1st Edition
Frontiers of South Asian Culture Nation, Trans-Nation and Beyond
This book is the first of its kind to significantly concentrate on trans-nation, transnationalism and its dialogue with various nationalisms in South Asia. Taking the absence of discussion on transnationalism in South Asia as a conspicuous lacuna as well as a point of intervention, this book pushes the boundaries of scholarship further by organizing a dialogue between the nation-state and many nationalisms and the emergent method of transnationalism. It opens itself up for many cross-border movements, formulating the trans-South Asian discursive exchange necessitated by contemporary, theoretical upheavals. It looks at such exchanges through the prisms of literature and cinema and traces the many modes of engagement that exist between some of the globally dominant literary and cinematic forms, trying to locate these engagements and negotiations across three geopolitical formations and locations of culture, namely region, nation and trans-nation.
List of Contributors
Introduction
- Parichay Patra and Amitendu Bhattacharya
Part I: Nation and Its Porous Frontiers
Chapter 1: The Politics of Spectatorship: Textual Traditions, Cinematograph and the Moral Dilemma of the Natives of Assam in British India (1900–1935)
-Kaushik Thakur Bhuyan
Chapter 2: Then and Now: Nation and Transnational Identity in Jyoti Prasad Agarwala’s Joymati (1935) and Jahnu Barua’s Ajeyo (2014)
- Asha Kuthari Chaudhuri
Chapter 3 Humour and Cinema: A Study of Language Politics in Assam
-Simona Sarma and Sukrity Gogoi
Chapter 4: The Transnational City of Pondicherry: Elite Indian Identity Crisis and Cortes’ Receding French Image
-Andrea Rodrigues
Chapter 5: Cartography of Goa: Analysis of the Tangible Loci of Culture in the Sketches of Mario Miranda
- Amrita Biswas
Part II: Nation, Cultural Histories, Trans-Nation: The Cinematic Imagi-Nation
Chapter 6: That Which Flows
- Moinak Biswas
Chapter 7: Ray at Large: Cinema In and Out of Literature in Region, Nation, Transnation
- Kaushik Bhaumik
Chapter 8: Beckett and Avikunthak: Lineages of the Avant-Garde
-Brinda Bose
Chapter 9: The Partitioning of Bengal, 1971 and National Identity Formation in Tanvir Mokammel’s Films
- Fakrul Alam
Part III: Nation, Cultural Histories, Trans-Nation: The Literary Imagi-Nation
Chapter 10: Region, Nation, Border: Histories of Land and Water
- Supriya Chaudhuri
Chapter 11: Travelling On: Bengali and English Literatures of Transnational Worlding
- Arka Chattopadhyay
Chapter 12: Capitalist World-Ecology, Food Crisis, and Embodied Aesthetics in in Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve
- Sourit Bhattacharya
Chapter 13: Modernity on Wheels: Reading Trains as Sites of Encounter and Disaster
- Anuparna Mukherjee
Chapter 14: "The lights cut out quickly": Nation, Nationalism and City-lit during 1980–1990s
- Dibyakusum Ray
Part IV: South Asian Transactions: Between Subcontinental Flow and Transnational Frictions
Chapter 15: Tagorean Cosmopolitanism and Ceylonic Indigenization Movement
- Saman M. Kariyakarawane and S. S. A. Senevirathne
Chapter 16: From Villain to Superhero: Reimaginings of Ravana in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Sri Lanka
- Kanchuka Dharmasiri
Index
Biography
Parichay Patra is Assistant Professor, School of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur, India.
Amitendu Bhattacharya is Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani – K.K. Birla Goa Campus, India.
"Frontiers of South Asian Culture: Nation, Trans-Nation and Beyond is a fascinating collection of essays on postcolonial literature, film, and culture. The collection covers a broad geographic range — and it also incorporates recent theoretical approaches such as ecocriticism, humour studies, food studies, and graphic art criticism."
Donna L. Potts, Professor and Chair, Department of English, Washington State University, Pullman, USA
"A thoroughly engaging and timely intervention in the debates on nationhood, globalism, and regional cultures. Moving consciously away from existing frameworks, Frontiers of South Asian Culture: Nation, Trans-Nation and Beyond offers new insight and provocations on the significance of transnationalism as both a context and methodological approach to literature and cinema. The book’s great value lies in its marshalling of original material and reflections to shed light on the complex entanglements found in India's diverse territorial imaginations."
Ranjani Mazumdar, Professor of Cinema Studies, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, India
"In the wake of decolonisation, the process of national identity formation in the independent countries of South Asia inhibited mutual understanding and discouraged collective scrutiny of the human condition. With its emphasis on the entangled cultural and political histories of South Asian locations, regions, and nations, Frontiers of South Asian Culture: Nation, Trans-Nation and Beyond realises a commendable academic milestone."
Senath Walter Perera, Professor Emeritus, Department of English, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka
"Frontiers of South Asian Culture: Nation, Trans-Nation and Beyond by Parichay Patra and Amitendu Bhattacharya offers a rich palette of essays that look at a range of cultural practices and texts to flesh out imaginaries of the nation and beyond. Working along literary and cinematic registers, the edited collection confronts the challenges of understanding borders and boundaries, yielding valuable insight on the conundrums of our contemporary existence."
Lakshmi Subramanian, Formerly Professor, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, India
"This is an eclectic collection of scholarly essays that together map the regional imaginary of "South Asia", considering literature and cinema, sometimes regarded as stand-alone media forms, sometimes as driving each other. We see how the trans/national is configured in specific regional locales — Sri Lanka, Goa, Assam, Pondicherry and Bangladesh, besides West Bengal. At the same time, the essays look at flows — of rivers, trains, ideas, and people as they traverse across spaces. This unique volume combines the scholarship of the young as well as the established in the fields of comparative/literary studies and film studies.
Nikhila H., Professor, Department of Film Studies, The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India.
"This capacious volume richly extends the very idea of the frontier and space-time — artistically, as well as politically. The comparative framework of the regional-national frees us from the narrow precincts of nationhood and the detached local as well as from the ersatz universality of the global. The porosity of encountering cultural seepage is a tantalizing possibility. Through the lens of the transnational, the volume grapples with the deeper questions of tradition and modernity, style and meaning, space and temporality. An abundant experience."
Prasanta Chakravarty, Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Delhi, India
