1st Edition
Global South Asia South Asian Literatures and the World
This book collects essays that take on the excavatory, critical, and generative work of rethinking the relationship between South Asia and the world. In examining what kind of new relationships are uncovered between these two geopolitical groupings, the chapters in this book argue that South Asian literature and literary criticism can reframe the common narrative of the powerful Global North and a disenfranchised Global South. This is not always a comforting reframing since it must account for the oppressive roles that South Asian nations sometimes play in regional and intranational theatres.
Through myriad disciplinary groundings, theoretical approaches, and objects of study, the essays in this book collectively argue that South Asian literature allows us to think more critically about both the liberatory possibilities of South Asia as a grouping (of nations but also of ideas and aesthetics) as well as the elisions that may happen under such categorization.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the South Asia Review.
1. Introduction: South Asian Literature and the World
Madhurima Chakraborty
2. Between World and Home: Tagore and Goethe
R. Radhakrishnan
3. "Against the Biggest Buccaneering Enterprise in Living History": Krishna Menon and the Colonial Response to International Crisis
Brant Moscovitch
4. Bodies in Translation/Transition: (Re)Writing Kashmir, Kaschmir, Cashmere in Agha Shahid Ali’s Poetry
Wafa Hamid
5. Home, Away from Home: Violence, Womanhood and Home/Land in Jahnavi Barua’s Fiction
Uddipana Goswami
6. From Cheap Labor to Overlooked Citizens: Looking for British Muslim Identities in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire
Debjani Banerjee
7. Dastan-e Amir Hamza and Salman Rushdie’s Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
Anonymous Author
8. Ajitesh Bandyopadhyay, Nandikar, and the World: Staging World Literature in Bengali
Souradeep Roy
9. Queering the Colonial in Shyam Selvadurai’s Swimming in the Monsoon Sea
Tuli Chatterji
10. At the Interface of Colonial Knowing and Unknowing: A Critical Reading of the Golden Camellia in Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke
Gaana Jayagopalan
11. Unveiling the Transcultural: The Question of Identity in Suneeta Peres da Costa’s Saudade
Khaoula Chakour
12. Looking Backward to a Distant Land: South Asian Diaspora and Function of Nostalgia in "Silver Pavements, Golden Roofs," "Mrs. Sen’s" and The Inheritance of Loss
Farzana Akhter
Biography
Madhurima Chakraborty is Associate Professor in the English and Creative Writing department at Columbia College Chicago. She is one of the editors of Postcolonial Urban Outcasts: City Margins in South Asian Literature, the editor of South Asian Review’s special issue on South Asian Literatures in the World, and co-editor of another SAR special issue on The Nation and Its Discontents. Her shorter work has also appeared in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Literature/Film Quarterly, and South Asian Review, among others.
