfortunate because regional narratives compellingly capture the... more
Despite the wide availability of "regional novels" in India, academic scholarship in this area has been surprisingly lacking.
For environmental literary scholars, this is unfortunate because
regional narratives compellingly capture the conflicts between
local social dynamics and global capitalist cultures, resulting in an
aesthetic that is ecologically sensitive and stylistically complex. In
this essay, I will first situate the Gandhian call for ruralism as an
important reason behind the rise of regional narratives in latecolonial India. Then, drawing from Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee’s
eco-materialism and recent scholarship in "peripheral realism," I
will show how the noted Bengali novelist Tarashankar
Bandyopadhyay in his classic Hansuli Banker Upakatha (1947/51;
The Tale of Hansuli Turn) historicizes the tragic fate of the Kahar
tribe in the face of colonial-capitalist developments in the rural
interiors of Bengal. Closely engaging with the complex narrative
structure of the novel, especially his pitting of a social realist narrative of "tradition versus modernity" against an experimental
style "upakatha" or tale, I will argue that Tarashankar’s literary peripherality is socio-ecologically aware and self-consciously political,
representative of world-literary aesthetics.
For environmental literary scholars, this is unfortunate because
regional narratives compellingly capture the conflicts between
local social dynamics and global capitalist cultures, resulting in an
aesthetic that is ecologically sensitive and stylistically complex. In
this essay, I will first situate the Gandhian call for ruralism as an
important reason behind the rise of regional narratives in latecolonial India. Then, drawing from Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee’s
eco-materialism and recent scholarship in "peripheral realism," I
will show how the noted Bengali novelist Tarashankar
Bandyopadhyay in his classic Hansuli Banker Upakatha (1947/51;
The Tale of Hansuli Turn) historicizes the tragic fate of the Kahar
tribe in the face of colonial-capitalist developments in the rural
interiors of Bengal. Closely engaging with the complex narrative
structure of the novel, especially his pitting of a social realist narrative of "tradition versus modernity" against an experimental
style "upakatha" or tale, I will argue that Tarashankar’s literary peripherality is socio-ecologically aware and self-consciously political,
representative of world-literary aesthetics.
Research Interests:
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the colonies controlled by the British, the Dutch, and other European countries witnessed a number of devastating famines. These famines did not solely arise for the ‘natural’ reasons of the... more
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the colonies controlled by the British, the Dutch, and other European countries witnessed a number of devastating famines. These famines did not solely arise for the ‘natural’ reasons of the shortage of rainfall or food availability problems, but were aggravated by the systemic imperialist exploitation of the world by these major European powers. Taking as its case study the two great famines in Ireland and India – the 1845–52 Irish Famine and the 1943–44 Bengal Famine – the essay offers a reading of Liam O'Flaherty's Famine (1937) and Bhabani Bhattacharya's So Many Hungers! (1947). It shows that these works – apart from registering the devastating impact of the famines on the colonial population – have pointed through their powerful uses of content, form, and style to the world-historical reasons of long-term agrarian crisis, political instability, tyranny of the landlord classes, inefficiency of the British Empire, and others as responsible for the famines.
Research Interests: World Literatures, Comparative Literature, Irish Literature, Postcolonial Studies, World Systems Analysis, and 10 moreDisaster Studies, Ecocriticism, Ecological catastrophe fiction, Environmental Humanities, Indian Literature, Empire, Famine Studies, Imperialism, Realism, and Postcolonial and Anticolonial Studies
J. M. Coetzee’s Youth (2002), born in the heated times of the reconciliation of races in South Africa, has invited scholarship primarily on two areas: the problem of storytelling and the nature of place. Its predominant aspects,... more
J. M. Coetzee’s Youth (2002), born in the heated times of the reconciliation of races in South Africa, has invited scholarship primarily on two areas: the problem of storytelling and the nature of place. Its predominant aspects, modernism, and post-war London have hardly been taken up for an analytical discussion on the issues of land, race, and storytelling. These aspects merit attention for three specific reasons: to understand the nature of exile for a white intellectual or artist from a peripheral colonial geography to a white metropolitan centre and the related notion of ‘real’ and ‘configured’ racial foreignness in post-war London; to comprehend the ‘evental’ in art and cityspace as against the everyday and the contemporary influenced by 1920s European modernism; and to see the masculinist aspect in such project, especially in relation to the problem of love. The essay concludes with the argument that the author’s repeated focus on the aspect of John’s conscious dismissal of his essentially Romantic nature for this modernist quest is a suggestion that art, entirely dissevered from contemporary social and political reality, is bound to be futile and failed.
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How does a creative writer, situated in a geography of disaster, represent a disaster? Which areas or factors of the disaster does he highlight and which does he ignore? What happens if that writer is also a professional historian,... more
How does a creative writer, situated in a geography of disaster, represent a disaster? Which areas or factors of the disaster does he highlight and which does he ignore? What happens if that writer is also a professional historian, journalist, and social scientist? These are some of the questions that this essay asks through a reading of the representation of the 1943–44 Bengal famine in Bhabani Bhattacharya’s novels. The first section concerns the relations between late colonial governance, disaster, and violence in So Many Hungers! (1947), and the second analyses the roles of caste, law, and subaltern agency during this famine in He Who Rides a Tiger (1954). This essay argues that the Second World War, the class basis of the disaster, and the immediacy of suffering compelled Bhattacharya to write in a deeply analytical-ethnographic mode that also had to negotiate with the literary. By studying the novels’ representations of the economic, historical, and political elements of the era, this essay attempts to situate the wider horizons of the social in times of famine.
Research Interests: Material Culture Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Disaster Studies, Environmental Studies, South Asian Studies, and 22 moreColonialism, Materialism, Cultural Materialism, Indian English Literature, Postcolonial Theory, British Imperial and Colonial History (1600 - ), Postcolonial Literature, Ecocriticism, South Asian Literature, Marxist political economy, Literature and Environment, Famine Studies, Natural Disasters, Environmental Literature, Caste and Gender Issues in Indian Culture and Literature, Bhabani Bhattacharya, Disaster Culture, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, World-Ecology, Environmental Literature, Bengal Famine, Postcolonialism, and Late-Colonial India
The article studies multiculturalism and ethnicity in Australia through the literary lens of the Chinese-Australian writer, Ouyang Yu. His novel, "The Eastern Slope Chronicle," written from the embattled perspective of an international... more
The article studies multiculturalism and ethnicity in Australia through the literary lens of the Chinese-Australian writer, Ouyang Yu. His novel, "The Eastern Slope Chronicle," written from the embattled perspective of an international student’s difficult negotiation with the term “postcolonial,” throws a compulsive doubt into the case of official celebration of multiculturalism. Apart from primary engagement with central postcolonial issues like nationhood, foreign policy, repatriation, violence, and immigrant identity, the novel presents an embittered picture of the corporate packaging of the multicultural and postcolonial into the body of the diasporic student, inviting critical questions on the issues of university research, the category of the international student, and the commodification of love in a late-capitalist world.
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Ethics, Multiculturalism, Self and Identity, Globalization, and 37 moreAustralian Studies, Transnationalism, Refugee Studies, Popular Culture, Postcolonial Studies, Immigration, Identity (Culture), Identity politics, Australia, Globalisation and Development, Globalization And Postcolonial Studies, Chinese Diaspora (Migration and Ethnicity), South Asian Diaspora in Australia, Postcolonial Theory, Diaspora Studies, Postcolonial Literature, Australian Politics, Transnational migration, Australian History, Contemporary Chinese Literature, Australian Literature, Diaspora and transnationalism, Cultural hybridity, Immigrants, Anti-Capitalism, Global Capitalism, Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literature, Refugees and Forced Migration Studies, Tiananmen Square massacre, Multicultural, Chinese-Australian history, Critical University Studies, Chinese Literature in English Translation, Hybridity and Cultural Identity, Tiananmen Square Protest in 1989, Australian Immigration, and Postcolonialism
(This draft, ostensibly inspired by my enthusiasm for Foucault then, derives from a postgraduate special paper I wrote in 2010. The journal, Contemporary Discourse, part of the Literary Insight Forum, published from Maharashtra, India,... more
(This draft, ostensibly inspired by my enthusiasm for Foucault then, derives from a postgraduate special paper I wrote in 2010. The journal, Contemporary Discourse, part of the Literary Insight Forum, published from Maharashtra, India, was seeking brief development-of-thought papers in literary-critical studies. They accepted it. Unfortunately, I could not get time to develop it into a fuller article. Sometime in the future may be. Anyone interested in Sherlock Holmes studies or in crime fiction may find the directions, or the references, useful.)
This paper attempts to understand the rise of crime fiction in 19th C Britain as something integrally related to the importation of statistical reasoning and the rigorous practice of routine disciplining of the body in contemporary everyday life. Tracking Foucault's and Hacking's contributions, the paper situates the fictional figure of Sherlock Holmes in the dialogue between the normal and abnormal and the criminal and the detective, thereby inviting questions on the gaps in reason-making in everyday life in late-Victorian Britain.
This paper attempts to understand the rise of crime fiction in 19th C Britain as something integrally related to the importation of statistical reasoning and the rigorous practice of routine disciplining of the body in contemporary everyday life. Tracking Foucault's and Hacking's contributions, the paper situates the fictional figure of Sherlock Holmes in the dialogue between the normal and abnormal and the criminal and the detective, thereby inviting questions on the gaps in reason-making in everyday life in late-Victorian Britain.
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The twentieth-century history of South Africa is marked by racist and colonialist laws of segregation and apartheid. The post-apartheid, ‘postcolonial afterlife’, instead of auguring a world of social justice and equality, has painfully... more
The twentieth-century history of South Africa is marked by racist and colonialist laws of segregation and apartheid. The post-apartheid, ‘postcolonial afterlife’, instead of auguring a world of social justice and equality, has painfully witnessed, among other persistent ‘colonial’ problems, the crisis of AIDS epidemic. In this paper, I will show through scholarly engagement that there is nothing South African or African about this epidemic. Epidemics, in the last centuries, had a social and cultural history of travel often from European countries to the colonial world, which, via discourses of European civilisation and ‘western’ science, were rendered into problems of the colonies that European colonisers had to study and eradicate. In South Africa, colonial epidemics were understood to have been borne by poor back and Asian migrant workers in the mines which were used for the racist urban segregation laws that have crystallised into a postcolonial xenophobia in the globalised world. I will engage with these concerns through a close reading of content, style, and form of Phaswane Mpe’s short novel, 'Welcome to Our Hillbrow' (2001). I will further argue that Mpe’s novel envisions an overcoming of the ‘contagious community’ by a ‘community of healing’ through storytelling, talking, fellow feeling, and an empathetic solidarity.
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Nabarun Bhattacharya's novel, 'Toy City' (2004) is based on a small working-class habitat named Khelna Nagar or Toy City surrounding a now-defunct toy city factory from capitalist greed and nuclear detonation. Borrowing from environmental... more
Nabarun Bhattacharya's novel, 'Toy City' (2004) is based on a small working-class habitat named Khelna Nagar or Toy City surrounding a now-defunct toy city factory from capitalist greed and nuclear detonation. Borrowing from environmental literary critics like Lawrence Buell, Rob Nixon, Sharae Deckard and others, I discuss here the toxic ecologies of the Global South, which, I argue, takes up the form of an ecogothic with fabular dimensions to reflect the ‘disposable’ nature of life and living in this part of the world.
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(This is an uncorrected proof copy. Please cite from the published book.) This chapter tracks the development and use of magical realism in South Asia. It argues that realism in the colonial novel grew in a complex fashion, drawing upon... more
(This is an uncorrected proof copy. Please cite from the published book.)
This chapter tracks the development and use of magical realism in South Asia. It argues that realism in the colonial novel grew in a complex fashion, drawing upon elements from fables, myths, puranas and epics. The term's South Asian ‘boom‘ arises in the decolonized context, specifically in the political turmoil of the 1970s, and with the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. While the essay offers a through reading of the novel, it situates Rushdie alongside a host of lesser-known English and vernacular-language writers from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Further, it shows that beyond this time frame the term has been used by writers with tremendous heterogeneity to address social issues ranging from gender, caste, religion, ecology, identity, refugee movements and others. Offering a list of resources, the essay builds a much-needed archive on the vast and diverse examples of magical realism in South Asia.
This chapter tracks the development and use of magical realism in South Asia. It argues that realism in the colonial novel grew in a complex fashion, drawing upon elements from fables, myths, puranas and epics. The term's South Asian ‘boom‘ arises in the decolonized context, specifically in the political turmoil of the 1970s, and with the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. While the essay offers a through reading of the novel, it situates Rushdie alongside a host of lesser-known English and vernacular-language writers from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Further, it shows that beyond this time frame the term has been used by writers with tremendous heterogeneity to address social issues ranging from gender, caste, religion, ecology, identity, refugee movements and others. Offering a list of resources, the essay builds a much-needed archive on the vast and diverse examples of magical realism in South Asia.
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This is the introduction chapter of my monograph, "Postcolonial Modernity and the Indian Novel: On Catastrophic Realism (Palgrave 2020). The chapter argues that British colonialism in South Asia was marked by modernisation programmes of... more
This is the introduction chapter of my monograph, "Postcolonial Modernity and the Indian Novel: On Catastrophic Realism (Palgrave 2020). The chapter argues that British colonialism in South Asia was marked by modernisation programmes of agriculture and industry. These programmes resulted in a long-term agrarian and food crisis which then led to a number of catastrophic events in the long twentieth century. The book is about three such events from India’s late-colonial and postcolonial periods—the 1943–1944 Bengal famine, the 1967–1972 Naxalbari movement, and the 1975–1977 national emergency. The chapter contends that these events are all linked with the historical crisis and yet distinct in their nature and orientation. It further argues that such a condition of relation through difference can be better understood via a reading of form and mode of the novels of these events. Showing that writers have predominantly used the realist form to represent the long-term historical crisis, the chapter then points to their employing a range of modes—from social realist, critical realist to metafictional, urban fantastic, gothic, and others (many of which are conventionally understood as anti-realist or non-realist). These modes have shaped their realisms into a deeply heterogeneous and dynamic form, and, in so doing, composed the aesthetic framework of catastrophe-prone, crisis-ridden condition of life and living in postcolonial India, which is called here as “catastrophic realism.” The chapter situates the link between crisis and event by drawing upon the works of Fredric Jameson, Veena Das, Shahid Amin, and Louis Althusser. Its take on catastrophic realism is mediated through a thorough reading of realism, form, and mode in the European and postcolonial/Indian contexts, where Sa’adat Hasan Manto’s pre- and post-partition stories are offered as examples.
Research Interests: Southeast Asian Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Fantasy Literature, Magical Realism, Indian English Literature, and 15 morePostcolonial Literature, Ecocriticism, Historical Materialism, Salman Rushdie, Indian Literature, Famine Studies, Marxist Literary Theory, Naxalite Movement, Realism, Disaster Culture, Rohinton Mistry, Saadat Hasan Manto, Nayantara Sahgal, Mahasweta Devi, and Indian Emergency
The 1943–1944 Bengal famine is a watershed in Indian history. Caused by a long-term crisis in agriculture and economy in British South Asia and the immediate reasons of the Second World War, nationalist agitation, black-marketing... more
The 1943–1944 Bengal famine is a watershed in Indian history. Caused by a long-term crisis in agriculture and economy in British South Asia and the immediate reasons of the Second World War, nationalist agitation, black-marketing practices, and so on, the famine reflected powerfully the contemporary socioeconomic questions, and shaped the literary-cultural productions in its wake. The writers of the famine attempted to understand the causes and effects of the disaster through their uses of literary content, form and style. Reading the works of Sukanta Bhattacharya and Bijan Bhattacharya, this chapter investigates how the poets and theatre artists spoke of the use of a realist literary vocabulary which would be able to address the suffering of its times, to analyze the historical reasons and material conditions responsible for the famine, and to mobilize a trenchant critique of colonialism, imperialism, and establishment politics.
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(From Intro para) This chapter discusses the dynamics of marginal space in the postcolonial city. It looks at the way marginalized humans utilize the urban space and resist in significant ways the postcolonial state's imposition of the... more
(From Intro para) This chapter discusses the dynamics of marginal space in the postcolonial city. It looks at the way marginalized humans utilize the urban space and resist in significant ways the postcolonial state's imposition of the capitalistic logic of clearing the space for multinational investment and development. It situates what it considers to be the central contradiction within post-colonial urbanity: the thesis of rationality as against the practice of " irreal " activities. It takes the term "irreal" from the Marxist scholar, Michael Löwy, who separates it from the domain of "unreal" and "anti-real" and argues for a case of dissent and critique in the term's use. Through a reading of work on Indian modernity, anthropological findings by postcolonial scholars, and recent literary criticism on urban space, the chapter argues that "irreality" is integral to the dispensation and practice of space in the postcolonial urban world. For the literary part, the chapter reads the fictional work of Nabarun Bhattacharya (1948–2014), son of Mahasweta Devi and Bijon Bhattacharya, whose work centers around the margins of postcolonial society. It is argued here that he provides the urban poor with the "armory" of the spectral and the mysterious to fight the bourgeois weapon of instrumental rationality and class dominance. The deliberate narrative effort at blurring spaces, times, and processes of reason-making contributes to his empowering of the subaltern and the outcast, and push for a rethinking of the matrices of postcolonial urbanity and modernity.
Research Interests: Translation Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Critical Realism, Urban Studies, Modernity, and 13 moreMagical Realism, Indian English Literature, Postcolonial Theory, Bengali Literature, Postcolonial Literature, Indian Literature, Subaltern Studies, Literature and Urban Space, Marxist Literary Theory, Fantastic Literature, Postcolonialism and indian english fictions, Nabarun Bhattacharya, Raghab Bandyopadhyay, Subimal Mishra, and Irrealism
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How was literary realism introduced to the Colony? Was it derivative in form or were there disruptions made into it? Was realism passively determined by the political energies of the times or did it actively inform the radical qualities... more
How was literary realism introduced to the Colony? Was it derivative in form or were there disruptions made into it? Was realism passively determined by the political energies of the times or did it actively inform the radical qualities within politics and help constitute the individual’s
differential relations with the nation? These are some of the questions that Ulka Anjaria raises in her book, Realism in the Twentieth-Century Indian Novel.
differential relations with the nation? These are some of the questions that Ulka Anjaria raises in her book, Realism in the Twentieth-Century Indian Novel.
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The session will delve into the possibility of treating untranslated regional literature across the world as world literature and hence the titular question: does the untranslated travel? The predominant framework of 'world literature' is... more
The session will delve into the possibility of treating untranslated regional literature across the world as world literature and hence the titular question: does the untranslated travel? The predominant framework of 'world literature' is premised on translation where only translated texts travel across cultures to be worthy of the appellation, world literature. Against the grain of this Anglocentric and monolingual edifice, the seminar suggests that even an untranslated text can travel and become an important case study for world literature, if it addresses questions that go beyond regional, ethnic and national boundaries to echo transcultural experiences and motifs. The inherently multilingual literary cultures of South Asia, for example, extend this point about vernacularizing world literature as a political mode of reading. At a deeper level, we have to ask, what language we perceive our 'worlds' in. If a regional subject thinks in a regional language, which is one of the many languages spoken in her nation and acquires a notion of the world in that tongue, the literature, she composes, has an appeal to her understanding of the world. Is the resultant text an instance of world literature? This is a question about the coupling of language and the subjective and cultural/material experience of 'worlding.' How is the 'world' of world literature different from regional content to a normatively Anglophone material? We will also displace the notions of travel and circulation, endemic to world literature, from the plane of language to that of idea and matter. In other words, can ideas travel across cultures without linguistic translation? Can matters or material situations expressed in ideas be 'worldly'? For example, a text which is rooted in the material specificity of a particular region and written in a regional language, can still have a material extension into the 'world.' How is this regionally grounded arrival at the notion of the 'world' different from an Anglophone translation, deemed as world literature in the standard sense of the term? When the region travels to the world or inheres the world within itself, or better still, makes an inductive gesture towards the world, it is a materiality that travels and circulates without their being any linguistic translation. These points beg the question whether an untranslated regional text, marked by a trans-national idea or materiality can be significant in a discussion of world literature. The session hopes to tackle the varied nuances of this question through readings of untranslated regional literatures from across the world. Some possible topics could be: Worlds of World Literature
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What is the ‘world’ of world literature? How can this ‘world’ pose a challenge to or offer a model of critique for the ideology of globalisation? How does world literature’s accent on the circulation of literature reflect back on the... more
What is the ‘world’ of world literature? How can this ‘world’ pose a challenge to or offer a model of critique for the ideology of globalisation? How does world literature’s accent on the circulation of literature reflect back on the content that gets circulated? If world literature underlines literary circulation, how do we consider the role of technology as a means of instant global circulation? What does it mean to create literature in the world which is also of the world in the current realities of Brexit and Trump when the very notion of the world is eaten up by heterogeneous zones of conflict? Can a local, untranslated, and little-circulated text have ‘world’ features?
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Research Interests: Religion, Gender Studies, Art History, Censorship, Literature, and 16 morePostcolonial Studies, Religion and Politics, Sexuality, Gender and Sexuality, Copyright, Law and Literature, Literary Theory, Modernist Literature (Literary Modernism), Social Media, Feminism, Early Modern Literature, Aesthetics and Politics, Book History (History), Pornography Studies, Surveillance and the State, and Book Banning
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This is a CFP for Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry (http://sanglap-journal.in/) an open access bi-annual peer-reviewed academic journal. We are preparing for an issue on Speculation and Fiction in July 2015. Prospective... more
This is a CFP for Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry (http://sanglap-journal.in/) an open access bi-annual peer-reviewed academic journal. We are preparing for an issue on Speculation and Fiction in July 2015.
Prospective papers addressing the issue should be sent to editors@sanglap-journal.in by April 30, 2015. The decisions will be communicated to the authors by June 30, 2015. The papers should be between 4000 and 7000 words in length excluding notes and references, sent along with an abstract not exceeding 200 words and five or six keywords. For further information on style and guidelines, please log on to: http://sanglap-journal.in/
Prospective papers addressing the issue should be sent to editors@sanglap-journal.in by April 30, 2015. The decisions will be communicated to the authors by June 30, 2015. The papers should be between 4000 and 7000 words in length excluding notes and references, sent along with an abstract not exceeding 200 words and five or six keywords. For further information on style and guidelines, please log on to: http://sanglap-journal.in/
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This is a conference panel, jointly held by Sourit Bhattacharya (University of Warwick) and Priyanka Basu (SOAS, London), at the 24th Biennial European Conference on South Asian Studies (ECSAS), to take place at the University of Warsaw,... more
This is a conference panel, jointly held by Sourit Bhattacharya (University of Warwick) and Priyanka Basu (SOAS, London), at the 24th Biennial European Conference on South Asian Studies (ECSAS), to take place at the University of Warsaw, Poland, July 27-30, 2016.
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This is our second joint introduction from the 2014 Sanglap issue (Vol 2: Issue 1) on Democracy, Resistance and the Practice of Literature.
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Our third joint introduction for Sanglap's third issue (Vol 2: Issue 1) on Speculation and Fiction
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Our fourth joint introduction for Sanglap's 2015 special memorial supplement on the Indian Bengali writer Nabarun Bhattacharya
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A joint introduction to Sanglap 3.1 (August 2016) Critiquing Humanism
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The intro to our latest Sanglap issue on Censorship and Literature (2:2, 2016)
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World literature has become hegemonic in the English humanities, subsuming postcolonial, minority, and 'Anglophone' writing into its capacious remit. Influential narratives of the field favour a systematic approach, in which the... more
World literature has become hegemonic in the English humanities, subsuming postcolonial, minority, and 'Anglophone' writing into its capacious remit. Influential narratives of the field favour a systematic approach, in which the centre-periphery model reigns supreme. The premise of this panel is that if world literature can be conceived as a corpus of texts that rise to planetary status through a literary market whose mechanisms of selection and gate-keeping rely on the university, prize culture, and a multinational publishing industry, its interpretative paradigms need to move beyond the analysis of the hierarchies of international capital to include language and translation. This panel invites papers exploring alternatives to world literature studies in the criticism of contemporary texts. The aim is to question world literature as a (mappable) system, one that uncannily echoes the " EU-niversalization " of global literary publishing, marked by the dominance of the Anglophone novel. Prevailing models of " world literature " often separate the literary from the political. For Pascale Casanova, literary internationalism means " standing united against literary nationalism, against the intrusion of politics into literary life ". This panel seeks to set the idea of an internationalist literature and Casanova's " literary internationalism " against each other. In our reading, internationalist literature is premised on a multilingual literary sphere in which translation plays a prominent role. Decolonization struggles show that revolution and culture are interdependent , and that resistance is translatable across different contexts. We welcome proposals that train their gaze on a different temporality, namely on short-lived, topical, and/or politically oriented literature, often produced with little to no infrastructure. By eschewing a fixation with " universal " literary values, we aim to revalue the contingent and political imperatives of the historical " moment ". Such an emphasis would offer a riposte to the center-periphery model, shifting it instead to the vital South-South alliances that permitted the formation of " literary internationals " in the period of decolonization and after —alliances which appear to have been largely forgotten in contemporary theorizations of the world-literary field. Paper topics might include, but are not limited to: • Alternative theoretical models to " world literature " • " Resistance literature " (e.g. protest poetry, Dalit writing) • The role of radical/independent presses in disseminating anti-imperialist and marginal writings; • Anti-colonial/Third-Worldist periodical culture (e.g. Présence Africaine, Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings, El Moudjahid) • Internationalist networks during colonialism and decolonization that fostered the emergence of a " resistance " aesthetics, such as Congresses of Black Writers and Artists, All-India Progressive Writers' Association, PEN • The role of translation in disseminating literature in non-metropolitan languages Deadline for submitting paper proposals: September 23, 2016 ACLA website: http://www.acla.org/
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Magical realism is a world literary genre that stages and enables radical crossing of illicit boundaries. Intradiegetically, the mode explores questions of faith on the same ontological level as rationality. In the Arabic and... more
Magical realism is a world literary genre that stages and enables radical crossing of illicit boundaries. Intradiegetically, the mode explores questions of faith on the same ontological level as rationality. In the Arabic and Hebrew-Mizrahi contexts, magical realism serves to puncture the purportedly rational language of the state with the fantastic as a vehicle of minoritarian empowerment. These texts narrate subaltern histories without constantly reproducing the hegemonic language of Othering and subjugation. They disrupt dominant national, ethnic, religious, racial and gender historiographies and ontologies in their respective contexts, but this disruption is all the more powerful when Arabic and Hebrew texts are placed in relation extradiegetically. The networks of relationality created by this dual reading allow us to see ‘Arabness’ with the proverbial third eye – from the positions of minority and majority simultaneously, thereby allowing for a complex, textured and multifaceted understanding of its identitarian and performative meanings.
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The Oxford English Dictionary defines censorship as “the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.”1 There is at least a two-fold... more
The Oxford English Dictionary defines censorship as “the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.”1 There is at least a two-fold meaning in this definition: first, certain factors give rise to censorship including obscenity, security, etc.
Biren was one of those people, you come across or talk to almost every day and then forget immediately afterwards
Be it Irfan or Mandol’s, whosoever’s country liquor-shack it is, there are days when there is no sense of control in anyone
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Abstract Despite the wide availability of "regional novels" in India, academic scholarship in this area has been surprisingly lacking. For environmental literary scholars, this is unfortunate because regional narratives... more
Abstract Despite the wide availability of "regional novels" in India, academic scholarship in this area has been surprisingly lacking. For environmental literary scholars, this is unfortunate because regional narratives compellingly capture the conflicts between local social dynamics and global capitalist cultures, resulting in an aesthetic that is ecologically sensitive and stylistically complex. In this essay, I will first situate the Gandhian call for ruralism as an important reason behind the rise of regional narratives in late-colonial India. Then, drawing from Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee's eco-materialism and recent scholarship in "peripheral realism," I will show how the noted Bengali novelist Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay in his classic Hansuli Banker Upakatha (1947/51; The Tale of Hansuli Turn) historicizes the tragic fate of the Kahar tribe in the face of colonial-capitalist developments in the rural interiors of Bengal. Closely engaging with the complex narrative structure of the novel, especially his pitting of a social realist narrative of "tradition versus modernity" against an experimental style "upakatha" or tale, I will argue that Tarashankar's literary peripherality is socio-ecologically aware and self-consciously political, representative of world-literary aesthetics.
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Despite the wide availability of "regional novels" in India, academic scholarship in this area has been surprisingly lacking. For environmental literary scholars, this is unfortunate because regional narratives compellingly... more
Despite the wide availability of "regional novels" in India, academic scholarship in this area has been surprisingly lacking. For environmental literary scholars, this is unfortunate because regional narratives compellingly capture the conflicts between local social dynamics and global capitalist cultures, resulting in an aesthetic that is ecologically sensitive and stylistically complex. In this essay, I will first situate the Gandhian call for ruralism as an important reason behind the rise of regional narratives in late-colonial India. Then, drawing from Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee's eco-materialism and recent scholarship in "peripheral realism," I will show how the noted Bengali novelist Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay in his classic Hansuli Banker Upakatha (1947/51; The Tale of Hansuli Turn) historicizes the tragic fate of the Kahar tribe in the face of colonial-capitalist developments in the rural interiors of Bengal. Closely engaging with the complex narrative ...
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In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the colonies controlled by the British, the Dutch, and other European countries witnessed a number of devastating famines. These famines did not solely arise for the ‘natural’ reasons of the... more
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the colonies controlled by the British, the Dutch, and other European countries witnessed a number of devastating famines. These famines did not solely arise for the ‘natural’ reasons of the shortage of rainfall or food availability problems, but were aggravated by the systemic imperialist exploitation of the world by these major European powers. Taking as its case study the two great famines in Ireland and India – the 1845–52 Irish Famine and the 1943–44 Bengal Famine – the essay offers a reading of Liam O'Flaherty's Famine (1937) and Bhabani Bhattacharya's So Many Hungers! (1947). It shows that these works – apart from registering the devastating impact of the famines on the colonial population – have pointed through their powerful uses of content, form, and style to the world-historical reasons of long-term agrarian crisis, political instability, tyranny of the landlord classes, inefficiency of the British Empire, and others ...
Research Interests: History, World Literatures, Comparative Literature, Irish Literature, Postcolonial Studies, and 14 moreWorld Systems Analysis, Disaster Studies, Ecocriticism, Ecological catastrophe fiction, Environmental Humanities, Indian Literature, Empire, Famine Studies, Literary studies, Imperialism, Famine, Realism, Postcolonial and Anticolonial Studies, and Irish university
British colonialism in South Asia was marked by modernisation programmes of agriculture and industry. These programmes resulted in a long-term agrarian and food crisis which then led to a number of catastrophic events in the long... more
British colonialism in South Asia was marked by modernisation programmes of agriculture and industry. These programmes resulted in a long-term agrarian and food crisis which then led to a number of catastrophic events in the long twentieth century. The present book is about three such events from India’s late-colonial and postcolonial periods—the 1943–1944 Bengal famine, the 1967–1972 Naxalbari movement, and the 1975–1977 national emergency. It argues that these events are all linked with the historical crisis and yet distinct in their nature and orientation. The chapter contends that such a condition of relation through difference can be better understood via a reading of form and mode of the novels of these events. It shows that writers have predominantly used the realist form to represent the long-term historical crisis, while they have employed a range of modes—from social realist, critical realist to metafictional, urban fantastic, gothic, and others (many of which are conventi...
Research Interests: History, Postcolonial Studies, Colonialism, Modernity, Fantasy Literature, and 15 moreMagical Realism, Indian English Literature, Postcolonial Literature, Ecocriticism, Historical Materialism, Indian Literature, Famine Studies, Marxist Literary Theory, Naxalite Movement, Realism, Disaster Culture, Rohinton Mistry, Nayantara Sahgal, Mahasweta Devi, and Indian Emergency
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This chapter discusses the dynamics of marginal space in the postcolonial city. It looks at the way marginalized humans utilize the urban space and resist in signicant ways the postcolonial state’s imposition of the capitalistic logic of... more
This chapter discusses the dynamics of marginal space in the postcolonial city. It looks at the way marginalized humans utilize the urban space and resist in signicant ways the postcolonial state’s imposition of the capitalistic logic of clearing the space for multinational investment and development. It situates what it considers to be the central contradiction within postcolonial urbanity: the thesis of rationality as against the practice of “irreal” activities. It takes the term “irreal” from the Marxist scholar, Michael Lowy, who separates it from the domain of “unreal” and “anti-real” and argues for a case of dissent and critique in the term’s use. Through a reading of work on Indian modernity, anthropological ndings by postcolonial scholars, and recent literary criticism on urban space, the chapter argues that “irreality” is integral to the dispensation and practice of space in the postcolonial urban world. The literary writings on postcolonial urbanity that specically highlig...
Research Interests: Sociology, Translation Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Critical Realism, Urban Studies, and 13 moreModernity, Magical Realism, Indian English Literature, Postcolonial Theory, Bengali Literature, Postcolonial Literature, Indian Literature, Subaltern Studies, Literature and Urban Space, Marxist Literary Theory, Fantastic Literature, Postcolonialism and indian english fictions, and Irrealism
The Oxford English Dictionary defines censorship as “the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.” There is at least a two-fold... more
The Oxford English Dictionary defines censorship as “the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.” There is at least a two-fold meaning in this definition: first, certain factors give rise to censorship including obscenity, security, etc., and second, there is a governing body that imposes censorship. It is understandable from this definition that this body may be in most cases an official body, careful of the interests of the nation-state. But then, is this body, although official, free of partial or sectional interests? To rephrase, does censorship carry with it a dominant aspect of the political interests of the ruling party or can it also be effected by the mobilized interest of various groups, sections, and parties? The second body of actors in this case is important as factors that give rise to censorship, such as obscenity or security, are relative in their importance fo...
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As students of literature, one of the most frequent questions we encounter is: how does one write anything? What are the factors responsible for writing fiction? Does fiction have its autonomous qualities? Put in a slightly different way:... more
As students of literature, one of the most frequent questions we encounter is: how does one write anything? What are the factors responsible for writing fiction? Does fiction have its autonomous qualities? Put in a slightly different way: what is thought or how is thought put into fiction? Broadly speaking, the study into the domain of thought is speculation. The Oxford English dictionary defines “speculation” this way: “the forming of a theory or conjecture without firm evidence.” 1 Speculation then is a field of thinking thought, conjecture, or hypothesis which seeks for evidence to become “fact” or “practice.” In such argument, the foundational aspect of all philosophy appears to be speculation. This won’t be an overstatement if we endeavour to trace the genealogy and use of the term in ancient Indian philosophy to the Greco-Roman world, or in the mediaeval scholastic philosophy in Europe. 2 From the term’s rooted traditional philosophical basis to a particular meaning-making i...
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This chapter engages with the Naxalbari uprising in Bengal. A crucial event in postcolonial India, this uprising was a consequence of food crises in the wake of the 1943 Bengal famine. The militant faction of the Left known as the CPI... more
This chapter engages with the Naxalbari uprising in Bengal. A crucial event in postcolonial India, this uprising was a consequence of food crises in the wake of the 1943 Bengal famine. The militant faction of the Left known as the CPI (ML) played a significant role, both sparking and high-jacking the movement, creating confusion among followers and allowing for a negative representation in popular media. Focusing on the literary representational aspects, this chapter studies two novels by Mahasweta Devi to understand the reception of the movement—Hajar Churashir Maa (Mother of 1084) and Operation? Bahai Tudu. I contend here that Devi uses a quest mode in which her protagonists appear to make both physical and psychological journeys to understand the characters and ideologies of their militant family members or political comrades. These novels, set both in urban and rural areas, complicate the questions of student agitation, peasant insurgency, and militant leftism, all of which cons...
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The 1943 Bengal famine was caused by a long-term agrarian crisis, aggravated by the conditions of the Second World War and the rise of speculative capitalism (black-marketing and hoarding). The famine led to wide food crisis conditions in... more
The 1943 Bengal famine was caused by a long-term agrarian crisis, aggravated by the conditions of the Second World War and the rise of speculative capitalism (black-marketing and hoarding). The famine led to wide food crisis conditions in late-colonial and postcolonial Bengal and gave birth to a rich literary-artistic culture. Many of these literary works, especially novels, have been criticised for their weak structure and unconventional style. This chapter first makes a theoretical framework for reading disaster and literary form, or rather famine and realism in this context. Then it elucidates the theoretical readings with examples from two novels. Bhabani Bhattacharya’s So Many Hungers! (1947) was written immediately after the famine and in the context of India’s decolonisation. The novel, the chapter argues, uses an analytical-affective mode within realism wherein it not only analyses the historical reasons responsible for the famine but also situates the affective aspects (the...
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The incident will take place in 2020. This story proves that it is possible to write what will happen seventeen years from now. That the Soviet Union would be destroyed in 1991 could not be foretold even by the most noted Kremnologists of... more
The incident will take place in 2020. This story proves that it is possible to write what will happen seventeen years from now. That the Soviet Union would be destroyed in 1991 could not be foretold even by the most noted Kremnologists of the world. Thousands of nuclear missiles that could burn the whole world and tear it into pieces remained asleep in their underground silos; the huge military army, the police, the KGB, millions of Party members deployed to overthrow the US, all kept mum like thnuto Jagannath . 1 We can easily term this incident the biggest paralysis of the world. Historians like Volkogonov have said many things after that. However, that Great Fall was only intimated in literature – from Bulgakov, Grossman, Lev Anatol to Solzhenitsyn and many others. Maybe it wasn't spoken out directly – but there was an indication, a pattern, or a form based on that pattern. Only literature can do that. It can change the meaning in the number – 2020. But this story will defini...
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Biren was one of those people, you come across or talk to almost every day and then forget immediately afterwards. Maybe in every para , every neighbourhood, one can find a few people who may be our Birens or may come very close to... more
Biren was one of those people, you come across or talk to almost every day and then forget immediately afterwards. Maybe in every para , every neighbourhood, one can find a few people who may be our Birens or may come very close to Biren-like figures. 1 Not many of us remember him today though. I have tested that. In various places, small alleys or streetside roaks, in houses or in STD phone-booths, in clubs or in markets, in small pan -cigarette shops, I had tried to raise the issue of Biren by throwing a quick reference in a manner one throws an unused coin so that somebody would pick it up and Biren would suddenly appear with his dirty shirt, untrimmed beard, dishevelled hair, big gray eyes, sunken cheek and safety-pin strapped slippers. And having appeared, he would do something which he always did, speaking about a thing which had no meaning whatsoever, hundred percent bhat . 2 No, he would not talk nonsense always. He would also speak of other things, the hot topics – such as ...
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The book aims to introduce the Bengali writer (1948-2014) to a global audience through some of his short stories and poems in English translation and a series of critical essays on his works. A political commitment to literature frames... more
The book aims to introduce the Bengali writer (1948-2014) to a global audience through some of his short stories and poems in English translation and a series of critical essays on his works. A political commitment to literature frames Nabarun Bhattacharya's aesthetic project and the volume wishes to tease out the various perspectives on this complex meeting of politics and aesthetics. Be it the novel on dogs or those on petro-pollution and the machine, the political question in Nabarun echoes significant contemporary issues, such as animal rights, global warming and techno-capitalism. This opens up the possibility of questioning the traditional paradigm of humanist values in a world of catastrophic and violent encounters such as nuclear war or holocaust, which keeps returning in Nabarun's works.
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This book studies postcolonial Indian novels in order to understand the nature and character of Indian postcolonial modernity. Modernity is understood here as the socio-historical condition that colonial modernisation programmes have... more
This book studies postcolonial Indian novels in order to understand the nature and character of Indian postcolonial modernity. Modernity is understood here as the socio-historical condition that colonial modernisation programmes have given rise to. This condition is deeply catastrophic, marked by such events as the 1943-44 Bengal famine, the Naxalbari Movement (1967-1972), and the State of Emergency (1975-1977). This book contends that a careful study of form and mode in novels registering these events can show that they are all linked with the long-term agrarian crisis originating from the British modernisation programmes in India. It argues that while writers have used the realist form to represent the crisis, because of the specific nature and orientation of these events, they have also employed a wide set of literary modes which shape their realism into a deeply heterogeneous form. These modes of realisms, together read as ‘catastrophic realism’ in this book, insightfully point ...
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Nabarun Bhattacharya was born in Calcutta in 1948 to Bijan Bhattacharya and Mahasweta Devi, both noted literary personalities. Devi left family for a career in activism and literary writing at a very early age when Nabarun was a kid. He... more
Nabarun Bhattacharya was born in Calcutta in 1948 to Bijan Bhattacharya and Mahasweta Devi, both noted literary personalities. Devi left family for a career in activism and literary writing at a very early age when Nabarun was a kid. He grew up under the guidance and immediate artistic inspiration of Bijan Bhattacharya, whose 1943 Bengal Famine based play Nabanna (New Harvest) had already made a huge impact in the Indian theatre world, and his uncle Ritwik Ghatak, the noted auteur, whose films captured the despairing social conditions of poverty, joblessness, and political bankruptcy in a recently liberated nation. Nabarun’s literary writings were highly alert to the immediate social and political concerns and marked by an ideological faith in Marxism.
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Recent world politics has witnessed the rise of a certain style of authoritarianism. It can be roughly characterized with a cult of masculine leadership, a popular rhetoric of foreign investment and development, and a phobia of the... more
Recent world politics has witnessed the rise of a certain style of authoritarianism. It can be roughly characterized with a cult of masculine leadership, a popular rhetoric of foreign investment and development, and a phobia of the illegal immigrant made into an ethical obligation. These contradictory forms of politics – the paean to multinational corporations, free trade, and the ‘bloc’-ing of power and the simultaneous mobilization of hyper-nationalism in the form of censoring books and throttling subversive aesthetic practices – characterize the conception and practice of what may be called “authoritarian democracy.” Considering the democratically elected basis of this authoritarianism, it becomes all the more important to ask if democracy paves the way for it. In that case, where do we locate democracy today? Is it right to say that the real democratic space unfolds itself in people’s movements and not in the electoral process? If this is the case, a radical conception of democr...
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The word “humanism” is associated with the revival of classical antiquity in 13th -15thC Italy. “It involves,” as Nicholas Mann writes, “the rediscovery and study of ancient Greek and Roman texts, the restoration and interpretation of... more
The word “humanism” is associated with the revival of classical antiquity in 13th -15thC Italy. “It involves,” as Nicholas Mann writes, “the rediscovery and study of ancient Greek and Roman texts, the restoration and interpretation of them and the assimilation of the ideas and values that they contain” (2). The assimilation was based on archaeological and philological attention to the details of all manner of written records - from inscriptions to epic poems – and pervaded all areas of post-medieval culture, including theology, philosophy, political thought, jurisprudence, medicine, mathematics, and the creative arts. Such a practice allowed humanist scholars to explore the meaning of local or foreign texts, use them for religious, socio-political or economic reasons, and form an international community of texts and discourses. Since the revival of classical learning was related with the popular rise of liberal education, especially literature, philosophy, and the arts, which had an...
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In this issue, we acknowledge the phenomenal rise of world literature in current (Euro-American) literary studies. Although world literature as an object of study was revived in the 1990s, it was not till the last decade or so that... more
In this issue, we acknowledge the phenomenal rise of world literature in current (Euro-American) literary studies. Although world literature as an object of study was revived in the 1990s, it was not till the last decade or so that scholars expressed such intense engagement with the issue. A number of journal special issues, anthologies, monographs, conferences, and symposia were published which widened and complicated the use of the term[1]. Alongside the definitive volumes of David Damrosch’s What is World Literature (2003) and How to Read World Literature (2009), which have variously focussed on the issue of translation, there have been more critical interventions regarding methodology and employment of the term, notably by Emily Apter who has questioned the possibility of communication and meaning-making through translation, by Pascale Casanova who has pointed out the importance of world publication circuits and cultural capital, by Francesca Orsini who has highlighted the quest...
The proposed paper attempts to investigate the nuanced layers of multiculturalism and ethnicity in Australia through the lens of the Chinese-Australian writer, Ouyang Yu. His novel, The Eastern Slope Chronicle, written from the... more
The proposed paper attempts to investigate the nuanced layers of multiculturalism and ethnicity in Australia through the lens of the Chinese-Australian writer, Ouyang Yu. His novel, The Eastern Slope Chronicle, written from the perspective of a student’s cooperation with the term ‘postcolonial’, throws a compulsive doubt on the celebration of multiculturalism. Whereas the novel deals with central ‘postcolonial’ questions like nationhood, political relation between countries, repatriation, violence, and immigrant identity, its unabridged and cut-and-dried presentation of the corporate packaging of terms like multicultural and postcolonial or the body of the diasporic student as the product of study and university research invites more critical thoughts on university space, the category of international student or the commodification of feelings like love, emotion and soul. In a way, it seeks the irony and economy of ‘affect’ in a supposedly ‘postcolonial’ novel.
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Ethics, Globalization, Australian Studies, Australia, and 15 moreGlobalisation and Development, Globalization And Postcolonial Studies, Diaspora Studies, Australian Politics, Australian History, Contemporary Chinese Literature, Australian Literature, Diaspora and transnationalism, Cultural hybridity, Global Capitalism, Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literature, Critical University Studies, Chinese Literature in English Translation, Hybridity and Cultural Identity, and Australian Immigration
Terror and terrorism are probably the most frequent catchwords of the contemporary times. At the turn of the century, Hardt and Negri warned us that we are living in a world of Empire as biopolitical production, where transnational... more
Terror and terrorism are probably the most frequent catchwords of the contemporary times. At the turn of the century, Hardt and Negri warned us that we are living in a world of Empire as biopolitical production, where transnational corporations operate the mechanics of governance, and can wage ‘just war’ and resolve conflicts with the moral policing of the NGOs (2001: 22-41). Terror is part of the surveillance and regulation of life, while ‘terrorism,’ in its delimited political use, is only one way of engaging with it. Agamben’s notion of ‘state of exception’ in fuller picture indicates that the practice of life in contemporary times is a conscious response to fear of an unknown, unaccountable death which may not always be the death of the body as corpse. As Elizabeth Dauphinee and Christian Masters note: “Livings and dyings are ruptured by survivings that are neither livings nor dyings, but which are otherwise: liminal spaces of abjection that are dangerously difficult to recogniz...
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Indira Gandhi became the Prime Minister of India at a time when heavy sociopolitical discontent was on the rise due to the widespread conditions of poverty, hunger, inflation, and unemployment. Unable to tackle the situation and... more
Indira Gandhi became the Prime Minister of India at a time when heavy sociopolitical discontent was on the rise due to the widespread conditions of poverty, hunger, inflation, and unemployment. Unable to tackle the situation and threatened by mass political mobilisations led by Jayprakash Narayan and by legal jurisdiction against her, Gandhi declared a national Emergency. This Emergency was marked by several “disciplinary” measures such as imprisoning thousands of people, gaging the press, and, most notoriously, mass sterilisation and slum clearance programmes. While there remains an astonishing paucity of historical-sociological works on this area, novelists have long engaged with the period and attempted to recover voices suppressed by the measures. This chapter will read three novels by Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children, 1981), Nayantara Sahgal (Rich Like US, 1985), and Rohinton Mistry (A Fine Balance, 1996), written immediately or much after the catastrophic event. It will arg...
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This thesis attempts to understand, through a study of postcolonial Indian novels, the nature and character of Indian (post)colonial modernity. Modernity is understood as the social condition that (post)colonial modernisation and... more
This thesis attempts to understand, through a study of postcolonial Indian novels, the nature and character of Indian (post)colonial modernity. Modernity is understood as the social condition that (post)colonial modernisation and development have given rise to. This condition underlies a historical crisis which is manifest in various kinds of catastrophic events – famine, peasant insurgency, caste violence, communal riot, state repression, and so on. By analysing three of these historical events – the 1943-44 Bengal famine, the Naxalbari Movement (1967-1972), and the State of Emergency (1975-1977) – this thesis argues that a careful reading of the dialectic between event and crisis can offer crucial insights into the conditions of postcolonial modernity. It claims that novels that register these events are able to capture the event-crisis dialectic through their use of form and mode. Socially committed writers adopt the realist form to represent the historical aspects and traumatisi...
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Research Interests: Material Culture Studies, Disaster Studies, Environmental Studies, Colonialism, Materialism, and 15 moreCultural Materialism, Indian English Literature, Ecocriticism, Marxist political economy, Literature and Environment, Famine Studies, British Imperial and Colonial History, Natural Disasters, Environmental Literature, Caste and Gender Issues in Indian Culture and Literature, Bhabani Bhattacharya, Disaster Culture, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, Marxist Political Economy, and Bengal Famine
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World literature has become hegemonic in the English humanities, subsuming postcolonial, minority, and 'Anglophone' writing into its capacious remit. Influential narratives of the field favour a systematic approach, in which the... more
World literature has become hegemonic in the English humanities, subsuming postcolonial, minority, and 'Anglophone' writing into its capacious remit. Influential narratives of the field favour a systematic approach, in which the centre-periphery model reigns supreme. The premise of this panel is that if world literature can be conceived as a corpus of texts that rise to planetary status through a literary market whose mechanisms of selection and gate-keeping rely on the university, prize culture, and a multinational publishing industry, its interpretative paradigms need to move beyond the analysis of the hierarchies of international capital to include language and translation. This panel invites papers exploring alternatives to world literature studies in the criticism of contemporary texts. The aim is to question world literature as a (mappable) system, one that uncannily echoes the " EU-niversalization " of global literary publishing, marked by the dominance of the Anglophone novel. Prevailing models of " world literature " often separate the literary from the political. For Pascale Casanova, literary internationalism means " standing united against literary nationalism, against the intrusion of politics into literary life ". This panel seeks to set the idea of an internationalist literature and Casanova's " literary internationalism " against each other. In our reading, internationalist literature is premised on a multilingual literary sphere in which translation plays a prominent role. Decolonization struggles show that revolution and culture are interdependent , and that resistance is translatable across different contexts. We welcome proposals that train their gaze on a different temporality, namely on short-lived, topical, and/or politically oriented literature, often produced with little to no infrastructure. By eschewing a fixation with " universal " literary values, we aim to revalue the contingent and political imperatives of the historical " moment ". Such an emphasis would offer a riposte to the center-periphery model, shifting it instead to the vital South-South alliances that permitted the formation of " literary internationals " in the period of decolonization and after —alliances which appear to have been largely forgotten in contemporary theorizations of the world-literary field. Paper topics might include, but are not limited to: • Alternative theoretical models to " world literature " • " Resistance literature " (e.g. protest poetry, Dalit writing) • The role of radical/independent presses in disseminating anti-imperialist and marginal writings; • Anti-colonial/Third-Worldist periodical culture (e.g. Présence Africaine, Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings, El Moudjahid) • Internationalist networks during colonialism and decolonization that fostered the emergence of a " resistance " aesthetics, such as Congresses of Black Writers and Artists, All-India Progressive Writers' Association, PEN • The role of translation in disseminating literature in non-metropolitan languages Deadline for submitting paper proposals: September 23, 2016 ACLA website: http://www.acla.org/
Research Interests: World Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, Postcolonial Literature, French and Francophone Studies, African and Caribbean Literature, New World Studies, Gender and Women Studies, Comparative literature, postcolonial literatures and literary theory, world literature, contemporary literature, intersections among Latin American and Arabic literatures, liberation movements, and translation studies, and 2 moreLiterature in English Around the World Ma Eng 11 and World Languages and Literatures
The book aims to introduce the Bengali writer (1948-2014) to a global audience through some of his short stories and poems in English translation and a series of critical essays on his works. A political commitment to literature frames... more
The book aims to introduce the Bengali writer (1948-2014) to a global audience through some of his short stories and poems in English translation and a series of critical essays on his works. A political commitment to literature frames Nabarun Bhattacharya's aesthetic project and the volume wishes to tease out the various perspectives on this complex meeting of politics and aesthetics. Be it the novel on dogs or those on petro-pollution and the machine, the political question in Nabarun echoes significant contemporary issues, such as animal rights, global warming and techno-capitalism. This opens up the possibility of questioning the traditional paradigm of humanist values in a world of catastrophic and violent encounters such as nuclear war or holocaust, which keeps returning in Nabarun's works.