Writing Disaster in South Asian Literature and Culture

Writing Disaster in South Asian Literature and Culture
Author: Sk Sagir Ali
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2024-05-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 166695148X

Writing Disaster in South Asian Literature and Culture: The Limits of Empathy and Cosmopolitan Imagination looks at the myriad ways in which disaster events (both man-made and natural) are perceived and represented in South Asian literature and culture. This book explores the affective mechanisms of empathy and imaginary identification which are conditioned and reiterated by biopolitical statist regimes of power to preempt and coopt any radical agential or cognitive intervention which might be evinced by the event of the disaster. The contributors also examine South Asian disasters vis-a-vis the registers of ecological crises, migration events, civil and liberation wars, and pandemics to understand the multifarious ways in which such ‘disasters’ are used as tropes to peddle certain structures of interpellation in the collective consciousness.

Community, Faith, and Resistance

Community, Faith, and Resistance
Author: Sk Sagir Ali
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2024-11-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1040222889

This book looks at texts produced before and after 9/11 by novelists with Muslim backgrounds in Britain. It delves into the ways in which the politics of representation have changed in the wake of 9/11 and highlights the conflicts that arise in these coming-of-age narratives between the demands of a liberal individualist lifestyle and those of community, family, and faith. Drawing on the works of Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Nadeem Aslam, Qaisra Shahraz, Leila Aboulela, Robin Yassin-Kassab, Zia Haider Rahman, and Ahdaf Soueif, Community, Faith, and Resistance discusses how these authors distinguish between Islam as a religion and Islam as a culture and negotiate complex themes of religion, representation, recognition, and secularism in their works. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers, particularly those focused on literature, politics, cultural studies, South Asian studies, Islamic studies, and decolonial studies, providing valuable insights and fostering deeper understanding in these disciplines.

Postcolonial Disaster

Postcolonial Disaster
Author: Pallavi Rastogi
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020-04-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780810141728

Postcolonial Disaster studies literary fiction about crises of epic proportions in contemporary South Asia and Southern Africa: the oceanic disaster in Sri Lanka, the economic disaster in Zimbabwe, the medical disaster in South Africa and Botswana, and the geopolitical disaster in India and Pakistan. Pallavi Rastogi argues that postcolonial fiction about catastrophe is underpinned by a Disaster Unconscious, a buried but mobile agenda that forces disastrous events to narrate themselves. She writes that in disaster fiction, a literary Story and its real-life Event are in constant dialectic tension. In recent disasters, Story and Event are tied together as the urgency to circulate information and rebuild in the aftermath of the disaster dictates the flow of the narrative. As the Story acquires temporal distance from the Event, such as the seventy-three years since the partition of India in 1947, it plays more with form and theme, to expand beyond a tale about an all-consuming tragedy. Story and Event are in a constant dance with each other, and the Disaster Unconscious plays the tune to which they move. Rastogi creates a narratology for postcolonial disaster fiction and brings concepts from Disaster Studies into the realm of literary analysis.

The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing

The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing
Author: Susheila Nasta
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 862
Release: 2020-01-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108169007

The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing provides a comprehensive historical overview of the diverse literary traditions impacting on this field's evolution, from the eighteenth century to the present. Drawing on the expertise of over forty international experts, this book gathers innovative scholarship to look forward to new readings and perspectives, while also focusing on undervalued writers, texts, and research areas. Creating new pathways to engage with the naming of a field that has often been contested, readings of literary texts are interwoven throughout with key political, social, and material contexts. In making visible the diverse influences constituting past and contemporary British literary culture, this Cambridge History makes a unique contribution to British, Commonwealth, postcolonial, transnational, diasporic, and global literary studies, serving both as one of the first major reference works to cover four centuries of black and Asian British literary history and as a compass for future scholarship.

Fractured Narratives and Pandemic Identities

Fractured Narratives and Pandemic Identities
Author: Om Prakash Dwivedi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 136
Release: 2024-08-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1040119522

The book considers how identities have become more fractured since COVID-19, by thinking of COVID-19 in relation to other crises (economic, social, digital, and ecological) and by drawing parallels to literature, cinema, and visual art. COVID-19 was a type of apocalypse, a catastrophic destructive event that produced dystopian measures in its wake and drew uncanny parallels to dystopic works of literature and speculative fiction. Yet the pandemic was apocalyptic in another sense too. The word apocalypse derives from apokalupsis, which means disclosure or uncovering. In this way, COVID-19 also revealed the dystopian processes already at work in the world, including digital forms of surveillance as well as the asymmetries within populations and divides in health outcomes between the Global North and Global South. Indeed, societies that have experienced the horrors of settler colonialism have already survived apocalypses. COVID-19 serves then as a premonition for our climate emergency as well as an echo of other apocalyptic situations, both real and imagined. This book consists of essays from acclaimed theorists and scholars writing amid the pandemic and exposes the asymmetries of our divided world. The volume will be indispensable for scholars and researchers of literature, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and comparative literature including post-apocalyptic and speculative fiction. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing and are accompanied by a new afterword.

Ecologies in Southeast Asian Literatures: Histories, Myths and Societies

Ecologies in Southeast Asian Literatures: Histories, Myths and Societies
Author: Chi P. Pham
Publisher: Vernon Press
Total Pages: 166
Release: 2019-09-09
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1622736834

Ecocriticism in relation to the Southeast Asian region is relatively new. So far, John Charles Ryan’s Ecocriticism in Southeast Asia is the first book of its kind to focus on the region and its literature to give an ecocritical analysis: that volume compiles analyses of the eco-literatures from most of the Southeast Asian region, providing a broad insight into the ecological concerns of the region as depicted in its literatures and other cultural texts. This edited volume furthers the study of Southeast Asian ecocriticism, focusing specifically on prominent myths and histories and the myriad ways in which they connect to the social fabric of the region. Our book is an original contribution to the expanding field of ecocriticism, as it highlights the mytho-historical basis of many of the region’s literatures and their relationship to the environment. The varied articles in this volume together explore the idea of nature and its relationship with humans. The always problematic questions that surround such explorations, such as “why do we regard nature as ‘external’?” or “how is humankind a continuum with nature?”, emerge throughout the volume either overtly or implicitly. As Pepper (1993) points out, what Karl Marx referenced as ‘first’ or ‘external’ nature gave rise to humankind. But humanity “worked on this ‘first’ nature to produce a ‘second’ nature: the material creations of society plus its institutions, ideas and values.” (Pepper, 108). Thus, our volume constantly negotiates this field of ideas and belief systems, in diverse ways and in various cultures, attempting to relate them to the current ecological predicaments of ASEAN. It will likely prove an invaluable resource for scholars and students of ecocriticism and, more broadly, of Southeast Asian cultures and literatures.

Ethnographic Narratives as World Literature

Ethnographic Narratives as World Literature
Author: Lucio De Capitani
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2023-10-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 303138704X

This book links world-literary studies with anthropology and ethnography. It shows how ethnographic narratives can represent a compelling point of departure for world-literary explorations. The volume compares the travel writing and fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling as colonial ethnographic narratives; the militant writings of Carlo Levi and Mahasweta Devi; and the travelogues and ethnographic fiction of Amitav Ghosh and the literary journalism of Frank Westerman. Each of these readings focuses on a set of social, political and historical circumstances and relies on a dialogue with anthropological theory and history. This book demonstrates how imperialism, colonialism, capitalism and ecology are interdependent, and contributes to methodological debates within both anthropology and world-literary studies.

Negative Cosmopolitanism

Negative Cosmopolitanism
Author: Eddy Kent
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 406
Release: 2017-11-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0773552049

From climate change, debt, and refugee crises to energy security, environmental disasters, and terrorism, the events that lead nightly newscasts and drive public policy demand a global perspective. In the twentieth century the world sought solutions through formal institutions of international governance such as the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and the World Bank, but present-day responses to global realities are often more provisional, improvisational, and contingent. Tracing this uneven history in order to identify principal actors, contesting ideologies, and competing rhetoric, Negative Cosmopolitanism challenges the Kantian ideal of cosmopolitanism as the precondition for a perpetual global peace. Uniting literary scholars with researchers working on contemporary problems and those studying related issues of the past – including slavery, industrial capitalism, and corporate imperialism – essays in this volume scrutinize the entanglement of cosmopolitanism within expanding networks of trade and global capital from the eighteenth century to the present. By doing so, the contributors pinpoint the ways in which whole populations have been unwillingly caught up in a capitalist reality that has little in common with the earlier ideals of cosmopolitanism. A model for provoking new and necessary questions about neoliberalism, biopolitics, colonialism, citizenship, and xenophobia, Negative Cosmopolitanism establishes a fresh take on the representation of globalization and modern life in history and literature. Contributors Include Timothy Brennan (University of Minnesota), Juliane Collard (University of British Columbia), Mike Dillon (California State University, Fullerton), Sneja Gunew (University of British Columbia), Dina Gusejnova (University of Sheffield), Heather Latimer (University of British Columbia), Pamela McCallum (University of Calgary), Geordie Miller (Dalhousie University), Dennis Mischke (Universität Stuttgart), Peter Nyers (McMaster University), Liam O’Loughlin (Pacific Lutheran University), Crystal Parikh (New York University), Mark Simpson (University of Alberta), Melissa Stephens (Vancouver Island University), and Paul Ugor (Illinois State University).

Terror and Reconciliation

Terror and Reconciliation
Author: Maryse Jayasuriya
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2012-03-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0739165798

Terror and Reconciliation explores the English language literature that has emerged from Sri Lanka’s quarter-century long ethnic conflict. It examines poetry, short fiction and novels by both diasporic writers and writers resident in Sri Lanka. Its discussion of resident Sri Lankan writers is particularly important because it calls attention to a rich and ambitious body of work that has largely been ignored in the Western academy and media until now. The book outlines the ways in which a wide range of resident and diasporic writers have sought to represent the conflict, mourn the violence and terror associated with the conflict, and present options for reconciliation in the conflict’s aftermath. The writers discussed grapple with issues of terrorism, human rights, nationalism, war, democracy, gender, ethnicity, and reconciliation, making this a study of profound interest for students and scholars of South Asian literature and culture, postcolonial studies, race and ethnic studies, women’s studies, and peace studies.

Teaching Anglophone South Asian Women Writers

Teaching Anglophone South Asian Women Writers
Author: Deepika Bahri
Publisher: Modern Language Association
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2021-06-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1603294910

Global and cosmopolitan since the late nineteenth century, anglophone South Asian women's writing has flourished in many genres and locations, encompassing diverse works linked by issues of language, geography, history, culture, gender, and literary tradition. Whether writing in the homeland or in the diaspora, authors offer representations of social struggle and inequality while articulating possibilities for resistance. In this volume experienced instructors attend to the style and aesthetics of the texts as well as provide necessary background for students. Essays address historical and political contexts, including colonialism, partition, migration, ecological concerns, and evolving gender roles, and consider both traditional and contemporary genres such as graphic novels, chick lit, and Instapoetry. Presenting ideas for courses in Asian studies, women's studies, postcolonial literature, and world literature, this book asks broadly what it means to study anglophone South Asian women's writing in the United States, in Asia, and around the world.