- Department of English
The University of Hyderabad
[An Institution of Eminence]
Prof. CR Rao Road
Gachibowli
Hyderabad 500 046
INDIA - 91-40-23133400 (W)
Pramod K. Nayar
University of Hyderabad, English, Faculty Member
- I teach M.A. courses in Literary Theory, the English Romantics and Postcolonial Literatures. My interests lie in Engl... moreI teach M.A. courses in Literary Theory, the English Romantics and Postcolonial Literatures. My interests lie in English colonial writings on India, travel writing, Human Rights and narratives, posthumanism, postcolonial literature, Cultural Studies (specifically, celebrity studies), literary & cultural theory and graphic novels, with significant and regular publications in these areas.
I also hold the UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies in the Department of English.edit
Vulnerable Earth is a study of the literature of climate crisis. Building on the assumption that the crisis is planetary in scope even if differential and unequal in effects, it examines literary fiction, graphic novels, memoirs about... more
Vulnerable Earth is a study of the literature of climate crisis. Building on the assumption that the crisis is planetary in scope even if differential and unequal in effects, it examines literary fiction, graphic novels, memoirs about toxic wastes and neo-slavery narratives, mostly from the contemporary decades, but touching upon select antecedents as well, and from all over the world. The study covers texts that fictionalize a 'hydrocrisis', those that are concerned with species extinction and experimental solutions such as rewilding, fiction and memoirs that are interested in exploring the conversations between and across species in multispecies encounters and, finally, texts that show the linkage between social justice and environmental justice.Focusing on aesthetics, narrative modes and constructions of damaged, wasted and at-risk worlds, this book shows how the literature of climate crisis foregrounds a feature that humans and nonhumans, the living and the non-living share, differentially, with the planet: vulnerability.
The Humanities have defined, for centuries now, what we mean by the public, the demos, and therefore, democracy as well. The essays in this collection bring to the interested reader concerns that the Humanities as a discipline have... more
The Humanities have defined, for centuries now, what we mean by the public, the demos, and therefore, democracy as well. The essays in this collection bring to the interested reader concerns that the Humanities as a discipline have addressed for some time now: atrocities and human rights, cultural memory, difference and dissent, climate crisis, the space of the university and the state of the disciplines within, and the transformation of the public university system itself through policies and pressures of different kinds.
Written in response to immediate contexts, these reflections on higher education and the liberal arts, particularly the role of the literary – its ‘sanitization’, its connection with dissent and freedom and the ways in which the humanities deals with critical concerns such as climate change – address the public through the frames of humanistic understanding, in the language of public debate.
Written in response to immediate contexts, these reflections on higher education and the liberal arts, particularly the role of the literary – its ‘sanitization’, its connection with dissent and freedom and the ways in which the humanities deals with critical concerns such as climate change – address the public through the frames of humanistic understanding, in the language of public debate.
Nuclear Cultures: Irradiated Subjects, Aesthetics and Planetary Precarity aims to develop the field of nuclear humanities and the powerful ability of literary and cultural representations of science and catastrophe to shape the meaning of... more
Nuclear Cultures: Irradiated Subjects, Aesthetics and Planetary Precarity aims to develop the field of nuclear humanities and the powerful ability of literary and cultural representations of science and catastrophe to shape the meaning of historic events. Examining multiple discourses and textual materials, including fiction, poetry, biographies, comics, paintings, documentary and photography, this volume will illuminate the cultural, ecological and social impact of nuclearization narratives. Furthermore, this text explores themes such as the cultures of atomic scientists, the making of the bomb, nuclear bombings and disasters, nuclear aesthetics and art, and the global mobilization against nuclearization. Nuclear Cultures breaks new ground in the debates on "the nuclear" to foster the development of nuclear humanities, its vocabulary and methodology.
Life/Writing brings together essays that represent the author’s contribution to the field of Life Writing/Studies over the last decade and a half. While reflecting the major themes and shifting trends in Life Writing/Studies, the essays... more
Life/Writing brings together essays that represent the author’s contribution to the field of Life Writing/Studies over the last decade and a half. While reflecting the major themes and shifting trends in Life Writing/Studies, the essays deploy a variety of frames of analysis including theories of Life Writing and biography writing, studies of the testimonio genre, ideas of precarity and precarious lives, and disability studies. The texts used for analysis range from Dalit autobiographies and ‘autobiogenographies’ to neurogothic life writing and graphic narratives. Extending and challenging the conceptual vocabulary, semantic scope and analytical boundaries of Life Writing/Studies, the volume is testimony to a sustained, deep and nuanced engagement with the field.
India and the subcontinent stimulated the curiosity of the British who came to India as traders. Each aspect of life in India - its people, customs, geography, climate, fauna and flora - was documented by British travelers, traders,... more
India and the subcontinent stimulated the curiosity of the British who came to India as traders. Each aspect of life in India - its people, customs, geography, climate, fauna and flora - was documented by British travelers, traders, administrators, soldiers to make sense to the European mind. As they 'discovered' India and occupied it, they also attempted to 'civilise' the natives.
The present volumes focus on select aspects of the imperial archives: the accounts of “discovery” and exploration – fauna and flora, geography, climate – the people of the subcontinent, English domesticity and social life in the subcontinent, the wars and skirmishes – including the “Mutiny” of 1857-58 – and the “civilisational mission”.
The present volumes focus on select aspects of the imperial archives: the accounts of “discovery” and exploration – fauna and flora, geography, climate – the people of the subcontinent, English domesticity and social life in the subcontinent, the wars and skirmishes – including the “Mutiny” of 1857-58 – and the “civilisational mission”.
Research Interests:
This book examines writings by people living with Alzheimer's Disease and their caregivers. Its focus areas include the construction of the self in the face of diminishing linguistic and cognitive abilities, the stigmatization of ageing,... more
This book examines writings by people living with Alzheimer's Disease and their caregivers. Its focus areas include the construction of the self in the face of diminishing linguistic and cognitive abilities, the stigmatization of ageing, the various narrative strategies that these texts (often collaborative) employ, the health activism and advocacy generated via a 'biosociality,' and the ethics of care.
The book is a full-length study of Indian celebrity culture, including fandom, celebrity philanthropy and celebrity activism, which are established features of life today and which constitute a major component of pop culture’s coverage of... more
The book is a full-length study of Indian celebrity culture, including fandom, celebrity philanthropy and celebrity activism, which are established features of life today and which constitute a major component of pop culture’s coverage of sports/film stars.
The collection of essays in the book moves from the largest domain of celebrity culture in India – Bollywood – through celebrity life writing and biopics and, finally, to the politics of and by celebrity culture. The book begins with an exploration of films made around women celebrity victims – Phoolan Devi, Bhanwari Devi, Jessica Lal and Kiranjit Ahluwaliato – and moves on to show how the vernacular cosmopolitanism of Bollywood stars’ philanthropic and humanitarian work enables their insertion into a global humanitarian project wherein the Bollywood campaigner for women’s rights, environmental causes or animal welfare generates a membership in the global citizenship of benevolence and charity. Celebrity charisma and its role in the current era of ‘post-truth’ are studied to show how Bollywood charisma as a form of mimetic capital generates a sensuous fidelity in the audience, inducing a certain cultural ignorance.
The book goes on to show how star memoirs reinforce star-value through the generation of an interart work, in which the life story is framed within the film history of the individual, and the films are framed by the life of the actor. The hagiographic biopics around cricket stars M.S. Dhoni and Sachin Tendulkar, the criminal Charles Shobhraj and Neerja Bhanot, the air hostess killed by hijackers, make a case for an argument that the family and the nation remain nodal points in the representations of the lives and careers, and how these representations enable the making of certain aspirational models for the country. Reading cancer memoirs by Bollywood stars shows how these celebrity somatographies move outward, from a focus on the star’s body to the biosocial network.
The final collection of essays are at the intersection of celebritydom and celebrity politics that starts with the examination of the genre of Indian writing in English as a celebrity within the context of literary festivals and the demand for the postcolonial exotic. The River Narmada as a cultural icon and its iconicity generates a whole new grammar of protest, having become a part of India’s collective cultural memory. Reading Arundhati Roy as a celebrity makes a case for her ‘insurgent celebrityhood’ created through her mobility into and across many public domains. The desacralization of the iconic Ambedkar statues, which occurs periodically in parts of India, is a mode of once again rendering the Dalit an ‘outcast’. Reading the websites of celebrity Indian authors, Ashok Banker, Devdutt Pattnaik and Amish, demonstrates how a certain self-fashioning by these authors occurs through a careful engagement with a Hindu ancestry and tradition. The self-fashioning is linked to, and manifests as, their literary location within a scriptural-mythological narrative.
The collection of essays in the book moves from the largest domain of celebrity culture in India – Bollywood – through celebrity life writing and biopics and, finally, to the politics of and by celebrity culture. The book begins with an exploration of films made around women celebrity victims – Phoolan Devi, Bhanwari Devi, Jessica Lal and Kiranjit Ahluwaliato – and moves on to show how the vernacular cosmopolitanism of Bollywood stars’ philanthropic and humanitarian work enables their insertion into a global humanitarian project wherein the Bollywood campaigner for women’s rights, environmental causes or animal welfare generates a membership in the global citizenship of benevolence and charity. Celebrity charisma and its role in the current era of ‘post-truth’ are studied to show how Bollywood charisma as a form of mimetic capital generates a sensuous fidelity in the audience, inducing a certain cultural ignorance.
The book goes on to show how star memoirs reinforce star-value through the generation of an interart work, in which the life story is framed within the film history of the individual, and the films are framed by the life of the actor. The hagiographic biopics around cricket stars M.S. Dhoni and Sachin Tendulkar, the criminal Charles Shobhraj and Neerja Bhanot, the air hostess killed by hijackers, make a case for an argument that the family and the nation remain nodal points in the representations of the lives and careers, and how these representations enable the making of certain aspirational models for the country. Reading cancer memoirs by Bollywood stars shows how these celebrity somatographies move outward, from a focus on the star’s body to the biosocial network.
The final collection of essays are at the intersection of celebritydom and celebrity politics that starts with the examination of the genre of Indian writing in English as a celebrity within the context of literary festivals and the demand for the postcolonial exotic. The River Narmada as a cultural icon and its iconicity generates a whole new grammar of protest, having become a part of India’s collective cultural memory. Reading Arundhati Roy as a celebrity makes a case for her ‘insurgent celebrityhood’ created through her mobility into and across many public domains. The desacralization of the iconic Ambedkar statues, which occurs periodically in parts of India, is a mode of once again rendering the Dalit an ‘outcast’. Reading the websites of celebrity Indian authors, Ashok Banker, Devdutt Pattnaik and Amish, demonstrates how a certain self-fashioning by these authors occurs through a careful engagement with a Hindu ancestry and tradition. The self-fashioning is linked to, and manifests as, their literary location within a scriptural-mythological narrative.
This book studies human rights discourse across a variety of graphic novels, both fiction and non-fiction, originating in different parts of the world, from India to South Africa, Sarajevo to Vietnam, with texts on the Holocaust, the... more
This book studies human rights discourse across a variety of graphic novels, both fiction and non-fiction, originating in different parts of the world, from India to South Africa, Sarajevo to Vietnam, with texts on the Holocaust, the Partition of the Indian subcontinent, the Rwandan and Sarajevan genocides, the Vietnam War, comfort women in World War II and the Civil Rights movement in the USA, to mention a few.
The book demonstrates the emergence of the ‘universal’ subject of human rights, despite the variations in contexts. It shows how war, rape, genocide, abuse, social iniquity, caste and race erode personhood in multiple ways in the graphic novel, which portrays the construction of vulnerable subjects, the cultural trauma of collectives, the crisis and necessity of witnessing, and resilience-resistance through specific representational and aesthetic strategies. It covers a large number of authors and artists: Joe Sacco, Joe Kubert, Matt Johnson-Walter Pleece, Guy Delisle, Appupen, Thi Bui, Olivier Kugler and others. Through a study of these vastly different authors and styles, the book proposes that the graphic novel as a form is perfectly suited to the ‘culture’ and the lingua franca of human rights due to its amenability to experimentation and the sheer range within the form.
The book demonstrates the emergence of the ‘universal’ subject of human rights, despite the variations in contexts. It shows how war, rape, genocide, abuse, social iniquity, caste and race erode personhood in multiple ways in the graphic novel, which portrays the construction of vulnerable subjects, the cultural trauma of collectives, the crisis and necessity of witnessing, and resilience-resistance through specific representational and aesthetic strategies. It covers a large number of authors and artists: Joe Sacco, Joe Kubert, Matt Johnson-Walter Pleece, Guy Delisle, Appupen, Thi Bui, Olivier Kugler and others. Through a study of these vastly different authors and styles, the book proposes that the graphic novel as a form is perfectly suited to the ‘culture’ and the lingua franca of human rights due to its amenability to experimentation and the sheer range within the form.
Indian Travel Writing in the Age of Empire studies a variety of travel narratives by Indian kings, evangelists, statesmen, scholars, merchants, leisure travellers and reformers. It identifies the key modes through which the Indian... more
Indian Travel Writing in the Age of Empire studies a variety of travel narratives by Indian kings, evangelists, statesmen, scholars, merchants, leisure travellers and reformers. It identifies the key modes through which the Indian traveller engaged with Europe and the world-from aesthetic evaluations to cosmopolitan nationalist perceptions, from exoticism to a keen sense of connected and global histories. These modes are constitutive of the identity of the traveller.
The book demonstrates how the Indian traveller defied the prescriptive category of the 'imperial subject' and fashions himself through this multilayered engagement with England, Europe and the world in different identities.
The book demonstrates how the Indian traveller defied the prescriptive category of the 'imperial subject' and fashions himself through this multilayered engagement with England, Europe and the world in different identities.
Research Interests:
This 5-volume set tracks the various legal, administrative and social documentation on the progress of Indian education from 1780 to 1947. This first volume features commentaries, reports, policy documents from the period 1781-1853.... more
This 5-volume set tracks the various legal, administrative and social documentation on the progress of Indian education from 1780 to 1947. This first volume features commentaries, reports, policy documents from the period 1781-1853.
The documents not only map a cultural history of English education in India but capture the debates in and around each of these domains through coverage of English (language, literature, pedagogy), the journey from school-to-university, and technical and vocational education. Produced by statesmen, educationists, administrators, teachers, Vice Chancellors and native national leaders, the documents testify to the complex processes through which colleges were set up, syllabi formed, the language of instruction determined, and infrastructure built. The sources vary from official Minutes to orders, petitions to pleas, speeches to opinion pieces.
The collection contributes, through the mostly unmediated documents, to our understanding of the British Empire, of the local responses to the Empire and imperial policy and of the complex negotiations within and without the administrative structures that set about establishing the college, the training institute and the teaching profession itself.
The documents not only map a cultural history of English education in India but capture the debates in and around each of these domains through coverage of English (language, literature, pedagogy), the journey from school-to-university, and technical and vocational education. Produced by statesmen, educationists, administrators, teachers, Vice Chancellors and native national leaders, the documents testify to the complex processes through which colleges were set up, syllabi formed, the language of instruction determined, and infrastructure built. The sources vary from official Minutes to orders, petitions to pleas, speeches to opinion pieces.
The collection contributes, through the mostly unmediated documents, to our understanding of the British Empire, of the local responses to the Empire and imperial policy and of the complex negotiations within and without the administrative structures that set about establishing the college, the training institute and the teaching profession itself.
Ecoprecarity: Vulnerable Lives in Literature and Culture presents an examination of ecoprecarity - the precarious lives that humans lead in the process and event of ecological disaster, and the increasing precarious state of the... more
Ecoprecarity: Vulnerable Lives in Literature and Culture presents an examination of ecoprecarity - the precarious lives that humans lead in the process and event of ecological disaster, and the increasing precarious state of the environment itself as a result of human interventions - in contemporary literary-cultural texts. It studies the representation of 'invasion narratives' of the human body and the earth by alien life forms, the ecodystopian vision that informs much environmental thought in popular cultures, the states of ontological integrity and genetic belonging in the age of cloning, xenotransplantation and biotechnology's 'capitalisation' of life itself, and the construction of the 'wild' in these texts. It pays attention to the ecological uncanny and the monstrous that haunts ecodystopias and forms of natureculture that emerge in the bioeconomies since the late twentieth century.
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Research Interests:
The book studies the cultural texts—fiction, protest effigies, photographs, films, reportage, eyewitness accounts, campaign posters and reports—produced around the world’s worst industrial disaster: the Bhopal tragedy of 1984. It makes a... more
The book studies the cultural texts—fiction, protest effigies, photographs, films, reportage, eyewitness accounts, campaign posters and reports—produced around the world’s worst industrial disaster: the Bhopal tragedy of 1984. It makes a case for an ecological Gothic, wherein the city, its landscape and its people are Gothicized. After tracing the history of the disaster as a history of negligence, the book proceeds in later chapters to study the coverage of the events themselves by eyewitnesses and survivors, and the remnants, in various forms, of the disaster – the haunting – within human bodies and nature. Finally, it examines the industrial ruins and the mobilization of protests against Union Carbide.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Bhopal, Disaster, Precarity
Chapter 1: The Prefiguration of Disaster
Chapter 2: The Event of Disaster
Chapter 3: Bhopal’s Biopolitical Uncanny I: The Nature of Haunting
Chapter 4: Bhopal’s Biopolitical Uncanny II: The Haunting of Nature
Chapter 5: Bhopal’s Precarity: Toxic History and Thanatopolitics in the Postcolony
Conclusion: ‘Burial of an Unknown Child’ as Icon
Table of Contents
Introduction: Bhopal, Disaster, Precarity
Chapter 1: The Prefiguration of Disaster
Chapter 2: The Event of Disaster
Chapter 3: Bhopal’s Biopolitical Uncanny I: The Nature of Haunting
Chapter 4: Bhopal’s Biopolitical Uncanny II: The Haunting of Nature
Chapter 5: Bhopal’s Precarity: Toxic History and Thanatopolitics in the Postcolony
Conclusion: ‘Burial of an Unknown Child’ as Icon
Research Interests:
For two hundred years India was the jewel in the British imperial crown. During the course of governing India – the Raj – a number of words came to have particular meanings in the imperial lexicon. This book documents the words and terms... more
For two hundred years India was the jewel in the British imperial crown. During the course of governing India – the Raj – a number of words came to have particular meanings in the imperial lexicon. This book documents the words and terms that the British used to describe, define, understand and judge the subcontinent. It offers insight into the cultures of the Raj through a sampling of its various terms, concepts and nomenclature, and utilizes critical commentaries on specific domains to illuminate not only the linguistic meaning of a word but its cultural and political nuances.
Research Interests:
This is a study of vulnerability as a dominant cultural discourse today, especially as it manifests in ‘extreme cultures’. These are cultural practices and representations of humans in risky, painful or life-threatening conditions where... more
This is a study of vulnerability as a dominant cultural discourse today, especially as it manifests in ‘extreme cultures’. These are cultural practices and representations of humans in risky, painful or life-threatening conditions where the limits of their humanity are tested, and producing heightened sensations of pain and pleasure. Extreme cultures in this book signal the social ontology of humans where, in specific conditions, vulnerability becomes helplessness. We see in these cultures the exploitation of the body’s immanent vulnerability in involuntary conditions of torture or deprivation, the encounter with extreme situations where the body is rendered incapacitated from performing routine functions due to structural conditions or in a voluntary embracing of risk in sporting events wherein the body pits itself against enormous forces and conditions.The Extreme in Contemporary Culture studies vulnerability across various conditions: torture, disease, accident. It studies spaces of vulnerability and helplessness, the aesthetics and representations of vulnerability, the extreme in the everyday and, finally, the witnessing of (in)human extremes. Extreme cultures suggest shared precarity as a foundational condition of humanity. A witness culture emerges through the cultural discourse of vulnerability, the representations of the victim and/or survivor, and the accounts of witnesses. They offer, in short, an entire new way of speaking about and classifying the human.
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Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
This volume brings together an unusual collection of British captivity writings – composed during and after imprisonment and in conditions of siege. Writings from the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857 are well known, but there exists a vast body of texts,... more
This volume brings together an unusual collection of British captivity writings – composed during and after imprisonment and in conditions of siege. Writings from the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857 are well known, but there exists a vast body of texts, from Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Burma, and the Indian subcontinent, that have rarely been compiled or examined.
Written in anxiety and distress, or recalled with poignancy and anger, these siege narratives depict a very different Briton. A far cry from the triumphant conqueror, explorer or ruler, these texts give us the vulnerable, injured and frightened Englishman and woman who seek, in the most adverse of conditions, to retain a measure of stoicism and identity. From Robert Knox’s 17th-century account of imprisonment in Sri Lanka, through J. Z. Holwell’s famous account of the ‘Black Hole’ of Calcutta, through Florentia Sale’s Afghan memoir, and Lady Inglis’s ‘Mutiny’ diary from Lucknow, the book opens up a dark and revealing corner of the colonial archive.
Written in anxiety and distress, or recalled with poignancy and anger, these siege narratives depict a very different Briton. A far cry from the triumphant conqueror, explorer or ruler, these texts give us the vulnerable, injured and frightened Englishman and woman who seek, in the most adverse of conditions, to retain a measure of stoicism and identity. From Robert Knox’s 17th-century account of imprisonment in Sri Lanka, through J. Z. Holwell’s famous account of the ‘Black Hole’ of Calcutta, through Florentia Sale’s Afghan memoir, and Lady Inglis’s ‘Mutiny’ diary from Lucknow, the book opens up a dark and revealing corner of the colonial archive.
Research Interests:
Part 1
1. Cultural Studies: Scope, Aim, Methods
2. Theories
3. Methods
Part II
4. Cultures of Consumption
5. Cultures of Memory
6. Cultures of Impression Management
1. Cultural Studies: Scope, Aim, Methods
2. Theories
3. Methods
Part II
4. Cultures of Consumption
5. Cultures of Memory
6. Cultures of Impression Management
Research Interests:
This book is a detailed study of the Indian graphic novel as a significant category of South Asian literature. It focuses on the genre’s engagement with history, memory and cultural identity and its critique of the nation in the form of... more
This book is a detailed study of the Indian graphic novel as a significant category of South Asian literature. It focuses on the genre’s engagement with history, memory and cultural identity and its critique of the nation in the form of dissident histories and satire. Deploying a nuanced theoretical framework, the volume closely examines major texts such as The Harappa Files, Delhi Calm, Kari, Bhimayana, Gardener in the Wasteland, Pao Anthology, and authors and illustrators including Sarnath Banerjee, Vishwajyoti Ghosh, Durgabai Vyam, Amrutha Patil, Srividya Natarajan and others. It also explores — using key illustrations from the texts — critical themes like contested and alternate histories, urban realities, social exclusion, contemporary politics, and identity politics.
A major intervention in Indian writing in English, this volume will be of great importance to scholars and researchers of South Asian literature, cultural studies, art and visual culture, and sociology.
A major intervention in Indian writing in English, this volume will be of great importance to scholars and researchers of South Asian literature, cultural studies, art and visual culture, and sociology.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
The Transnational in English Literature examines English literary history through its transnational engagements and argues that every period of English Literature can be examined through its global relations. English identity and... more
The Transnational in English Literature examines English literary history through its transnational engagements and argues that every period of English Literature can be examined through its global relations. English identity and nationhood is therefore defined through its negotiation with other regions and cultures.
The first book to look at the entirety of English literature through a transnational lens, it :
Maps the discourses that constitute the global in every age, from the Early Modern to the twentieth century
Offers readings of representative texts in poetry, fiction, essay and drama, covering a variety of genres such as Early Modern tragedy, the adventure novel, the narrative poem, Gothic and utopian fiction
Examines major authors including Shakespeare, Defoe, Behn, Swift, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Austen, Mary Shelley, the Brontës, Doyle, Ballantyne, Orwell, Conrad, Kipling, Forster
Looks at themes such as travel and discovery, exoticism, mercantilism, commodities, the civilisational mission and the multiculturalization of England.
The first book to look at the entirety of English literature through a transnational lens, it :
Maps the discourses that constitute the global in every age, from the Early Modern to the twentieth century
Offers readings of representative texts in poetry, fiction, essay and drama, covering a variety of genres such as Early Modern tragedy, the adventure novel, the narrative poem, Gothic and utopian fiction
Examines major authors including Shakespeare, Defoe, Behn, Swift, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Austen, Mary Shelley, the Brontës, Doyle, Ballantyne, Orwell, Conrad, Kipling, Forster
Looks at themes such as travel and discovery, exoticism, mercantilism, commodities, the civilisational mission and the multiculturalization of England.
Research Interests:
This book is a study of cultures of surveillance, from CCTV to genetic data-gathering and the new forms of subjectivity and citizenship that are forged in such cultures. It studies data, bodies and space as domains within which this... more
This book is a study of cultures of surveillance, from CCTV to genetic data-gathering and the new forms of subjectivity and citizenship that are forged in such cultures. It studies data, bodies and space as domains within which this subjectivity of the vulnerable individual emerges. The book also proposes that we can see a shift within cultures of surveillance where, from active participation in the process of surveilling, a witness-citizen emerges. The book therefore seeks to alter surveillance as a mere top-down system, instead arguing that surveillance is also a mode of engagement with the world enabling trust, accountability and eventually a responsible humanitarianism.
Research Interests:
Co-published by Routledge and Edition Synapse, this new title makes key archival source material readily available to scholars, researchers, and students of Indian imperial history. The collection will be particularly welcomed by those... more
Co-published by Routledge and Edition Synapse, this new title makes key archival source material readily available to scholars, researchers, and students of Indian imperial history. The collection will be particularly welcomed by those working in women’s and gender studies, and in women’s history, but also by those active in allied and related fields. Selected and introduced by an expert editor, the gathered materials are reproduced in facsimile, giving users a strong sense of immediacy to the texts and permitting citation to the original pagination.
Women in Colonial India is a veritable treasure-trove; it brings together key colonial documents and other materials which are currently widely dispersed or very difficult for scholars, researchers, and students across the globe to locate and use. In five volumes, the collection draws on a wide variety of sources, including periodicals, memoirs, parliamentary, and administrative reports. It covers crucial gendered concerns and topics, such as ‘the woman question’; female infanticide; widow-burning; education; health; and marriage. Each volume is supplemented by a substantial introduction, newly written by the learned editor, which contextualizes the collected works, and this vital reference and research resource also includes a detailed appendix providing data on the provenance of the gathered works.
Women in Colonial India is a veritable treasure-trove; it brings together key colonial documents and other materials which are currently widely dispersed or very difficult for scholars, researchers, and students across the globe to locate and use. In five volumes, the collection draws on a wide variety of sources, including periodicals, memoirs, parliamentary, and administrative reports. It covers crucial gendered concerns and topics, such as ‘the woman question’; female infanticide; widow-burning; education; health; and marriage. Each volume is supplemented by a substantial introduction, newly written by the learned editor, which contextualizes the collected works, and this vital reference and research resource also includes a detailed appendix providing data on the provenance of the gathered works.
This timely book examines the rise of posthumanism as both a material condition and a developing philosophical-ethical project in the age of cloning, gene engineering, organ transplants and implants. Nayar first maps the political and... more
This timely book examines the rise of posthumanism as both a material condition and a developing philosophical-ethical project in the age of cloning, gene engineering, organ transplants and implants.
Nayar first maps the political and philosophical critiques of traditional humanism, revealing its exclusionary and ‘speciesist’ politics that position the human as a distinctive and dominant life form. He then contextualizes the posthumanist vision which, drawing upon biomedical, engineering and techno-scientific studies, concludes that human consciousness is shaped by its co-evolution with other life forms, and our human form inescapably influenced by tools and technology. Finally the book explores posthumanism’s roots in disability studies, animal studies and bioethics to underscore the constructed nature of ‘normalcy’ in bodies, and the singularity of species and life itself.
As this book powerfully demonstrates, posthumanism marks a radical reassessment of the human as constituted by symbiosis, assimilation, difference and dependence upon and with other species. Mapping the terrain of these far-reaching debates, Posthumanism will be an invaluable companion to students of cultural studies and modern and contemporary literature.
Nayar first maps the political and philosophical critiques of traditional humanism, revealing its exclusionary and ‘speciesist’ politics that position the human as a distinctive and dominant life form. He then contextualizes the posthumanist vision which, drawing upon biomedical, engineering and techno-scientific studies, concludes that human consciousness is shaped by its co-evolution with other life forms, and our human form inescapably influenced by tools and technology. Finally the book explores posthumanism’s roots in disability studies, animal studies and bioethics to underscore the constructed nature of ‘normalcy’ in bodies, and the singularity of species and life itself.
As this book powerfully demonstrates, posthumanism marks a radical reassessment of the human as constituted by symbiosis, assimilation, difference and dependence upon and with other species. Mapping the terrain of these far-reaching debates, Posthumanism will be an invaluable companion to students of cultural studies and modern and contemporary literature.
Frantz Fanon has established a position as a leading anticolonial thinker, through key texts such as Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. He has influenced the work of thinkers from Edward Said and Homi Bhabha to Paul... more
Frantz Fanon has established a position as a leading anticolonial thinker, through key texts such as Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. He has influenced the work of thinkers from Edward Said and Homi Bhabha to Paul Gilroy, but his complex work is often misinterpreted as an apology for violence.
This clear, student-friendly guidebook considers Fanon’s key texts and theories, looking at:
Postcolonial theory’s appropriation of psychoanalysis
Anxieties around cultural nationalisms and the rise of native consciousness
Postcoloniality’s relationship with violence and separatism
New humanism and ideas of community.
Introducing the work of this controversial theorist, Pramod K. Nayar also offers alternative readings, charting Fanon’s influence on postcolonial studies, literary criticism and cultural studies.
This clear, student-friendly guidebook considers Fanon’s key texts and theories, looking at:
Postcolonial theory’s appropriation of psychoanalysis
Anxieties around cultural nationalisms and the rise of native consciousness
Postcoloniality’s relationship with violence and separatism
New humanism and ideas of community.
Introducing the work of this controversial theorist, Pramod K. Nayar also offers alternative readings, charting Fanon’s influence on postcolonial studies, literary criticism and cultural studies.
This comprehensive anthology of English poetry, from the Elizabethan age to the Restoration, places canonized poets – Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Herbert – in conjunction with poets not usually found in anthologies – Margaret... more
This comprehensive anthology of English poetry, from the Elizabethan age to the Restoration, places canonized poets – Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Herbert – in conjunction with poets not usually found in anthologies – Margaret Cavendish, Isabella Whitney, Mary Wroth, among others. Combining variety with depth, the anthology offers the poetry of science, religious poetry, the country-house poem and courtly poetry. The comprehensive Introduction sets out the socio-political and intellectual backgrounds to the literature before presenting a survey of the major kinds of poetry from the period. Traditional and new readings of the poetry are listed in a full bibliography at the end of the Introduction – besides a ‘Further Reading’ at the end of the volume – to encourage and facilitate further exploration and research. Biographical notes introduce each poet, while selective annotation explains some of the more obscure references and contextual implications of the poem in question.
Seeing Stars: Spectacle, Society and Celebrity Culture explores the ways in which celebrities are 'manufactured', how they establish their hold on the public imagination and how social responses enable them to be what they are. Celebrity... more
Seeing Stars: Spectacle, Society and Celebrity Culture explores the ways in which celebrities are 'manufactured', how they establish their hold on the public imagination and how social responses enable them to be what they are.
Celebrity culture is marked by three main responses: adulation, identification and emulation. These responses are generated as a result of media constructions of celebrities. Therefore, celebrity culture needs to be studied as a consequence of new forms of media representation and mass culture. The author aims to explore this phenomenon, especially from the 1990s. It is a popular introduction to celebrity culture and a new 'society of spectacle' that is visible in India today through a rigorous analyses of a range of media sources
Celebrity culture is marked by three main responses: adulation, identification and emulation. These responses are generated as a result of media constructions of celebrities. Therefore, celebrity culture needs to be studied as a consequence of new forms of media representation and mass culture. The author aims to explore this phenomenon, especially from the 1990s. It is a popular introduction to celebrity culture and a new 'society of spectacle' that is visible in India today through a rigorous analyses of a range of media sources
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This introduction to cybercultures provides a cutting-edge and much needed guide to the rapidly changing world of new media and communication. Considers cyberculture and new media through contemporary race, gender and sexuality studies... more
This introduction to cybercultures provides a cutting-edge and much needed guide to the rapidly changing world of new media and communication.
Considers cyberculture and new media through contemporary race, gender and sexuality studies and postcolonial theory
Offers a clear analysis of some of the most complex issues in cybercultures, including identity, network societies, new geographies, and connectivity
Includes discussions of gaming, social networking, geography, net-democracy, aesthetics, popular internet culture, the body, sexuality and politics
Examines key questions in the political economy, racialization, gendering and governance of cyberculture
Considers cyberculture and new media through contemporary race, gender and sexuality studies and postcolonial theory
Offers a clear analysis of some of the most complex issues in cybercultures, including identity, network societies, new geographies, and connectivity
Includes discussions of gaming, social networking, geography, net-democracy, aesthetics, popular internet culture, the body, sexuality and politics
Examines key questions in the political economy, racialization, gendering and governance of cyberculture
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Moving beyond traditional cyberculture studies paradigms in several key ways, this comprehensive collection marks the increasing convergence of cyberculture with other forms of media, and with all aspects of our lives in a digitized... more
Moving beyond traditional cyberculture studies paradigms in several key ways, this comprehensive collection marks the increasing convergence of cyberculture with other forms of media, and with all aspects of our lives in a digitized world.
Includes essential readings for both the student and scholar of a diverse range of fields, including new and digital media, internet studies, digital arts and culture studies, network culture studies, and the information society
Incorporates essays by both new and established scholars of digital cultures, including Andy Miah, Eugene Thacker, Lisa Nakamura, Chris Hables Gray, Sonia Livingstone and Espen Aarseth
Created explicitly for the undergraduate student, with comprehensive introductions to each section that outline the main ideas of each essay
Explores the many facets of cyberculture, and includes sections on race, politics, gender, theory, gaming, and space
Includes essential readings for both the student and scholar of a diverse range of fields, including new and digital media, internet studies, digital arts and culture studies, network culture studies, and the information society
Incorporates essays by both new and established scholars of digital cultures, including Andy Miah, Eugene Thacker, Lisa Nakamura, Chris Hables Gray, Sonia Livingstone and Espen Aarseth
Created explicitly for the undergraduate student, with comprehensive introductions to each section that outline the main ideas of each essay
Explores the many facets of cyberculture, and includes sections on race, politics, gender, theory, gaming, and space
Information sharing, of any kind, in spite of the necessity, the ethics and the danger of it, makes it unrestricted and may be even unauthenticated, but rarely so. Information dispersion becomes entwined with the idea of a cultural... more
Information sharing, of any kind, in spite of the necessity, the ethics and the danger of it, makes it unrestricted and may be even unauthenticated, but rarely so. Information dispersion becomes entwined with the idea of a cultural process, and makes for a phenomenon that treats the study of information sharing, or expounding of the ‘truth’ a delightful text to be read, reread and even unread. It at once becomes a cultural as well as a technological phenomenon. The popular understanding of technology preceding the culture daunts on the face of this write‐up. The culture of leaks inspires technology to rise up to it, and the protocols of controls add to the pivotal role of a technology‐efficient world that looks up to the dynamic character of ‘culture’ for constant renewals.
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This book proposes that our responses to various situations, events and representations are not entirely private, individual and internal. They have a crucial social dimension. Emotions are a result of the internalisation of cultural... more
This book proposes that our responses to various situations, events and representations are not entirely private, individual and internal. They have a crucial social dimension.
Emotions are a result of the internalisation of cultural codes and discourses that inform, and even determine the appropriateness or inappropriateness of emotional responses.
We see a terrorist as a threat, a cyclone as worrying, a rags-to-riches story as a feel-good moment. We mourn the sudden death of Michael Jackson, we rejoice in the victory of a triumphant Tendulkar and we react with horror and shock to 9/11. All of these are emotional responses to specific representational strategies that present these people and events in particular ways. These strategies in turn construct our emotional relations to the events and people.
Exactly how sentiments of care, passion, desire, pleasure, fear, sympathy or pity are discursively commodified (made a commodity) in the mass media, films, reportage and the other public culture forms today is the subject of this book. It demonstrates how cultures today are getting emotion-driven.
The book is organised around four ‘sentiments’: well-being, suffering, aversion and hope.
It uses reality TV, hate speech, self-help literature, media coverage of 9/11 and 26/11, autobiographies, websites and films, and blends theoretical insights with elements of innovative inquiry, to show how emotions are packaged and how these emotions then determine social relations itself.
Emotions are a result of the internalisation of cultural codes and discourses that inform, and even determine the appropriateness or inappropriateness of emotional responses.
We see a terrorist as a threat, a cyclone as worrying, a rags-to-riches story as a feel-good moment. We mourn the sudden death of Michael Jackson, we rejoice in the victory of a triumphant Tendulkar and we react with horror and shock to 9/11. All of these are emotional responses to specific representational strategies that present these people and events in particular ways. These strategies in turn construct our emotional relations to the events and people.
Exactly how sentiments of care, passion, desire, pleasure, fear, sympathy or pity are discursively commodified (made a commodity) in the mass media, films, reportage and the other public culture forms today is the subject of this book. It demonstrates how cultures today are getting emotion-driven.
The book is organised around four ‘sentiments’: well-being, suffering, aversion and hope.
It uses reality TV, hate speech, self-help literature, media coverage of 9/11 and 26/11, autobiographies, websites and films, and blends theoretical insights with elements of innovative inquiry, to show how emotions are packaged and how these emotions then determine social relations itself.
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Research Interests:
Postcolonialism as a critical approach and pedagogic practice has informed literary and cultural studies since the late 1980s. The term is heavily loaded and has come to mean a wide, and often bewildering, variety of approaches, methods,... more
Postcolonialism as a critical approach and pedagogic practice has informed literary and cultural studies since the late 1980s. The term is heavily loaded and has come to mean a wide, and often bewildering, variety of approaches, methods, politics and ideas. Beginning with the historical origins of postcolonial thought in the writings of Gandhi, Cesaire and Fanon, this guide moves on to Edward Said's articulation into a critical approach and finally to postcolonialism’s multiple forms in contemporary critical thinking, including theorists such as Bhabha, Spivak, Arif Dirlik and Aijaz Ahmed. Written in jargon-free language and illustrated with examples from literary and cultural texts, this book addresses the many concerns, forms and ‘specializations’ of postcolonialism, including gender and sexuality studies, the nations and nationalism, space and place, history and politics. It explains the key ideas, concepts and approaches in what is arguably the most influential and politically edged critical approach in literary and cultural theory today
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Drawing on a vast array of textual sources, this analysis of the discourse of colonialism tracks the many narratives and narrative strategies of imperial domination. Focusing on British involvement in India, the material collated for this... more
Drawing on a vast array of textual sources, this analysis of the discourse of colonialism tracks the many narratives and narrative strategies of imperial domination. Focusing on British involvement in India, the material collated for this revealing study includes travelogues, administrative reports, memoirs, letters, exhibition catalogues, anthropological tracts, parliamentary debates, and instruction manuals. It shows how subtle changes of emphasis reflect evolving colonial attitudes toward conquered territories, shifting from flights of the imagination to factual inquiry, to a narrative of exoticism and heterogeneity that safely compartmentalized colonial “‘otherness”’ via natural history, ethnography, and cartographies of disease.
The book adopts a thematic approach to elucidate the cultural myth-making at the height of European colonialism in the nineteenth century, focusing on law and order, landscape-planning, and domestication, and showing how dominance and political power were naturalized through grand spectacles that humbled natives into obedience. This constructed colonial narrative helped legitimize imperial ambitions as charitable humanitarianism, rather than as asset-stripping and economic manipulation. Finally, the narrative examines colonial aesthetics, arguing that disciplines like archaeology and art history situated Indian art and architecture within a colonial project of interpretation, ironically co-creating fresh notions of
“‘Englishness”’ and English characters.
The book adopts a thematic approach to elucidate the cultural myth-making at the height of European colonialism in the nineteenth century, focusing on law and order, landscape-planning, and domestication, and showing how dominance and political power were naturalized through grand spectacles that humbled natives into obedience. This constructed colonial narrative helped legitimize imperial ambitions as charitable humanitarianism, rather than as asset-stripping and economic manipulation. Finally, the narrative examines colonial aesthetics, arguing that disciplines like archaeology and art history situated Indian art and architecture within a colonial project of interpretation, ironically co-creating fresh notions of
“‘Englishness”’ and English characters.
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This book examines the ‘cultural apparatus’ of Human Rights in India today. It unravels discourses of victimhood, oppression, suffering and witnessing through a study of autobiographies, memoirs, literature, reportage and media coverage,... more
This book examines the ‘cultural apparatus’ of Human Rights in India today. It unravels discourses of victimhood, oppression, suffering and witnessing through a study of autobiographies, memoirs, literature, reportage and media coverage, and documentaries.
Moving across multiple media and genres for their representations of Dalits, riot victims, prisoners, abused and abandoned women and children, examining the formal properties of victim texts for their documentation of trauma, and analyzing the role of the sympathetic imagination, Writing Wrongs inaugurates a whole new field in literary–cultural studies by focusing on the narratives that build the culture of Human Rights. It argues that this cultural apparatus is essential to the political and legal dimensions of Human Rights.
The book emphasizes the need for an ethical turn to literary–cultural studies and a cultural turn to Human Rights studies, arguing that a public culture of Human Rights has a key role to play in revitalizing civil society and its institutions.
Moving across multiple media and genres for their representations of Dalits, riot victims, prisoners, abused and abandoned women and children, examining the formal properties of victim texts for their documentation of trauma, and analyzing the role of the sympathetic imagination, Writing Wrongs inaugurates a whole new field in literary–cultural studies by focusing on the narratives that build the culture of Human Rights. It argues that this cultural apparatus is essential to the political and legal dimensions of Human Rights.
The book emphasizes the need for an ethical turn to literary–cultural studies and a cultural turn to Human Rights studies, arguing that a public culture of Human Rights has a key role to play in revitalizing civil society and its institutions.
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Packaging Life: Cultures of the Everyday is a study of the cultural politics of four aspects of everyday life - health, comfort, risk and mobility - as manifest in public culture. The book explores the commodification of these aspects,... more
Packaging Life: Cultures of the Everyday is a study of the cultural politics of four aspects of everyday life - health, comfort, risk and mobility - as manifest in public culture. The book explores the commodification of these aspects, arguing that our experience and perception are mediated by discourses circulating in the mass media.
The author explores how notions of 'good' health, 'cosmopolitan' identities, and 'luxurious' lifestyles are constructed, arguing that such constructions, or what this book calls 'packaging', encourage us to buy particular commodities, adopt certain lifestyles, assimilate specific political beliefs and develop significant anxieties. Discourses, he suggests, morph into consumer practices, where particular kinds of bodies, objects, and practices are established as the norm-safe, stylish and cosmopolitan-so that they appear natural, legitimate and desirable and lead us, consumers, to buy, practice, believe in and adopt them. He also analyzes or tries to 'unpack' this underlying discourse within images, rhetoric, narratives and representations so that we understand the politics behind them.
'Unpacking' cultural politics, this book demonstrates, is the disentangling of the insidious regulatory frames of representation so that we generate dissident reading practices for public culture. The book is an essential reading for those who want to understand modern urban cultural rhetorics. Scholars and practitioners working in the fields of media and communication, consumer behaviour studies and cultural studies will find it highly engaging as well as provocative.
The author explores how notions of 'good' health, 'cosmopolitan' identities, and 'luxurious' lifestyles are constructed, arguing that such constructions, or what this book calls 'packaging', encourage us to buy particular commodities, adopt certain lifestyles, assimilate specific political beliefs and develop significant anxieties. Discourses, he suggests, morph into consumer practices, where particular kinds of bodies, objects, and practices are established as the norm-safe, stylish and cosmopolitan-so that they appear natural, legitimate and desirable and lead us, consumers, to buy, practice, believe in and adopt them. He also analyzes or tries to 'unpack' this underlying discourse within images, rhetoric, narratives and representations so that we understand the politics behind them.
'Unpacking' cultural politics, this book demonstrates, is the disentangling of the insidious regulatory frames of representation so that we generate dissident reading practices for public culture. The book is an essential reading for those who want to understand modern urban cultural rhetorics. Scholars and practitioners working in the fields of media and communication, consumer behaviour studies and cultural studies will find it highly engaging as well as provocative.
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Postcolonial writing originating from Africa, Asia, and South America in the mid-twentieth century has constantly examined, negotiated with, and reacted to the overarching experience of colonial subjugation. This book, in its seven... more
Postcolonial writing originating from Africa, Asia, and South America in the mid-twentieth century has constantly examined, negotiated with, and reacted to the overarching experience of colonial subjugation. This book, in its seven thematically organized chapters, lucidly elucidates complex concepts and formulations of postcolonial literature and theory and critically analyses their various dimensions with relevant examples from contemporary postcolonial writing. The book would also appeal to the general reader aiming to gain a thorough understanding of the fundamental themes and discourses of postcolonial literature.
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This book explores the formations and configurations of British colonial discourse on India through a reading of prose narratives of the 1600-1920 period. Arguing that colonial discourse often relied on aesthetic devices in order to... more
This book explores the formations and configurations of British colonial discourse on India through a reading of prose narratives of the 1600-1920 period.
Arguing that colonial discourse often relied on aesthetic devices in order to describe and assert a degree of narrative control over Indian landscape, Pramod Nayar demonstrates how aesthetics furnished a vocabulary and representational modes for the British to construct particular images of India.
Looking specifically at the aesthetic modes of the marvellous, the monstrous, the sublime, the picturesque and the luxuriant, Nayar marks the shift in the rhetoric – from the exploration narratives from the age of mercantile exploration to that of the ‘shikar’ memoirs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century’s extreme exotic. English Writing and India provides an important new study of colonial aesthetics, even as it extends current scholarship on the modes of early British representations of new lands and cultures.
Arguing that colonial discourse often relied on aesthetic devices in order to describe and assert a degree of narrative control over Indian landscape, Pramod Nayar demonstrates how aesthetics furnished a vocabulary and representational modes for the British to construct particular images of India.
Looking specifically at the aesthetic modes of the marvellous, the monstrous, the sublime, the picturesque and the luxuriant, Nayar marks the shift in the rhetoric – from the exploration narratives from the age of mercantile exploration to that of the ‘shikar’ memoirs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century’s extreme exotic. English Writing and India provides an important new study of colonial aesthetics, even as it extends current scholarship on the modes of early British representations of new lands and cultures.
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This essay proposes cultural studies of COVID-19. To this end, it studies the rhetoric of vaccinationalisms; the biopolitical cultures and the responses to these discourses that pointed to segregated vulnerabilities resulting from... more
This essay proposes cultural studies of COVID-19. To this end, it studies the rhetoric of vaccinationalisms; the biopolitical cultures and the responses to these discourses that pointed to segregated vulnerabilities resulting from inequalities of class, age, ethnicity and race; and the various genres of cultural production (including celebrity blogging and diaries). The essay demonstrates how COVID-19 cultures are implicitly about unequal social conditions.
This essay ponders on the thorny issue of including artificial beings under the category of “citizen.” The increasing humanization of the artificial being, it suggests, prevents us from seeing and treating the machine as a being. But if... more
This essay ponders on the thorny issue of including artificial beings under the category of “citizen.” The increasing humanization of the artificial being, it suggests, prevents us from seeing and treating the machine as a being. But if the humanoid robot performs all the functions of a human being, and acquires cultural traits such as emotional intelligence, rational thinking, or altruism, then on what grounds do we deny it the same status as a human person? Conversely, as more and more humans are cyborged, through transplants, implants, and prostheses, resulting in an erasure of their “core” humanity, then what is the difference between such a cyborged human with human rights and an artificial being?
Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun is a novel in which several of the questions raised in the opening paragraph are distilled into two principal themes that constitute the subject of this essay on posthuman rights and justice: the moral... more
Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun is a novel in which several of the questions raised in the opening paragraph are distilled into two principal themes that constitute the subject of this essay on posthuman rights and justice: the moral standing of Artificial Beings (ABs) such as Klara, and robot servitude to humans. I conclude with a short reflection on Ishiguro’s critique of an anthropocentric posthumanism.
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This article delves into the posthumanisation of sports, as various notions of enhancements in terms of sports, and also looks into the cyborgisation of playing sports as well as the sporting experience. It argues that the increasing... more
This article delves into the posthumanisation of sports, as various notions of enhancements in terms of sports, and also looks into the cyborgisation of playing sports as well as the sporting experience. It argues that the increasing scale of cyborgisation as seen in sports, is a testament to its proliferation in other aspects of human lives.
This essay argues that Hush, the graphic novel on child abuse, appropriates silence as a textual/narrative strategy to ‘speak’ of a subject on which society is usually silent. In medium that uses both word and image, Hush is radical in... more
This essay argues that Hush, the graphic novel on child abuse, appropriates silence as a textual/narrative strategy to ‘speak’ of a subject on which society is usually silent. In medium that uses both word and image, Hush is radical in not using words at all. The silencing works at the level of the girl child’s body – which is constantly ‘enclosed’ – and thus serves as a visual representation of commonly accepted notions of the child’s protected (enclosed) body within the circle of the family but which is subverted because the enclosed body is the abused body. I then argue that the hand-over-mouth visuals embody the silencing of languages of protest in Hush, and serve to demonstrate the denial of sovereignty to the body. In this essay I argue that the denial of rhetorical sovereignty to an individual is to deny material sovereignty in toto.
In this essay, I examine two aspects of the twin projects’ foregrounding of trauma: the modes of representing trauma in the digital and the consequent construction of a trauma globalectic. Preserving, and in many cases, retrieving,... more
In this essay, I examine two aspects of the twin projects’ foregrounding of trauma: the modes of representing trauma in the digital and the consequent construction of a trauma globalectic. Preserving, and in many cases, retrieving, cultural trauma in the digital age as Famine and Dearth and Famine Tales demonstrate, will mean a media archaeology that merges different forms and genres of/in media. Conjoining instances of social injustice and suffering, as these projects do across spatial and temporal spaces ensures that we see historical trauma in multiple sites and stemming from different forces and causes and yet following certain patterns – social hierarchies, unequal legislation, administrative inefficiency/indifference, all of which conspire to produce food scarcity and famine.
This paper studies two texts about animals in conflict zones: Sadat Hasan Manto's 'The Dog of Titwal' and its graphic adaptation by Arif Ayaz Parrey and Wasim Helal's 'Tamasha-e-Tetwal', in Vishwajyoti Ghosh's Partition collection, This... more
This paper studies two texts about animals in conflict zones: Sadat Hasan Manto's 'The Dog of Titwal' and its graphic adaptation by Arif Ayaz Parrey and Wasim Helal's 'Tamasha-e-Tetwal', in Vishwajyoti Ghosh's Partition collection, This Side That Side. In Manto, the deterritorialized dog creates an animal heterotopia. The dog is also significant in that its precarious life between two territories transforms the political organization of space into what Stuart Elden terms 'terrain'. Such an organization's biopolitics involves fauna and flora as well.
This essay examines Covid Chronicles: A Comics Anthology from the perspective of biopower and biopolitics. It contends that, on the one hand, the comics capture individual suffering and collec- tive trauma of the pandemic; on the other... more
This essay examines Covid Chronicles: A Comics Anthology from the perspective of biopower and biopolitics. It contends that, on the one hand, the comics capture individual suffering and collec- tive trauma of the pandemic; on the other hand, these comics draw attention to the role the state plays in regulating bodies to be monitored, governed and, in some cases, deemed disposable.
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This essay examines the link between Literature and democracy, arguing that the function of Literature and Literary Studies is to prepare for a democracy-to-come. It does so by, first, formulating possible worlds, in which people unlike... more
This essay examines the link between Literature and democracy, arguing that the function of Literature and Literary Studies is to prepare for a democracy-to-come. It does so by, first, formulating possible worlds, in which people unlike us may live. Second, Literature produces a public. And finally, it defines the idea of the Human and therefore the subject of Human Rights.
This essay theorises an AgoraGothic, a Gothic of the empty, open spaces captured in the photographic essay, ‘The Great Empty’ in the New York Times, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. The decolonised spaces of metropolises, as humans... more
This essay theorises an AgoraGothic, a Gothic of the empty, open spaces captured in the photographic essay, ‘The Great Empty’ in the New York Times, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. The decolonised spaces of metropolises, as humans were locked in, are an iteration of the colonial condition of the terra nullius, but also of the res nullius, abandoned by its owner and ready for occupation by others. The agora is haunted, with two registers of decolonisation: of losing human domination over built and natural spaces, and the return of the repressed non- human Other. As humans cower inside, the wait is interminable, as the virus stalks the outside.
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Research Interests:
Research Interests:
All biological precarity is biocultural precarity. “Precarity” here signals the nature of existence of biological forms embedded in contexts inimical – toxic – to life. Precarity induced by toxins and toxicity alters the form of life... more
All biological precarity is biocultural precarity. “Precarity” here signals the nature of existence of biological forms embedded in contexts inimical – toxic – to life. Precarity induced by toxins and toxicity alters the form of life adversely. The toxic nature of human nature (which is my concern here, rather than toxicity in rivers, soil, and nonhuman lifeforms), so to speak, may have its origins in exogenous causal factors such as industrial (Bhopal’s methyl isocyanate) or agricultural pollutants (such as Endosulfan sprayed as pesticide in Kerala, southern India), pharmacological interven- tions (numerous mutagens), or internal and inherited factors (genetically inherited conditions such as Huntington’s disease). The scope and degree of toxic human nature – de!ned as a toxicity embedded in the material unit of the human that produces alterations, diseases, conditions that adversely a"ect corporeal, intellectual, psychological, emotional behaviors – may be somatic or genetic, that is, restricted to an individual and non- reproducible (somatic), or transmissible across generations (genetic). In all cases, this chapter suggests, changes in human nature – by which I mean anatomical, physiological, behavioral – are biocultural, with both somatic and genetic toxicity being embedded in cultural systems and processes, from family to biomedicine, care-giving apparatuses to insurance.
During and after COVID, Digital Education has emerged as clear major, and thick, discursive field with inclusivity being a core concern. Any critique of the inequities in the field must necessarily include the rewiring of academic... more
During and after COVID, Digital Education has emerged as clear major, and thick, discursive field with inclusivity being a core concern. Any critique of the inequities in the field must necessarily include the rewiring of academic institutions that appear to be increasingly relying, heavily, on state-businesscorporation linkages.
Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro), the Xenogenesis trilogy (Octavia E. Butler) and The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood), invoke the full semantic scope of the term “steward,” which means “guard,” “overseer of workmen,” “one who manages... more
Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro), the Xenogenesis trilogy (Octavia E. Butler) and The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood), invoke the full semantic scope of the term “steward,” which means “guard,” “overseer of workmen,” “one who manages affairs of an estate on behalf of his employer” and a “person who supervises arrangements,” all of which imply control, power and dominance. I propose that stewardship in eugenic dystopias such as these, while directed at the future of the human race in terms of its very continuity and existence, foregrounds what Rebekah Sheldon following Lee Edelman terms “reproductive futurism".However, the dystopian vision of Atwood, Butler and Ishiguro treats reproductive futurism as not (only) the creation of (improved) human bodies – in terms of cures for diseases, freedom from cancer, longevity, among others – but also, contra Sheldon, lacking a redemption from humanity’s political and social pasts of violence, coercion, oppression and discrimination. In other words, the stewardship for “continuing” humanity is founded on structures of power and knowledge that remain scarred by the political and social pasts of humanity and does not ensure a redemptive future.
This essay examines an unusual text, Robert Boyle‘s instructions for travellers, titled 'Inquiries for Suratte‘ (1666-67) through multiple lenses: the social histories of science and scientific institutions, genealogies and genres,... more
This essay examines an unusual text, Robert Boyle‘s instructions for travellers, titled 'Inquiries for Suratte‘ (1666-67) through multiple lenses: the social histories of science and scientific institutions, genealogies and genres, intellectual and cultural histories. Social histories of science and its institutions examine their institutionalized processes of collecting, organizing and disseminating knowledge, as I shall show. I then argue that a discursive tradition existed for such 'Instructions‘ and 'Inquiries‘, embodying a genealogy of knowledge-making procedures and modes of codifying the data received. The frame of intellectual history, I demonstrate, focuses on how intellectual authority is constructed through processes of knowledge gathering and legitimation, the modalities of the 'observing gaze‘, the categorization of the reported information as 'data‘ and/or 'facts‘, among others.
Posthumanism as a school of thought and a theme in literary and cultural texts strives to keep pace with developments such as terraforming or genetic engineering, but also engages philosophically and politically with those developments,... more
Posthumanism as a school of thought and a theme in literary and cultural texts strives to keep pace with developments such as terraforming or genetic engineering, but also engages philosophically and politically with those developments, in the form of enunciating questions about human identity, nonhuman agency, and ethics. In more recent times, posthuman thought has moved into areas as diverse as climate change, the Anthropocene, legal identity, and pedagogy. It also continues, as this chapter’s review shows, to be interested in legal subjectivity, ideas of personhood, human genealogy, and their cultural expressions in the form of pop culture and literary texts. The chapter is divided into seven sections: 1. Surveying Posthumanism; 2. Posthumanisms and the Anthropocene; 3. Posthuman Performance; 4. Transhumanism; 5. Posthumanism, Law, and Ethics; 6. Posthumanism and the Pandemic; 7. Conclusion.
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This essay examines several photographs taken during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in India in 2021. It argues that the photographs capture an “atmo-terror” (terror from the air). The paper records the evolution of... more
This essay examines several photographs taken during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in India in 2021. It argues that the photographs capture an “atmo-terror” (terror from the air). The paper records the evolution of atmo-technics: alongside the dehu- manization of the patient/sufferer, acts of resilience were reported and recorded. A “civil contract” of photography may be inferred from them.
This article examines one strand of COVID art that encodes a heteroclitic cultural imaginary – and is irregular and unsettling. Banksy’s murals and paintings parody classical artworks, and are themselves parodied, so as to capture the new... more
This article examines one strand of COVID art that encodes a heteroclitic cultural imaginary – and is irregular and unsettling. Banksy’s murals and paintings parody classical artworks, and are themselves parodied, so as to capture the new cultural realities of the COVID era. In the case of other artists, such as Chiara Grilli, the traditional heliotrope is parodied to convey a similar reality, like Banksy’s inversion of the superhero mythology. With the employ- ment of conventional disease-vector images, such as those of rats, Banksy brings into the human 5dwelling a “postnatural wilderness” showing the reversal of the disruption of ecosystems that had rendered animals habitat-less in India, with animals once again entering human spaces. Hence, the pandemic’s inversion of spatia- lized distribution of life can be seen as a decolonial and decoloniz- ing moment. Subsequently, the article highlights how COVID-19 art intervenes through its parodic, kitschy quality, in the discourses around the pandemic.
The form of postcolonial writing in Diane Glancy, this paper proposes, works to appropriate and fit the text into ‘compulsory postcoloniality’ where the postcolonial author discussing cultural encounters uses authenticating devices and... more
The form of postcolonial writing in Diane Glancy, this paper proposes, works to appropriate and fit the text into ‘compulsory postcoloniality’ where the postcolonial author discussing cultural encounters uses authenticating devices and prepares a ‘narrative society’ that demands such ‘authentic’ writing about the postcolonial condition and its revisionism of its past. Sacajawea’s narrative functions as a ‘narrative parasite’ because it formally disrupts and interrupts mainstream (white) information and induces a different order, asserting agency. The interaction of her narrative with the white men’s produces a ‘noise,’ but one which is agential in determining the shape of the overall narrative of the expedition. Sacajawea’s narrative rewrites the history of white exploration itself by showing the native’s individual as well as racial identity and mobility, without which the whites’ exploration would have been impossible. The novel works as a tale of postcolonial agency because it takes the central trope of Anglo-European travel — mobility — as a feature of the native woman. It generates a narrative where we are perforce asked to acknowledge that one of the greatest exploratory expeditions was facilitated by a native woman’s role as well. All the authenticating devices that point to ‘true’ native/postcolonial identity are present in Glancy’s writing. The paper proposes that we can discern a society that has learnt to disbelieve the story of ‘heroic’ expeditions such as Lewis and Clark’s and looks forward to texts like Glancy’s that show another narrative as well.
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Travel writing, this paper argues, is linked to human rights discourse because it constructs genocidal spaces through an ethnography of mourning within its narrative of witnessing, the creation of new contact zones of suffering and... more
Travel writing, this paper argues, is linked to human rights discourse because it constructs genocidal spaces through an ethnography of mourning within its narrative of witnessing, the creation of new contact zones of suffering and violation, and generating an affective literacy about the world as constituted by genocidal spaces. It examines Veronique Tadjo’s The Shadow of Imana, a travel narrative about Rwanda, for this purpose. Beginning with the assumption that human rights demand a narrative, it explores two major components of Tadjo’s work. It is proposed here that Rwanda is constructed as a ‘genocidal space’ because it is a space of human rights violation. The first part of the paper deals with Tadjo’s ‘narrative of witnessing’. This ‘narrative’ is generated through two modes: the semi-ethnographic ‘observation’ mode and the deeply subjective. The narrative also constructs an ethnography of mourning through representation of ‘sites of mourning’. Further, it also enacts individual stories of terror. It is in this last that the individual subject emerges - and the individual, as Michael Ignatieff and others have argued, is the locus of human rights. The second part of the paper develops the idea of ‘affective geographies’. Adapting the notion of ‘contact zones’ from M L Pratt, it argues that the emergence of ‘new’ contact zones is built on the recognition of suffering. This ‘contact zone’ is one where Tadjo encounters violations, deprivation, death and mourning. By folding the singularity of suffering terror into something larger (an ethnography), Tadjo’s travel narrative enables the creation of an entire archive of feelings, and this is the affective geography of the world. By widening our knowledge of suffering about the world, travel writing creates an ‘affective literacy’. This ‘affective literacy’ induced by narratives such as Tadjo’s, is the source of the discourse of human rights.
Abstract: This paper deals with a new medium of narrating history: the graphic narrative. Using Art Spiegelman's cult text, Maus, Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, and Joe Sacco's Safe Area Gorade and Palestine, it... more
Abstract: This paper deals with a new medium of narrating history: the graphic narrative. Using Art Spiegelman's cult text, Maus, Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, and Joe Sacco's Safe Area Gorade and Palestine, it studies the strategies through which the graphic narrative delivers ...
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The emotional dominant of well-being in contemporary cultures today,demands a transformational citizen. The transformational citizen is one who enhances and improves her/himself, feels/experiences a sense of well-being, and thereby... more
The emotional dominant of well-being in contemporary cultures today,demands a transformational citizen. The transformational citizen is one who enhances and improves her/himself, feels/experiences a sense of well-being, and thereby contributes to cultural well-being as well. The discourse of well-being constructs the idea(l) of an autonomous individual who, having evaluated her/his strengths and weaknesses through a process of self-surveillance, proceeds to improve her/himself, and in the process sets new aspirations for her-/himself and others and acquires a cultural membership in a group of successful people. This essay attempts to map the shift in discourse from the care of the Self to the transformational citizen and finally the myth of a ‘new civic order’.
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This essay argues that knowledge culture today is integral to the global archivization of human rights violations. Taking as its subject of analysis the website Witness, it argues that new forms of narratives emerge on a daily basis from... more
This essay argues that knowledge culture today is integral to the global archivization of human rights violations. Taking as its subject of analysis the website Witness, it argues that new forms of narratives emerge on a daily basis from across the world, constituting a new knowledge form about the world, that websites like Witness constitute a non-official and user-generated archive of testimony that demands an ethical engagement. The database, it argues, is a central ‘genre’ of human rights discourse in the new knowledge economy. A ‘narrative’ emerges from the database through a collection of trajectories used/followed by the reader. I suggest that this matter of user-choice is a call for an ethical engagement with the database of the suffering Others. It creates a new geography - of suffering - for us to explore. Witness is the space where the suffering Other appears, and calls upon us to respond ethically.
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Summary This essay studies Felicia Hemans’ The Indian City as embodying an aesthetic view of India. The essay argues that the poem deploys the aesthetic of the picturesque in order to produce a cultural fable about the collapse of an... more
Summary This essay studies Felicia Hemans’ The Indian City as embodying an aesthetic view of India. The essay argues that the poem deploys the aesthetic of the picturesque in order to produce a cultural fable about the collapse of an Indian city. The first section maps Hemans’ “Indian picturesque” and its pastoral Concordia discors in which diverse elements exist in harmony, and with a definite feminisation of the landscape. In the second section, it shows how this picturesque is subverted through an emphasis on the moral geography of the city; the feminisation of the land continuing in a different fashion. In the final section the essay argues that the civic picturesque of the poem retreats behind the natural picturesque, a process again initiated by the woman's presence, even as the landscape itself serves as a space of gendered memorialisation. It argues that, ultimately, Hemans presents the Oriental woman as politically ineffectual because although Maimuna is initially a point of political coalition she slides into the role of a sentimental mother blunting her political role and ambitions.
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The essay examines two specific instances of imperial spectacles: the 1877 imperial durbar in Delhi and the 1911 Pageant of Empire in London. It argues that these spectacles enabled the Empire to incorporate the natives as subjects into... more
The essay examines two specific instances of imperial spectacles: the 1877 imperial durbar in Delhi and the 1911 Pageant of Empire in London. It argues that these spectacles enabled the Empire to incorporate the natives as subjects into the symbolic hierarchies of the Raj, and the English into an imperial sensibility of ownership and shared destiny. It suggests that through these spectacles the power and majesty of the Empire was conveyed to their subjects but also to their own countrymen in the form of an imperial improvisation. In the case of the Delhi durbar imperial improvisation was made possible through the participatory nature of the spectacle where the native princes and aristocrats, by participating in the Durbar, implicitly endorsed it, accepted it as ‘Indian’, and located themselves within the imperial structure. The 1911 Pageant was an aesthetic spectacle that forged a sense of connection, for all English visitors to see themselves as a part of the large ‘British’ imperi...
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This article examines two Dalit novels, Bama’s Sangati and Sivakami’s The Grip of Change. It argues that the two novels hybridise the very novel form through the appropriation of different registers, the mythic, the historical and the... more
This article examines two Dalit novels, Bama’s Sangati and Sivakami’s The Grip of Change. It argues that the two novels hybridise the very novel form through the appropriation of different registers, the mythic, the historical and the immediate. It argues that this narrative hybridisation is a political project, reflecting a radicalisation of consciousness itself. Bama and Sivakami, I argue further, transform folkloric and local-mythic language and narrative by infusing into it the language of rights, Ambedkarite philosophy, dignity and the law. The language of the law and rights, I suggest, have entered common usage and thus results in a radicalising of the common sense, so that folkloric language itself becomes a language of protest and political challenge.
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Through a reading of two Dalit texts, Bama’s testimonio entitled Karukku and Baby Kamble’s life writing The Prisons We Broke, and tribal eco-activist C. K. Janu’s unfinished autobiography Mother Forest, this article examines the ecology... more
Through a reading of two Dalit texts, Bama’s testimonio entitled Karukku and Baby Kamble’s life writing The Prisons We Broke, and tribal eco-activist C. K. Janu’s unfinished autobiography Mother Forest, this article examines the ecology of protest in postcolonial India. It argues that the narrative devices and rhetorical strategies of these texts propose what E. P. Thompson terms a “moral economy” that constitutes, in these cases, a critique of existing socio-economic conditions (which amount to an immoral economy). These strategies also construct a model of the subaltern as a “knowing subaltern”: one who demonstrates historical consciousness, political awareness, advocacy and self-reflexivity. The article analyses the principal rhetorics in this discourse of eco-protest in writings from marginalized communities: those of suffering, fear and loss, labour and community.
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This chapter explores the instantiation of a posthuman uncanny in Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me. To do so, it studies three key themes: the nonperson and the familial Other, the technoanimism of the Other, and the “Crisis of the Natural”... more
This chapter explores the instantiation of a posthuman uncanny in Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me. To do so, it studies three key themes: the nonperson and the familial Other, the technoanimism of the Other, and the “Crisis of the Natural” and Emergence. The nonperson who is also the familial Other transforms the home into something else. Although Adam arrives and is treated as a humanoid, the ostensible “control” of the humanoid by the human master/parent/owner is undermined by the uncanny technoanimism of the posthuman “being” that is Adam. Then, an “emergent” condition, co-created by the human-nonhuman assemblage, poses a threat to the domesticity the humans had carved out for themselves but which entailed the employment of the nonhuman.
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In digital literary studies, a corpus is a collection of natively digital or digitized texts. These typically large bodies, or collections of data, are built and organized in ways that allow them to be queried, mined, analyzed, and... more
In digital literary studies, a corpus is a collection of natively digital or digitized texts. These typically large bodies, or collections of data, are built and organized in ways that allow them to be queried, mined, analyzed, and visualized for meaningful quantitative or qualitative results. None of these forms of investigation are possible—or even conceivable—with texts in traditional formats (such as manuscript or print), or also with digital surrogates or natively digital texts, unless they are gathered in a corpus and properly formatted. These are the stepping stones to virtually all Digital Humanities projects, of which corpus building represents the initial phase, foundational in its intent and essential to any further steps. Consequently, understanding what a corpus is, how it is built, and what can be done with it, is crucial to a better comprehension and appreciation of Digital Humanities as a field, and of computational literary studies as a relevant and growing part of it.
The talk will focus on Rammohun Roy's perception of institutional differences between indigenous and European pedagogical approaches on education. It will use Roy's own writings to point to his socio-cultural and intellectual location... more
The talk will focus on Rammohun Roy's perception of institutional differences between indigenous and European pedagogical approaches on education. It will use Roy's own writings to point to his socio-cultural and intellectual location within the colonial context, and his conviction of relevant knowledge systems for the Indians which would enable them to join the modern world outside of India's boundaries.
Reading IWE is the second event conducted in the IWE Online project. It was inaugurated on Aug 29 th 2022, by Professor M. Ghanashyam Krishna, Director IoE, in the presence of several faculty members and students, including the many... more
Reading IWE is the second event conducted in the IWE Online project. It was inaugurated on Aug 29 th 2022, by Professor M. Ghanashyam Krishna, Director IoE, in the presence of several faculty members and students, including the many student participants from universities across the country. The Project and Workshop were introduced by the project investigators, Anna Kurian and Pramod K. Nayar. Organized with the larger view of studying Indian Writing in English as a discipline, the series was divided into five segments focusing on different literary genres in IWE: the novel, the essay, poetry, Northeast Indian literature, and Partition literature, with the intention to train students in different methodological approaches to reading these genres. The four-day event was structured such that the resource persons delivered open lectures, conducted close readings of texts in workshop sessions and interacted with small groups of students about ideas for essays in a hybrid online-offline mode.
This workshop seeks to introduce introduce MA and PhD (Year 1) students to reading Indian Writing in English-its principal genres, contexts & approaches. The workshop will have, first, talks by specialists introducing the genre/contexts... more
This workshop seeks to introduce introduce MA and PhD (Year 1) students to reading Indian Writing in English-its principal genres, contexts & approaches. The workshop will have, first, talks by specialists introducing the genre/contexts and/or special themes and then a workshop component for the participants during which they will produce a cogent, incisive and precise write-up of a specified length. The talks will be open to all. The resource persons will prescribe reading materials, which will be sent in advance to selected and registered participants. The participants will be expected to incorporate the talks and these materials in their write-up which will be evaluated before certificates of participation are issued.
This short-term online program is situated at the intersection of Literary Studies and the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). With their now- seemingly impossible deadline of 2030 for fulfillment, the UN SDGs have figured,... more
This short-term online program is situated at the intersection of Literary Studies and the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). With their now- seemingly impossible deadline of 2030 for fulfillment, the UN SDGs have figured, informed and been anticipated in literary texts across cultures. Literature, like the SDGs themselves, enables the making and remaking of social imaginaries towards a juster, fairer and cleaner planet. The program foregrounds 'precarity' as a particular approach to the SDGs, where domains such as gender equality or climate action have been represented in literature as being in crisis but also, in literary texts as sites of embattled states of being, revisionism and reimagining. The STP will demonstrate how Literature at large can be read for and via the SDGs
Human societies grow through varied cultural forms and practices, thus adding to the diversity in multiple fields, be it economy, arts, languages, knowledge systems, etc. Cultural diversity is one of the key features of any nation and the... more
Human societies grow through varied cultural forms and practices, thus adding to the diversity in multiple fields, be it economy, arts, languages, knowledge systems, etc. Cultural diversity is one of the key features of any nation and the harmony and understanding between and across cultures is a focal area of interest now, especially when diversity everywhere is under threat due to many factors driving towards monoculturalism. New technologies have had both tangible and intangible impact on the cultural diversity, whether through archivization, cultural heritage studies or translation. The vulnerability of cultural diversity has also, therefore, been addressed, in many cases positively, through the new technologies, particularly from the last decades of the 20th century. UNESCO‟s Memory of the World
Project is one such initiative.
Celebrating the UN's 'World Day for Cultural Diversity', we proposed a two- day online conference on “Sustaining Cultural Diversity in the Context of Emerging Technologies in India”, 21-22 May 2024, to explore what UNESCO terms the „essential role of intercultural dialogue for achieving peace and sustainable development'. The Conference focuses on cultural diversity and revolves around language, translation, literature and indigeneity, while exploring the role of technology in documenting, understanding and sustaining this diversity. The speakers will address these four verticals through select
examples.
Project is one such initiative.
Celebrating the UN's 'World Day for Cultural Diversity', we proposed a two- day online conference on “Sustaining Cultural Diversity in the Context of Emerging Technologies in India”, 21-22 May 2024, to explore what UNESCO terms the „essential role of intercultural dialogue for achieving peace and sustainable development'. The Conference focuses on cultural diversity and revolves around language, translation, literature and indigeneity, while exploring the role of technology in documenting, understanding and sustaining this diversity. The speakers will address these four verticals through select
examples.
This presentation discusses the vulnerability of contemporary societies to waste. After a brief introduction to waste in its many forms, it shows how waste threatens public health, the climate and natural resources. A reason put forward... more
This presentation discusses the vulnerability of contemporary societies to waste. After a brief introduction to waste in its many forms, it shows how waste threatens public health, the climate and natural resources. A reason put forward for waste vulnerability is that waste has become something that is considered normal. With habituation to waste comes vulnerability to its hazards.
Siting Vulnerabilities' is related to human survivability. Human Survivability requires fresh air to breathe, clean water to drink, enough food to eat, health and wellbeing, and peace, including justice and equity for all as the basis for... more
Siting Vulnerabilities' is related to human survivability. Human Survivability requires fresh air to breathe, clean water to drink, enough food to eat, health and wellbeing, and peace, including justice and equity for all as the basis for living together. UNESCO contributes to peace via the Sustainable Development Goals, on the platforms of education, the sciences, and culture. This presentation provides an insight into how the natural science unit of the UNESCO Office in New Delhi contributes to reducing the Triple Planetary Crisis, consisting of biodiversity loss, climate change, and ecosystem pollution.
How do histories of human cultural atrocities intersect with slaughters of nonhuman species? What happens at the intersections of stories of extinction and genocide? Events marked by terrible losses to peoples and their animals are fast... more
How do histories of human cultural atrocities intersect with slaughters of nonhuman species? What happens at the intersections of stories of extinction and genocide? Events marked by terrible losses to peoples and their animals are fast becoming the subject of novels, films, even social justice movements. Focused on recovering a sense of affective bonds as shared across species lines, this talk reviews a few examples from the turn of the twenty-first century in order to reveal that what once made traditional cultures vulnerable to the ravages of settler colonialism also can be reframed non-anthropocentrically to serve as sources of strength for their resurgence.
This presentation explores mycorrhizal frameworks for imagining posthuman aging and care. 'Mycorrhiza' refers to the symbiotic association between plant roots and fungal mycelia in which the two organisms are conjoined in a mutually... more
This presentation explores mycorrhizal frameworks for imagining posthuman aging and care. 'Mycorrhiza' refers to the symbiotic association between plant roots and fungal mycelia in which the two organisms are conjoined in a mutually beneficial arrangement, exchanging nutrients and chemical messages. 'Mycorrhizal networks' reflects material and symbolic manifestations of interdependence that model more-than-human ways of relational being. This presentation analyzes Hiromi Goto's 1994 novel Chorus of Mushrooms, which imagines the mycorrhizal dimensions of human life and conveys the networked capacities of aging bodies as relational organisms. Goto's novel positions human beings mycorrhizomically and organismically, as entangled and interdependent, depicting her characters as both material entities and narrative subjects enmeshed in dense, vital worlds teeming with more-than-human life. As Goto's novel demonstrates, the theorization of aging and care can benefit from posthumanist approaches that engage the vicissitudes of embodied vulnerability in their modeling of relational being. Attending to mycorrhizal networks assists in the interrogation and dismantling of 'the human' as a discrete, autonomous individual impervious to vulnerability, and highlights the ubiquity and integrity of care across the life course.
About the Program: Literature documents, represents and re-presents crises and vulnerabilities of different kinds: genocide, climate crisis, historical oppression, and disease among several others. Reading and analysing such literature of... more
About the Program:
Literature documents, represents and re-presents crises and vulnerabilities of different kinds: genocide, climate crisis, historical oppression, and disease among several others. Reading and analysing such literature of crisis is significant for humanity, the nonhuman and the planet as it shifts the focus from discussing the Humanities in crisis to the Humanities of crisis. This ideational shift is important as the compelling times we live in now demand healthy debates on how academia, especially humanities as a field, contributes to the examination of the multitudes of crises and vulnerabilities that the planet and its inhabitants are subjected to. By introducing the key concepts in Vulnerability Studies, this training programme aims to enable the participants to identify and understand those strands of literature that study various forms of human, nonhuman and planetary vulnerability. The programme explores the ways of ‘reading’ diverse forms of vulnerability in literary texts. Through critical inquiry using diverse lenses, from trauma theory to literary gerontology, the programme aims to draw attention to specific narrative modes and aesthetics of representing and addressing vulnerability and crisis in various genres of literature: poetry, the graphic novel, the disease memoir, cli-fi, and drama.
Literature documents, represents and re-presents crises and vulnerabilities of different kinds: genocide, climate crisis, historical oppression, and disease among several others. Reading and analysing such literature of crisis is significant for humanity, the nonhuman and the planet as it shifts the focus from discussing the Humanities in crisis to the Humanities of crisis. This ideational shift is important as the compelling times we live in now demand healthy debates on how academia, especially humanities as a field, contributes to the examination of the multitudes of crises and vulnerabilities that the planet and its inhabitants are subjected to. By introducing the key concepts in Vulnerability Studies, this training programme aims to enable the participants to identify and understand those strands of literature that study various forms of human, nonhuman and planetary vulnerability. The programme explores the ways of ‘reading’ diverse forms of vulnerability in literary texts. Through critical inquiry using diverse lenses, from trauma theory to literary gerontology, the programme aims to draw attention to specific narrative modes and aesthetics of representing and addressing vulnerability and crisis in various genres of literature: poetry, the graphic novel, the disease memoir, cli-fi, and drama.
Climate Fiction, it has been argued, will save us. Because climate fiction allows us to "imaginatively experience what it is like to live in a climate-changed world" (Von Mossner) we can be shaken out of our supposed inaction and... more
Climate Fiction, it has been argued, will save us. Because climate fiction allows us to "imaginatively experience what it is like to live in a climate-changed world" (Von Mossner) we can be shaken out of our supposed inaction and complacency. Climate fiction is also understood to be a science-based literature (Andersen) that provides us with "road maps" (Malpas) capable of guiding us out of what many climate scientists call the Anthropocene: the new climate epoch that has been produced by the human species. However, as Richard Nixon and Farhana Sultana have observed, a large number of people have known for a very long time what it is like to live in a polluted and climate-changed world. Indeed, what Pramod Nayar has called "ecoprecarity" has been a fact of life since the early colonial period in many parts of the Global South and in precarious communities in the Global North. Furthermore, as noted by former Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC Christiana Figueres, "the climate crisis, the nature crisis, the inequality crisis, the food crisis all share the same deep root: extractivism based on extrinsic principles". From this, it can be argued that the planet has not entered the Anthropocene as much as what Françoise Vergès, building on Cedric J Robinson and Jason W. Moore, has termed the racial Capitalocene. This talk makes use of this understanding of the biospheric crisis to note that climate fiction from the Global North tends to ignore both uneven, racialized climate precarity and the extractive history that has produced it. Rather than probing the vulnerability of the planet and of its many entangled human and extra human forms of life, climate fiction is primarily preoccupied with the future fragility of white urban life in the Global North, and with how biospheric breakdown is an emergency for the modern capitalist state. The talk proposes that a better denominator for climate fiction is the Climate Emergency Narrative. This concept recognizes how many climate texts are really about the perceived need to protect the very capitalist world-system that has produced the climate crisis. It is an invitation pay attention to the security strategies that are used in the Global North to manage rather than mitigate the various crises and emergencies that biospheric breakdown is causing (Marzec). The Climate Emergency Narrative concept enables a critical reconsideration of how biospheric vulnerability are mediated by literature and other media.
This talk will consider two recent films-Mati Diop's Atlantique (2019) and Remi Weekes' His House (2020)-which draw from and renew tropes of the gothic to address contemporary migrations from the African continent to Europe. Both texts... more
This talk will consider two recent films-Mati Diop's Atlantique (2019) and Remi Weekes' His House (2020)-which draw from and renew tropes of the gothic to address contemporary migrations from the African continent to Europe. Both texts frame their subject with oblique references to the decimating effects of European (neo)colonialism on regions across Africa, and in both, the affectivity and aesthetics of the gothic are summoned to articulate states of socioecological vulnerability that emerge out of this ongoing history. In the Dakar-set Atlantique, a gothically inflected narrative of spirit possession critically foregrounds those aspects of life in Senegal's capital-poverty, ecocide, (gendered) exploitation-which are propelling people towards the sea. Conversely, His House draws from the gothic to figure conditions into which people of the move are received at their destination, in this case the United Kingdom. The horror of the monster at the heart of Weekes's film seems inseparable from the wider horror of austerity Britain as the protagonists encounter it: a nation riven by poverty, resentment, and institutional racism. In conclusion to the talk I suggest that, examined together, these two gothic films of migration and vulnerability make visible the boomerang trajectory of colonial history, in which the frontiers of extraction and exploitation previously located chiefly in the colonies are today being expanded to encompass the old imperial metropoles as well.
This paper approaches the representation of age in post-Independence Indian literature through a close reading of the iconoclastic Hindi writer K.B. Vaid's short play, 'Our Old Woman' (2000). The aged woman at the heart of the play is... more
This paper approaches the representation of age in post-Independence Indian literature through a close reading of the iconoclastic Hindi writer K.B. Vaid's short play, 'Our Old Woman' (2000). The aged woman at the heart of the play is clearly both a real person ('somebody's mother'), and also the postcolonial nation, while the surrounding chorus prefigures her unmindful children/ citizens trying to work out what they owe her. The paper argues that while Vaid's postcolonial dramatization of the figure of 'Mother India' continues to deploy age as a metaphor for social, political and cultural decline, it also feeds off the materiality of the ageing body, its lack of integrity, autonomy, and slippery location along rigid binaries of youth and age, to foreground an altogether more deviant account of the nation as one that is heterogeneous, discrepant, and mutable rather than timeless, essential and unchanging.
13 Oct 2023
6 PM - 7 PM
6 PM - 7 PM
Coordinated by Zahidul Haque, Faculty Fellow, UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies. Urdu literature too since the beginning has presented social realities. Different genres of prose and poetry like the dastaan (epics), Novels, Short... more
Coordinated by Zahidul Haque, Faculty Fellow, UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies. Urdu literature too since the beginning has presented social realities. Different genres of prose and poetry like the dastaan (epics), Novels, Short Story, Ghazal, Nazm, Mazameen, Inshaiya, the Travelogue etc have documented different forms and degrees of vulnerability. This seminar by the Department of Urdu, University of Hyderabad, in collaboration with the UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies, Department of English, School of Humanities, University of Hyderabad brings together scholars from different disciplines to address the theme of vulnerability in Urdu Literature and to evolve a methodological framework to understand this theme.
With the vast expansion of the genre of graphic novels and comics in terms of production, readership and academic respectability, the contribution of the medium in addressing diverse subjects has also multiplied exponentially.... more
With the vast expansion of the genre of graphic novels and comics in terms of production, readership and academic respectability, the contribution of the medium in addressing diverse subjects has also multiplied exponentially. Environmental comics; graphic novels dealing with genocides, war and disaster; disability, illness and graphic medicine; graphic adaptations of literature and particular sub-genres like sci-fi, gender/race/human rights are now the object of academic research and scrutiny.
In the 30th year of Scott McCloud's classic work on the form, Understanding Comics, the UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies at the University of Hyderabad a teaching and research unit, brings together artists and academics for a series of talks on the role, power and reach of the medium when representing and documenting different forms of vulnerability.
In the 30th year of Scott McCloud's classic work on the form, Understanding Comics, the UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies at the University of Hyderabad a teaching and research unit, brings together artists and academics for a series of talks on the role, power and reach of the medium when representing and documenting different forms of vulnerability.
This Roundtable was designed to conceptualize “vulnerability” from different disciplinary perspectives. Cognate terms such as precarity, precariousness and the precariat, some of which have been current for some time, are also employed... more
This Roundtable was designed to conceptualize “vulnerability” from different disciplinary perspectives. Cognate terms such as precarity, precariousness and the precariat, some of which have been current for some time, are also employed regularly across studies, from education to refugee studies. Thus, a recent volume defines ‘precariousness’ as ‘the shared human condition that makes all individuals intrinsically interdependent in their vulnerability’ (María Porras Sánchez and Gerardo Vilches, Precarious Youth in Contemporary Graphic Narratives 2023: 1).
In this Roundtable experts from various disciplines outlined a set of working propositions around vulnerability. They asked and addressed the following questions:
(i) How does one define and understand vulnerability?
(ii) What is the conceptual vocabulary employed to speak about vulnerability in different domains?
(iii) How are vulnerable populations – the precariats – identified and indexed of their vulnerability assessed?
(iv) What are the modes of representing vulnerability available to and within specific discipline?
Melissa Wall (Arts, Media, Communications, California State University, Northridge); Scott Slovic (Environmental Humanities, U of Idaho); Winifred Poster (International Affairs/Sociology, Washington U, St. Louis);
Lisa Diedrich (Women's and Gender Studies, SUNY, Stony Brook)
Alexandra Moore (Literature, Binghamton)
In this Roundtable experts from various disciplines outlined a set of working propositions around vulnerability. They asked and addressed the following questions:
(i) How does one define and understand vulnerability?
(ii) What is the conceptual vocabulary employed to speak about vulnerability in different domains?
(iii) How are vulnerable populations – the precariats – identified and indexed of their vulnerability assessed?
(iv) What are the modes of representing vulnerability available to and within specific discipline?
Melissa Wall (Arts, Media, Communications, California State University, Northridge); Scott Slovic (Environmental Humanities, U of Idaho); Winifred Poster (International Affairs/Sociology, Washington U, St. Louis);
Lisa Diedrich (Women's and Gender Studies, SUNY, Stony Brook)
Alexandra Moore (Literature, Binghamton)
The human mind has limited ability to embrace the meaning of ecosystemic vulnerability, but immense capacity to appreciate the frailty of individual nonhuman organisms, which exhibit precarity akin to our own. Even inhumanly strong and... more
The human mind has limited ability to embrace the meaning of ecosystemic vulnerability, but immense capacity to appreciate the frailty of individual nonhuman organisms, which exhibit precarity akin to our own. Even inhumanly strong and durable natural beings—such as whales, primates, and redwood trees—are legible to us as fellow “vulnerables,” individual, mortal, and representative of species susceptible to extinction. Such psychological tendencies as speculative empathy, empathetic self-projection and self-erasure, and metaphorical emulation are aspects of what social scientists and literary scholars have dubbed “the arithmetic of compassion.” This lecture will explore these tendencies in such literary works as Annie Dillard’s Holy the Firm (1977), Dale Peterson and Jane Goodall’s Visions of Caliban: On Chimpanzees and People (1993), Julia Butterfly Hill’s The Legacy of Luna: The Story of a Tree, a Woman, and the Struggle to Save the Redwoods (2000), and Amy Donovan’s “Raw, Dense, and Loud: A Whale’s Perspective on Cold Water Energy” (2022). What’s at stake in our potential to grasp the vulnerability of the other, with the aid of literary representation, includes the possibility that we might glimpse our own potential extinction on the horizon before it’s too late to choose a different path.
Chair Inaugural
Lecture by Professor Vinod Pavarala, UNESCO Chair on Community Media, The University of Hyderabad
7 Nov 2023
Lecture by Professor Vinod Pavarala, UNESCO Chair on Community Media, The University of Hyderabad
7 Nov 2023
Octavia Butler’s fiction underscores heightened empathy as a possible feature of the future humans (who may be co-evolved with alien species, in Butler’s imagination). Yet, in Butler’s fiction, the morally enhanced beings ponder over the... more
Octavia Butler’s fiction underscores heightened empathy as a possible feature of the future humans (who may be co-evolved with alien species, in Butler’s imagination). Yet, in Butler’s fiction, the morally enhanced beings ponder over the freedom they now possess. This talk, building on the view that ME requires multiple virtues (James Hughes), examines the linkage of ME with human freedom and/or autonomy.
In the dystopian film Repo Men (2010), starring Jude Law and Forest Whitaker, humans with diseased organs, can buy replacement organs at exorbitant EMIs from firms. These organs are repossessed, like cars or houses, if the buyer reneges... more
In the dystopian film Repo Men (2010), starring Jude Law and Forest Whitaker, humans with diseased organs, can buy replacement organs at exorbitant EMIs from firms. These organs are repossessed, like cars or houses, if the buyer reneges or even falls back on the payments. In Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), clones are manufactured and reared to adulthood, when they begin donating their organs to enable humanity to survive. In the Swedish author Ninni Holmquist’s The Unit (2017), women who are fifty and men sixty-nine years of age respectively, and childless, are deemed “dispensable,” serving as living cadavers to donate organs. The parents in Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper (2004), Anna is created as a bone-marrow match for her leukemia- afflicted elder sister, Kate. Margaret Atwood conceives a future society where fertile women are treated as reproductive units in The Handmaid’s Tale (1986) and its sequel, The Testaments (2019).
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Central to the late 20th and early 21st century’s cultural representations of ecoprecarity is the trope of invasion - of bodies, communities and homes. The discourses of fragility, vulnerability, power relations across species and... more
Central to the late 20th and early 21st century’s cultural representations of ecoprecarity is the trope of invasion - of bodies, communities and homes. The discourses of fragility, vulnerability, power relations across species and imminent extinction may be termed ecoprecarity. ‘Ecoprecarity’ is at once about the precarious lives humans lead in the event or ecological disaster, but also about the environment itself which is rendered precarious due to human intervention in the Anthropocene.
The theme of ecoprecarity may be read along two key lines using the invasion narrative: one, the loss of ontological and visceral-corporeal sovereignty, identity and integrity (the ‘pathogenized host body’ theme), and two, teratogenesis (‘pathological reproduction’, which ‘produce[s] offspring outside the rules of the heterosexual order’, Andrew Cooper 2010). The borders of bodies, homes, nations and the race itself are broken open, or punctured, and the human is transformed into a host for the Other (alien, monster, pathogen). The planet too begins to have an expanded demographics with lifeforms not ‘natural’ to it. Existing ecosystems, whether these are of the human body or the planet itself are threatened with invasion and resultant transformation.
Both lines are interlinked in that the human body invaded and altered produces, in turn, the alien progeny or altered unhuman humans. Indicative of a cultural anxiety that immigrant lifeforms will irrevocably alter human sovereignty over the earth and its inhabitants, the invasion narrative is central to the ecoprecarity theme.
The theme of ecoprecarity may be read along two key lines using the invasion narrative: one, the loss of ontological and visceral-corporeal sovereignty, identity and integrity (the ‘pathogenized host body’ theme), and two, teratogenesis (‘pathological reproduction’, which ‘produce[s] offspring outside the rules of the heterosexual order’, Andrew Cooper 2010). The borders of bodies, homes, nations and the race itself are broken open, or punctured, and the human is transformed into a host for the Other (alien, monster, pathogen). The planet too begins to have an expanded demographics with lifeforms not ‘natural’ to it. Existing ecosystems, whether these are of the human body or the planet itself are threatened with invasion and resultant transformation.
Both lines are interlinked in that the human body invaded and altered produces, in turn, the alien progeny or altered unhuman humans. Indicative of a cultural anxiety that immigrant lifeforms will irrevocably alter human sovereignty over the earth and its inhabitants, the invasion narrative is central to the ecoprecarity theme.
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Not many new books come with a "trigger warning". This one does. Just in case the reader thinks the opinions of the East India Company and the British Raj are endorsed by the publisher, there is a stern disclaimer in a prefatory note.... more
Not many new books come with a "trigger warning". This one does. Just in case the reader thinks the opinions of the East India Company and the British Raj are endorsed by the publisher, there is a stern disclaimer in a prefatory note. "These are not the views of the editor or Bloomsbury India and do not reflect our mission and values which are clearly stated on our website." It would be strange if they did, given that the book begins with the Charter awarded by Elizabeth I to the nascent "Company of Merchants" in 1600. Things have moved on since then. Having said that, this is an original approach to the colonial history of the Indian subcontinent. The author, who teaches in the English Depart ment at Hyderabad University, has chosen extracts from 10 significant texts by Britons writing about their work, their lives and their experiences across 350 years of involvement and interaction. His choice is good, including chapters on mapping the vast country by the geographer James Rennell, the narrative of the Black Hole of Calcutta by a survivor, Zephaniah Holwell, the suppression of thugee (ritual murder) by William Sleeman and guidance for memsahibs on running a successful household.
Pramod K. Nayar's inventive 150-page examination of physical and psychological vulnerability of man under extreme circumstances—torture, terminal illness, environmental and geographical limits etc.—is a brilliant work best described as a... more
Pramod K. Nayar's inventive 150-page examination of physical and psychological vulnerability of man under extreme circumstances—torture, terminal illness, environmental and geographical limits etc.—is a brilliant work best described as a thought-provoking, and surprisingly emotional, equivalent of an academic horror story. 'The Extreme in Contemporary Culture' leads the reader through film, literature, extreme sports, two major historical events—9/11 and Chernobyl—and the prisons of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, and, like a neat multi-flowered bouquet, interlinks these different topics in one (un)floral cone: the human body under duress. Pramod K. Nayar's inventive 150-page examination of physical and psychological vulnerability of man under extreme circumstances—torture, terminal illness, environmental and geographical limits etc.—is a brilliant work best described as a thought-provoking, and surprisingly emotional, equivalent of an academic horror story. The Extreme in Contemporary Culture leads the reader through film, literature, extreme sports, two major historical events—9/11 and Chernobyl—and the prisons of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, and, like a neat multi-flowered bouquet, interlinks these different topics in one (un)floral cone: the human body under duress. With such an intense yet delicate topic as torture, be it in such film franchises as the Saw or Hostel, or in the case of real life i.e. The War on Terror, Nayar is thoughtful and capable of walking the fine line between Hollywood fetishisation and real world implications. When discussing the space in which torture occurs, be it the compact and claustrophobic cell, the wide-open warehouse or, most importantly, the body and the mind of the tortured, the author, through his expert use of language not only paints an (often) frightening image in the reader's mind, but also provides a researched and well crafted argument for the post-traumatic psychology of 'no longer feeling at home in the world.'1 A particularly intense and emotional section of the work deals with an all-too-familiar form of 'he extreme, cancer. Nayar challenges the typical philosophical trope of what it means to have a body by addressing what happens when the body uses itself against its owner. The reflection on human nature when faced with extreme circumstances as familiar to us as our own body is riveting and provides a glimpse into how little separates our conscience being from becoming mere flesh, moving the disease—and in turn the extreme—from 'out there' to 'in here.' He goes on to discuss the mediation and conversation that occurs between the physical and mental self by breaking it down into a three-stage process borrowed from Noël Carroll: onset, discovery, and confirmation. The section is truly something of a surreal experience, and provides an emotional core of an academic gaze at the state of vulnerability, which, at its essence can be applied to any other debilitating disease, such as Alzheimer or Lou Gehrig's disease.
In this deftly constructed study, Pramod K. Nayar's orientation is towards engendering an acceptance for the Indian graphic novel which is still fairly new to the connoisseurs, scholars and students of Indian Writing in English. Through... more
In this deftly constructed study, Pramod K. Nayar's orientation is towards engendering an acceptance for the Indian graphic novel which is still fairly new to the connoisseurs, scholars and students of Indian Writing in English. Through an investigative and analytical approach he looks at the Indian graphic novel that possesses all the requisites of a literary text. Talking about the form of the graphic narrative, he argues that it has an edge over the other dominant genres as it simultaneously engages the reader to the act of reading and perceiving and that its form is enriched with range and versatility. It embodies a unique interplay of word and image, the literal and the symbolic layer of interpretation and even its gaps or absences render a field of signification. It not only communicates with its readers, but directly involves them and makes them the key players in the production of meaning. Its 'seeable' and 'sayable' mode allows the reader to inhabit the virtual space. Embedded with the power of the visual-the verbal-the gaps, the graphic narratives have become a potent medium to satirize and critique upon the follies of the society. Pondering over the appropriate form in which to represent or examine the issues of the nation, Nayar finds the medium to be the most befitting one. He vehemently asserts that the Indian graphic novel is perhaps the new literary form that the nation has been 'longing for'. He contends, " For this freedom of representation, for taking the process of critique into a medium associated with just entertainment, for its opening up an array of story-telling strategies and for its insistence on tackling more social commentary and cultural critique of the nation's lacunae of flaws, the graphic novel heralds a major shift within IWE. " (p. 8) Nayar's claim is undisputed, but one cannot brush aside the fact that the Indian graphic narrative's move from margin to mainstream may perhaps not be so easy in an academic culture where there is limited scope for experimentation and inclusion of the 'new'. Also this form has to rigorously compete with the dominant literary forms of IWE. Undoubtedly in the West, the graphic novel has witnessed a spectacular rise which has put an end to the debate on its legitimacy and the credit to its renewed status goes to the several promotional platforms such as publishing houses, literary magazines, journals, university classrooms that have been instrumental in establishing it as a work of
Research Interests:
Stanford University has recently published an update of its study of the global top 2% of most widely cited researchers in different disciplines. This ranking, considered one the most prestigious worldwide, is based on standardized... more
Stanford University has recently published an update of its study of the global top 2% of most widely cited researchers in different disciplines. This ranking, considered one the most prestigious worldwide, is based on standardized information on citations, h-index, co-authorship adjusted hm-index, citations to papers in different authorship positions, and a composite indicator (c-score). The October 2023 data update includes more than 210000 researchers from different countries, categorized under 22 scientific fields and 176 subfields.
The UoH's lone representative in the global top 2 per cent from the Social Sciences and Arts-Humanities (under the field 'Communications and Textual Studies') combined was Pramod K Nayar from English.
