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Indian writers of English such as G. V. Desani, Salman Rushdie, Amit Chaudhuri, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth, Allan Sealy, Shashi Tharoor, Arundhati Roy, Vikram Chandra and Jhumpa Lahiri have taken the potentialities of the novel form to new heights. Against the background of the genre’s macro-history, this study attempts to explain the stunning vitality, colourful diversity, and the outstanding but sometimes controversial success of postcolonial Indian novels in the light of ongoing debates in postcolonial studies. It analyses the warp and woof of the novelistic text through a cross-sectional scrutiny of the issues of democracy, the poetics of space, the times of empire, nation and globaliza...
Paradise is commonly imagined as a place of departure or arrival, beginning and closure, permanent inhabitation of which, however much desired, is illusory. This makes it the dream of the traveller, the explorer, the migrant – hence, a trope recurrent in postcolonial writing, which is so centrally concerned with questions of displacement and belonging. Projections of Paradise documents this concern and demonstrates the indebtedness of writers as diverse as Salman Rushdie, Agha Shahid Ali, Cyril Dabydeen, Bernardine Evaristo, Amitav Ghosh, James Goonewardene, Romesh Gunesekera, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Janette Turner Hospital, Penelope Lively, Fatima Mernissi, Michael Ondaatje, Shyam Selvadurai, ...
In the postcommunist world of organized mobility, commodified hospitality and portable devices, the category of people labelled as migrants, the displaced and refugees symbolize a different kind of movement. Among them, the postnational figure of the refugee stands out. Fleeing their land alone or in a group, on foot or on buses and trains, or via makeshift boats and commercial flights, dressed in unfamiliar clothes and borrowed identities, the refugees travel “to dare a future from the taken roads.” Their journey of escape is fraught with danger and despair, their survival complicated by the politics of suspicion, and their right to return compromised by the power game between sovereign...
This book investigates the millennial history of the Indian subcontinent. Through the various methods adopted, the objects and moments examined, it questions various linguistic, literary and artistic appropriations of the past, to address the conflicting comprehensions of the present and also the figuring/imagining of a possible future. The volume engages with this general cultural condition, in relation both to the subcontinent’s current “synchronic” reality and to certain aspects of the culture’s underlying diachronic determinations. It also reveals how the multiple heritages are negotiated through the subcontinent’s long-term sedimentational history. It scrutinizes both conserva...
This book demonstrates the critical importance of preserving the world's shared natural resources for averting global disaster and promoting international cooperation and trade.
A beguiling, short and yet sweeping prose-poem, Afternoon Raag is the account of a young Bengali man studying at Oxford University and caught in complicated love triangle. His loneliness and melancholy sharpen his memories of home, which come back to haunt him in vivid, sensory detail. Intensely moving, superbly written, Afternoon Raag is a testimony to the clash of the old and the new; arrivals and departures. With an introduction by James Wood
States of Emergency examines how violent anticolonial struggles and the legal, military, and political techniques employed by colonial governments to contain them have been imagined in both literary and legal narratives. Through a series of case studies, Stephen Morton considers how colonial states of emergency have been defined and represented in the contexts of Ireland, India, South Africa, Algeria, Kenya, and Israel- Palestine, concluding with a compelling assessment of the continuities between colonial states of emergency and the war on terror in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
In this quietly powerful and eminently readable novel, winner of the prestigious Sinclair Prize, Kenyan writer Marjorie Macgoye deftly interweaves the story of one young woman’s tumultuous coming of age with the history of a nation emerging from colonialism. At the age of sixteen, Paulina leaves her small village in western Kenya to join her new husband, Martin, in the bustling city of Nairobi. It is 1956, and Kenya is in the final days of the "Emergency," as the British seek to suppress violent anti-colonial revolts. But Paulina knows little about, about city life, or about marriage, and Martin’s clumsy attempts to control her soon lead to a relationship filled with silences, misunderst...
Paola Brusasco's study offers an original insight into Sri Lankan literature in English and an exploration of cultural, social, and linguistic issues at the basis of the country's ethnic conflict. By focussing on two distinctive and representative writers, both Burghers, yet with different personal histories, Brusasco confronts issues of cartography, history, and language, all contributing to a specific definition of identity. Both Ondaatje and Muller are outsiders, the former because of his diasporic existence, the latter because of his excentricity within the reality of a divided country where the legacy of British colonialism and the process of redefinition following independence in 1948, as well as matters of geography and history, become crucial to writers.
In 'When Rain Clouds Gather' a South African political refugee and an Englishman join forces in Botswana to revolutionize the villager's traditional farming methods, but their task is fraught with hazards. 'Maru' is the moving tale of an orphaned Masarwa girl who goes to teach in a remote village in Botswana.