1st Edition

Space, Utopia and Indian Decolonization Literary Pre-Figurations of the Postcolony

By Sandeep Banerjee Copyright 2019
188 Pages
by Routledge

188 Pages
by Routledge

188 Pages
by Routledge

The book illuminates the spatial utopianism of South Asian anti-colonial texts by showing how they refuse colonial spatial imaginaries to re-imagine the British Indian colony as the postcolony in diverse and contested ways. Focusing on the literary field of South Asia between, largely, the 1860s and 1920s, it underlines the centrality of literary imagination and representation in the cultural... Read more

Introduction: Spatial Desire in the Age of Empire  1. Of Good and Evil: The Anxiety of Utopianism  2. Tales of a City: Writing Colonial Calcutta  3. That Magnificent Song: Between the Performative and the Pedagogic  4. A Sense of Place: Narrating Knowable Communities  Epilogue: That Im/Possible Spatial Desire called Decolonization

Biography

Sandeep Banerjee is Assistant Professor of English at McGill University. His research focuses on Anglophone, Bengali, and Hindi literature from colonial and postcolonial South Asia; Bengali and Hindi film; and literary and social theory. His articles have been published (or are forthcoming) in Modern Asian Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, Mediations, and New Global Studies in addition to several anthologies. A recipient of grants from the Fonds de recherche du Québec–Société et culture (FRQSC) and the Gerda Henkel Stiftung in Germany, he is currently researching the ecocritical imagination of the colonial Himalaya.