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South Asia and its Others
The essays in South Asia and Its Others: Reading the "Exotic" reveal fresh perspectives on the notion of exoticism in South Asia, and also challenge and extend existing scholarship in the broader discourse of what constitutes South Asia. Significantly, the anthology considers how the phenomenon of "exoticization" may be interpreted as a strategic methodology utilized by writers of South Asian descent to examine critically both the post-colonialist ramifications of casteism, religious intolerance, and gender violence across differing cultural contexts within the region, and how current perceptions of "native" and "diasporic" South Asian subjects problematize ideologies of authenticity across Western-Eastern divides. The papers in this collection show how authors of South Asian ethnicity construct their own version of an "exotic" South Asia globally and the colonialist discourse of "exocitism" is employed as a discursive tool that uncovers the ambiguity that continues to mark the marginality of identities even today.
Contradictory Indianness
As Contradictory Indianness shows, a postcolonial Caribbean aesthetics that has from its inception privileged inclusivity, interraciality, and resistance against Old World colonial orders requires taking into account Indo-Caribbean writers and their reimagining of Indianness in the region. Whereas, for instance, forms of Indo-Caribbean cultural expression in music, cuisine, or religion are more readily accepted as creolizing (thus, Caribbeanizing) processes, an Indo-Caribbean literary imaginary has rarely been studied as such. Discussing the work of Ismith Khan, Harold Sonny Ladoo, Totaram Sanadhya, LalBihari Sharma, and Shani Mootoo, Contradictory Indianness maintains that the writers' enga...
Outside Women
Would you risk your own life to pursue justice for a stranger? Two migrant women—separated by geographies and generations—face this same devastating choice. Lured away from her home in 1890s India, Sita is brought to South Africa as an indentured servant—one among millions funneled by the British to replace the recently abolished slave trade. One hundred years later, Hajra, a Pakistani scholar, is forced to flee to New York City from her home in Peshawar after witnessing a violent act meant to target her. She loses herself in academic research until she comes face-to-face with a photo of a laughing, defiant young woman brandishing a banner in protest. Inexorably drawn to this woman, Hajra travels to South Africa to learn more and unknowingly traces Sita's path. With raw imagery and rich sensory detail, Roohi Choudhry's incandescent debut novel Outside Women intertwines the narratives of two women painfully yet valiantly carving their existences outside of patriarchal and colonial spaces as they search for kinship and strength in solidarity.
Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1800-1920: Volume 1
This volume explores Caribbean literature from 1800-1920 across genres and in the multiple languages of the Caribbean.
The Knight, the Cross, and the Song
The Knight, the Cross, and the Song offers a new perspective on the driving forces of crusading in the period 1100-1400. Although religious devotion has long been identified as the primary motivation of those who took the cross, Stefan Vander Elst argues that it was by no means the only focus of the texts written to convince the warriors of Western Christianity to participate in the holy war. Vander Elst examines how, across three centuries, historiographical works that served as exhortations for the Crusade sought specifically to appeal to aristocratic interests beyond piety. They did so by appropriating the formal and thematic characteristics of literary genres favored by the knightly clas...
Caribbean Inhospitality
The Caribbean has a global reputation for extending unparalleled hospitality to foreign guests. Yet local citizens express feeling alienated from the Caribbean nations they call home. Here, Natalie Lauren Belisle probes the relationship between these incompatible narratives of Caribbean life. Departing from tourist-centered critiques of the Caribbean’s visitor economy, Belisle instead gives primacy to the political life of the Caribbean citizen-subject within a broader hospitality regime. Reading literary, cinematic, and digital texts that traverse the Spanish, Anglophone, and Francophone Caribbean, Belisle interprets citizens’ estrangement through misdirected political deliberation and demonstrates that inhospitality is institutionalized through the aesthetic, reproducing itself in the laws that condition belonging and membership in the nation-state. Ultimately, Caribbean Inhospitality recasts the decay of nation/state sovereignty in the postcolonial Caribbean within the contours of neoliberalism, international relations, and cosmopolitanism.
Through a Nuclear Lens
The Franco-Japanese coproduction Hiroshima mon amour (1959) is one of the most important films for global art cinema and for the French New Wave. In Through a Nuclear Lens, Hannah Holtzman examines this film and the transnational cycle it has inspired, as well as its legacy after the 2011 nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi. In a study that includes formal and theoretical analysis, archival research, and interviews, Holtzman shows the emergence of a new kind of nuclear film, one that attends to the everyday effects of nuclear disaster and its impact on our experience of space and time. The focus on Franco-Japanese exchange in cinema since the postwar period reveals a reorientation of the primarily aesthetic preoccupations in the tradition of Japonisme to center around technological and environmental concerns. The book demonstrates how French filmmakers, ever since Hiroshima mon amour, have looked to Japan in part to better understand nuclear uncertainty in France.
Problematic Identities in Women's Fiction of the Sri Lankan Diaspora
Women novelists of the Sri Lankan diaspora make a significant contribution to the field of South Asian postcolonial studies. Their writing is critical and subversive, particularly concerned as it is with the problematic of identity. This book engages in insightful readings of nine novels by women writers of the Sri Lankan diaspora: Michelle de Kretser’s The Hamilton Case (2003); Yasmine Gooneratne’s A Change of Skies (1991), The Pleasures of Conquest (1996), and The Sweet and Simple Kind (2006); Chandani Lokugé’s If the Moon Smiled (2000) and Turtle Nest (2003); Karen Roberts’s July (2001); Roma Tearne’s Mosquito (2007); and V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Love Marriage (2008). These text...
Women Suicide Bombers
This book offers an evaluation of female suicide bombers through postcolonial, Third World, feminist, and human-rights framework, drawing on case studies from conflicts in Palestine, Sri Lanka, and Chechnya, among others. Women Suicide Bombers explores why cultural, media and political reports from various geographies present different information about and portraits of the same women suicide bombers. The majority of Western media and sovereign states engaged in wars against groups deploying bombings tend to focus on women bombers' abnormal mental conditions; their physicality-for example, their painted fingernails or their beautiful eyes; their sexualities; and the various ways in which the...
Defiant Bodies
In the Anglophone Caribbean, international queer human rights activists strategically located within and outside of the region have dominated interventions seeking to address issues affecting people across the region; a trend that is premised on an idea that the Caribbean is extremely homophobic and transphobic, resulting in violence and death for people who defy dominant sexual and gender boundaries. Human rights activists continue to utilize international financial and political resources to influence these interventions and the region’s engagement on issues of homophobia, transphobia, discrimination, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. This focus, however, elides the deeply complex nature of que...
