The paper examines the extractive forces that systematically erode the life conditions of the cit... more The paper examines the extractive forces that systematically erode the life conditions of the citizens of Perumalpuram village. Deprived of any rights, even the right to be identified as humans, the villagers are treated as wasted lives, good enough only to work without any monetary benefit, on the farms owned illegally by the village head, Sarkaraisamy, also known as the Master. Focussing on the food shortage and lack of affective bonds, the paper advocates a turn from governmentality to caremenatlity, the base of which is the creation, recognition, and promotion of foodocracy and networks of care. It identifies foodocracy as a reformative movement, exposing the structural inequity and disfranchisement and leading to enhanced vulnerability in Perumalpuram and the surrounding regions. That foodocracy should not be limited to this village but become a zeitgeist in the global fight for equal access to food is the central argument of this paper. That is to say, this paper underlines the need to make foodocracy a global movement for collective survival.
In the wake of rising precarity, the pressing question that confronts thinkers is how to formulat... more In the wake of rising precarity, the pressing question that confronts thinkers is how to formulate a new form of a social contract that recognises, legitmises, and promotes systems of social infrastructures. By focussing on Kavery Nambisan's The Story That Must Note Be Told (2010), this article highlights the precarious class of people living in a slum area. The crux of Nambisan's account is that few lives matter more than other lives, and few spaces need more supply of resources than others, and the task of government and corporate agencies is to render agential measures to the elite class. It is a precarious tale of a place where the vulnerability and death of the marginalised feed off the privileged class. In the light of the precarious conditions rendered by the neoliberal regime, this article analyses Martha Albertson Fineman's theory of human vulnerability, underlining the urgency to recognise human dependency on social institutions inherently linked to their resilience and survival.
Indian Writing in English and the Global Literary Market, 2014
Speaking at the 2014 Jaipur literary festival, British novelist Martin Amis made a sweeping comme... more Speaking at the 2014 Jaipur literary festival, British novelist Martin Amis made a sweeping comment on the meteoric success of Indian writing in English (IWE): ‘[T]he English novel was parochial in the 80s. Indian writers have given us the colour. We badly needed it.’2 Amis’s claim puts a questionmark on the whole issue of the UK’s reception of IWE as, according to him, IWE was given a warm welcome because of its ability to provide what Graham Huggan has termed ‘exotic’ features and what Francesca Orsini discusses as ‘fantastical’ writings, rather than necessarily being welcomed for its literary merit. Anis Shivani also makes a similar accusation against IWE as it is disseminated in the USA when he says that ‘American conglomerate publishing interests seem to be finding a ready supply of Indian novels in English that enact the commodification of exoticized Orientalism in global capitalist exchange’.3 The same can be applied to contemporary IWE, marketed and circulated throughout the world today. Lisa Lau rightly links this commodification of IWE, catering to Western readers, to the adoption of re-Orientalist4 strategies. The situation in terms of the Western reception of IWE has reached such a state that Tabish Khair even argues that ‘the best thing that can happen to Indian writing in English today is if it runs out of well-meaning British patronage’.5
This article conceptualizes the everyday existential crisis of man, nature, including the planeta... more This article conceptualizes the everyday existential crisis of man, nature, including the planetary life as bioprecarity. It looks at the neoliberal capitalist
The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies, 2021
This chapter examines the ontological conditions of urban life in postcolonial India. By looking ... more This chapter examines the ontological conditions of urban life in postcolonial India. By looking at some of the post-millennial Indian novels in English, it attempts to theorize urbanism and its consequences for the poor and slum-dwellers. The chapter makes a claim that the story of modernity and the concomitant progress of humanity has also been a story of mass exclusion, a chasm in the social division, denial of human rights, and, hence, a crisis of our moral imagination. This stems from the fact that urban life is essentially consumerist and hence divisive in nature. The scale and degree of one's consumption, therefore, become qualifying parameters of who can find healthy breathing space in urban life. The chapter concludes by making a case for strong and engaging frameworks of social assets to ensure a democratic life in cities.
This chapter examines the ontological conditions of urban life in postcolonial India. By looking ... more This chapter examines the ontological conditions of urban life in postcolonial India. By looking at some of the post-millennial Indian novels in English, it attempts to theorize urbanism and its consequences for the poor and slum-dwellers. The chapter makes a claim that the story of modernity and the concomitant progress of humanity has also been a story of mass exclusion, a chasm in the social division, denial of human rights, and, hence, a crisis of our moral imagination. This stems from the fact that urban life is essentially consumerist and hence divisive in nature. The scale and degree of one's consumption, therefore, become qualifying parameters of who can find healthy breathing space in urban life. The chapter concludes by making a case for strong and engaging frameworks of social assets to ensure a democratic life in cities.
Tracing the New Indian Diaspora, edited by Om Prakash Dwivedi (Rodopi, 2014)Diaspora studies, tho... more Tracing the New Indian Diaspora, edited by Om Prakash Dwivedi (Rodopi, 2014)Diaspora studies, though a comparatively new discipline, has gained tremendous impetus in the recent years both in public discourse as well as in academia. There has been a proliferation of scholarly assessments and critical inquiry on the South Asian as well as Indian diaspora studies in recent years. Situated within the corpus of the ever-growing academic inquiries like Vijay Mishra's The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary (2007), Susan Koshy and R. Radhakrishnan's Transnational South Asians: The Making of a Neo-Diaspora (2008), Rajesh Rai and Peter Reeves's The South Asian Diaspora: Transnational Networks and Changing Identities (2009), Om Prakash Dwivedi's Literature of the Indian Diaspora (2011) or Rita Christian and Judith Misrahi-Barak's India and the Diasporic Imagination (2011), Om Prakash Dwivedi's edited collection of essays on the contemporary representations of the Indian diaspora makes a significant contribution to the growing critical discourse on diaspora.Wide-ranging in scope and scholarly in outlook, Tracing the New Indian Diaspora offers an important and timely exploration into the complex and dynamic nature of the Indian diaspora. It tries to re-examine established notions of identity, home, location and/or belonging and search for newer paradigms for the concepts of hybridisation, dislocation and/or alienation and their myriad representations within the global Indian diaspora. The book is graced by a scholarly introduction by Om Prakash Dwivedi that sets out to introduce the new Indian diaspora and gives a critical overview of the evolving notions of the diaspora so as to contextualise the complex global nature of Indian diaspora. It foregrounds the evolving changes in contemporary times and contexts and gives a clear indication of the themes the essays follow. The book consists of two sections. The first section, 'Tracing the Indian Diaspora,' is made up of nine essays. The opening essay by Pierre Gottschlich discusses the socio-economic and political aspects of the Indian communities in Mauritius, Fiji, Singapore, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Suriname, the UK and New Zealand, and as such provides a broad overview of the cultural and geopolitical diversity of the Indian diaspora, its history and developments, specific circumstances and periods of settlement.This transnational trajectory of the Indian diaspora is further traced in the next few essays. Brij Maharaj's essay examines the condition of the Indian community as an ethnic minority in postapartheid South Africa and observes how the community's rigid conservatism of cultural identity might be a factor in exacerbating racist tensions and consequently giving rise to feelings of marginalisation and disillusionment. Amarjit Kaur's essay, however, tries to reconnect contemporary Indian migration to Malayasia with the late-nineteenth century Indian migrations to the Malaya. In his essay, Louis Harrington analyses how the Indian community in Ireland, through their multifarious interactions with the Irish community, recreates not only a new 'homeland' but also a new crosscultural identity. Anjali Sahay examines the Indian diaspora settled in the USA and the potential economic and political roles the NRI community can play in the development of their 'homeland' India. The complex nature of experiences pertaining to the ethnic minorities in Indian diaspora is brought out succinctly in Meena Dhanda's essay that spotlights the identity and rights of the Dalit community in Britain. Wardlow Friesen's essay takes the queue from the experiences of the Indian diaspora in New Zealand to theorise on the representation of diaspora in media and its significance in the construction of diasporic identity. Sunil Bhatia's essay grapples with the experiences and autobiographical representations of the Indian community in suburban USA post-9/11, while Brij V. …
Acknowledgements Notes on the Contributors Foreword Tabish Khair 1. Introduction: The Reception o... more Acknowledgements Notes on the Contributors Foreword Tabish Khair 1. Introduction: The Reception of Indian Writing in English (IWE) in the Global Literary Market Om Prakash Dwivedi and Lisa Lau PART I: MARKETING THEORY OF IWE 2. Writing India Right: Indian Writing and the Global Market Vrinda Nabar 3. Indian Writing in English as Celebrity Pramod K. Nayar 4. How Does it feel to be the Solution? Indians and Indian Diasporic Fiction: Their Role in the Market Place and the University Dorothy M. Figueira 5. Commodifying Culture: Language and Exoticism in Indian English Literature Nivedita Majumdar 6. Recreating the Native Female: Diasporic Appropriations of Female South Asian Writers and their Texts V.G. Julie Rajan PART II: INDIAN WOMEN WRITERS 7. Indian Women's Fiction in the European Market Belen Martin Lucas 8. The troubled politics and reception of The Inheritance of Loss Daniel Allington PART III: INDIAN MEN WRITERS 9. Global Goondas? Money, Crime and Social Anxieties in Aravind Adiga Robbie B. H. Goh 10. In the Right Place at The Right Time: A Tale of Two Brothers Rochelle Almeida 11. Discrepant zones of reception: The presence and absence of Kiran Nagarkar in the West Dirk Wiemann Bibliography Index
The paper examines the extractive forces that systematically erode the life conditions of the cit... more The paper examines the extractive forces that systematically erode the life conditions of the citizens of Perumalpuram village. Deprived of any rights, even the right to be identified as humans, the villagers are treated as wasted lives, good enough only to work without any monetary benefit, on the farms owned illegally by the village head, Sarkaraisamy, also known as the Master. Focussing on the food shortage and lack of affective bonds, the paper advocates a turn from governmentality to caremenatlity, the base of which is the creation, recognition, and promotion of foodocracy and networks of care. It identifies foodocracy as a reformative movement, exposing the structural inequity and disfranchisement and leading to enhanced vulnerability in Perumalpuram and the surrounding regions. That foodocracy should not be limited to this village but become a zeitgeist in the global fight for equal access to food is the central argument of this paper. That is to say, this paper underlines the need to make foodocracy a global movement for collective survival.
In the wake of rising precarity, the pressing question that confronts thinkers is how to formulat... more In the wake of rising precarity, the pressing question that confronts thinkers is how to formulate a new form of a social contract that recognises, legitmises, and promotes systems of social infrastructures. By focussing on Kavery Nambisan's The Story That Must Note Be Told (2010), this article highlights the precarious class of people living in a slum area. The crux of Nambisan's account is that few lives matter more than other lives, and few spaces need more supply of resources than others, and the task of government and corporate agencies is to render agential measures to the elite class. It is a precarious tale of a place where the vulnerability and death of the marginalised feed off the privileged class. In the light of the precarious conditions rendered by the neoliberal regime, this article analyses Martha Albertson Fineman's theory of human vulnerability, underlining the urgency to recognise human dependency on social institutions inherently linked to their resilience and survival.
Indian Writing in English and the Global Literary Market, 2014
Speaking at the 2014 Jaipur literary festival, British novelist Martin Amis made a sweeping comme... more Speaking at the 2014 Jaipur literary festival, British novelist Martin Amis made a sweeping comment on the meteoric success of Indian writing in English (IWE): ‘[T]he English novel was parochial in the 80s. Indian writers have given us the colour. We badly needed it.’2 Amis’s claim puts a questionmark on the whole issue of the UK’s reception of IWE as, according to him, IWE was given a warm welcome because of its ability to provide what Graham Huggan has termed ‘exotic’ features and what Francesca Orsini discusses as ‘fantastical’ writings, rather than necessarily being welcomed for its literary merit. Anis Shivani also makes a similar accusation against IWE as it is disseminated in the USA when he says that ‘American conglomerate publishing interests seem to be finding a ready supply of Indian novels in English that enact the commodification of exoticized Orientalism in global capitalist exchange’.3 The same can be applied to contemporary IWE, marketed and circulated throughout the world today. Lisa Lau rightly links this commodification of IWE, catering to Western readers, to the adoption of re-Orientalist4 strategies. The situation in terms of the Western reception of IWE has reached such a state that Tabish Khair even argues that ‘the best thing that can happen to Indian writing in English today is if it runs out of well-meaning British patronage’.5
This article conceptualizes the everyday existential crisis of man, nature, including the planeta... more This article conceptualizes the everyday existential crisis of man, nature, including the planetary life as bioprecarity. It looks at the neoliberal capitalist
The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies, 2021
This chapter examines the ontological conditions of urban life in postcolonial India. By looking ... more This chapter examines the ontological conditions of urban life in postcolonial India. By looking at some of the post-millennial Indian novels in English, it attempts to theorize urbanism and its consequences for the poor and slum-dwellers. The chapter makes a claim that the story of modernity and the concomitant progress of humanity has also been a story of mass exclusion, a chasm in the social division, denial of human rights, and, hence, a crisis of our moral imagination. This stems from the fact that urban life is essentially consumerist and hence divisive in nature. The scale and degree of one's consumption, therefore, become qualifying parameters of who can find healthy breathing space in urban life. The chapter concludes by making a case for strong and engaging frameworks of social assets to ensure a democratic life in cities.
This chapter examines the ontological conditions of urban life in postcolonial India. By looking ... more This chapter examines the ontological conditions of urban life in postcolonial India. By looking at some of the post-millennial Indian novels in English, it attempts to theorize urbanism and its consequences for the poor and slum-dwellers. The chapter makes a claim that the story of modernity and the concomitant progress of humanity has also been a story of mass exclusion, a chasm in the social division, denial of human rights, and, hence, a crisis of our moral imagination. This stems from the fact that urban life is essentially consumerist and hence divisive in nature. The scale and degree of one's consumption, therefore, become qualifying parameters of who can find healthy breathing space in urban life. The chapter concludes by making a case for strong and engaging frameworks of social assets to ensure a democratic life in cities.
Tracing the New Indian Diaspora, edited by Om Prakash Dwivedi (Rodopi, 2014)Diaspora studies, tho... more Tracing the New Indian Diaspora, edited by Om Prakash Dwivedi (Rodopi, 2014)Diaspora studies, though a comparatively new discipline, has gained tremendous impetus in the recent years both in public discourse as well as in academia. There has been a proliferation of scholarly assessments and critical inquiry on the South Asian as well as Indian diaspora studies in recent years. Situated within the corpus of the ever-growing academic inquiries like Vijay Mishra's The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary (2007), Susan Koshy and R. Radhakrishnan's Transnational South Asians: The Making of a Neo-Diaspora (2008), Rajesh Rai and Peter Reeves's The South Asian Diaspora: Transnational Networks and Changing Identities (2009), Om Prakash Dwivedi's Literature of the Indian Diaspora (2011) or Rita Christian and Judith Misrahi-Barak's India and the Diasporic Imagination (2011), Om Prakash Dwivedi's edited collection of essays on the contemporary representations of the Indian diaspora makes a significant contribution to the growing critical discourse on diaspora.Wide-ranging in scope and scholarly in outlook, Tracing the New Indian Diaspora offers an important and timely exploration into the complex and dynamic nature of the Indian diaspora. It tries to re-examine established notions of identity, home, location and/or belonging and search for newer paradigms for the concepts of hybridisation, dislocation and/or alienation and their myriad representations within the global Indian diaspora. The book is graced by a scholarly introduction by Om Prakash Dwivedi that sets out to introduce the new Indian diaspora and gives a critical overview of the evolving notions of the diaspora so as to contextualise the complex global nature of Indian diaspora. It foregrounds the evolving changes in contemporary times and contexts and gives a clear indication of the themes the essays follow. The book consists of two sections. The first section, 'Tracing the Indian Diaspora,' is made up of nine essays. The opening essay by Pierre Gottschlich discusses the socio-economic and political aspects of the Indian communities in Mauritius, Fiji, Singapore, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Suriname, the UK and New Zealand, and as such provides a broad overview of the cultural and geopolitical diversity of the Indian diaspora, its history and developments, specific circumstances and periods of settlement.This transnational trajectory of the Indian diaspora is further traced in the next few essays. Brij Maharaj's essay examines the condition of the Indian community as an ethnic minority in postapartheid South Africa and observes how the community's rigid conservatism of cultural identity might be a factor in exacerbating racist tensions and consequently giving rise to feelings of marginalisation and disillusionment. Amarjit Kaur's essay, however, tries to reconnect contemporary Indian migration to Malayasia with the late-nineteenth century Indian migrations to the Malaya. In his essay, Louis Harrington analyses how the Indian community in Ireland, through their multifarious interactions with the Irish community, recreates not only a new 'homeland' but also a new crosscultural identity. Anjali Sahay examines the Indian diaspora settled in the USA and the potential economic and political roles the NRI community can play in the development of their 'homeland' India. The complex nature of experiences pertaining to the ethnic minorities in Indian diaspora is brought out succinctly in Meena Dhanda's essay that spotlights the identity and rights of the Dalit community in Britain. Wardlow Friesen's essay takes the queue from the experiences of the Indian diaspora in New Zealand to theorise on the representation of diaspora in media and its significance in the construction of diasporic identity. Sunil Bhatia's essay grapples with the experiences and autobiographical representations of the Indian community in suburban USA post-9/11, while Brij V. …
Acknowledgements Notes on the Contributors Foreword Tabish Khair 1. Introduction: The Reception o... more Acknowledgements Notes on the Contributors Foreword Tabish Khair 1. Introduction: The Reception of Indian Writing in English (IWE) in the Global Literary Market Om Prakash Dwivedi and Lisa Lau PART I: MARKETING THEORY OF IWE 2. Writing India Right: Indian Writing and the Global Market Vrinda Nabar 3. Indian Writing in English as Celebrity Pramod K. Nayar 4. How Does it feel to be the Solution? Indians and Indian Diasporic Fiction: Their Role in the Market Place and the University Dorothy M. Figueira 5. Commodifying Culture: Language and Exoticism in Indian English Literature Nivedita Majumdar 6. Recreating the Native Female: Diasporic Appropriations of Female South Asian Writers and their Texts V.G. Julie Rajan PART II: INDIAN WOMEN WRITERS 7. Indian Women's Fiction in the European Market Belen Martin Lucas 8. The troubled politics and reception of The Inheritance of Loss Daniel Allington PART III: INDIAN MEN WRITERS 9. Global Goondas? Money, Crime and Social Anxieties in Aravind Adiga Robbie B. H. Goh 10. In the Right Place at The Right Time: A Tale of Two Brothers Rochelle Almeida 11. Discrepant zones of reception: The presence and absence of Kiran Nagarkar in the West Dirk Wiemann Bibliography Index
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