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Criminality and Power in the Postcolonial City
This book investigates the literary imaginings of the postcolonial city through the lens of crime in texts set in Naples and Mumbai from the 1990s to the present. Employing the analogy of a ‘black hole,’ it posits the discourse on criminality as a way to investigate the contemporary spatial manifestations of coloniality and global capitalist urbanity. Despite their different histories, Mumbai and Naples have remarkable similarities. Both are port cities, ‘gateways’ to their countries and regional trade networks, and both are marked by extreme wealth and poverty. They are also the sites and symbolic battlegrounds for a wider struggle in which ‘the North exploits the South, and the South fights back.’ As one of the characters of the novel The Neapolitan Book of the Dead puts it, a narrativisation of the underworld allows for a ‘discovery of a different city from its forgotten corners.’ Crime provides a means to understand the relationship between space and society/culture in a number of cities across the Global South, by tracing a narrative of postcolonial urbanity that exposes the connections between exploitation and the ongoing ‘coloniality of power.’
Narrative Performances of Mothering in South Asian Diasporic Fiction
Examining a range of South Asian Anglophone diasporic fiction and poetry, this monograph opens a new dialogue between diaspora studies and gender studies. It shows how discourses of diaspora benefit from re-examining their own critical relation to concepts of the maternal and the motherland. Rather than considering maternity as a fixed or naturally given category, it challenges essentialist conceptions and explores mothering as a performative practice which actively produces discursive meaning. This innovative approach also involves an investigation of central metaphors in nationalist and diasporic rhetorics, bringing critical attention to the strategies they employ and the unique aesthetic forms they produce.
Postliberalization Indian Novels in English
“Postliberalization Indian Novels in English: Politics of Global Reception and Awards” is a critical handbook that focuses on trends in contemporary Indian novels and discusses the global reception of these works. The volume provides a systematic approach to the study of Indian novelists that have not been (with certain exceptions) extensively examined.
Frontiers of South Asian Culture
This book is the first of its kind to significantly concentrate on trans-nation, transnationalism and its dialogue with various nationalisms in South Asia. Taking the absence of discussion on transnationalism in South Asia as a conspicuous lacuna as well as a point of intervention, this book pushes the boundaries of scholarship further by organizing a dialogue between the nation-state and many nationalisms and the emergent method of transnationalism. It opens itself up for many cross-border movements, formulating the trans-South Asian discursive exchange necessitated by contemporary, theoretical upheavals. It looks at such exchanges through the prisms of literature and cinema and traces the many modes of engagement that exist between some of the globally dominant literary and cinematic forms, trying to locate these engagements and negotiations across three geopolitical formations and locations of culture, namely region, nation and trans-nation.
Anarchy or Chaos
In this fascinating biography of the Indian revolutionary M. P. T. Acharya (1887–1954), Ole Birk Laursen uncovers the remarkable transnational networks, movements and activities of India’s most important anticolonial anarchist in the twentieth century. Driven by the urge for complete freedom from colonialism, authoritarianism, fascism and militarism, which are rooted in the idea and politics of the nation-state, Acharya fought for an international vision of socialism and freedom. During the tumultuous opening decades of the 1900s—marked by the globalisation of radical inter-revolutionary struggles, world wars, the rise of communism and fascism, and the growth of colonial independence m...
Fiction, Film, and Indian Popular Cinema
This book analyses the novels of Salman Rushdie and their stylistic conventions in the context of Indian popular cinema and its role in the elaboration of the author’s arguments about post-independence postcolonial India. Focusing on different genres of Indian popular cinema, such as the ‘Social’, ‘Mythological’ and ‘Historical’, Stadtler examines how Rushdie’s writing foregrounds the epic, the mythic, the tragic and the comic, linking them in storylines narrated in cinematic parameters. The book shows that Indian popular cinema’s syncretism becomes an aesthetic marker in Rushdie’s fiction that allows him to elaborate on the multiplicity of Indian identity, both on the su...
Rehumanizing Muslim Subjectivities
Rehumanizing Muslim Subjectivities: Postcolonial Geographies, Postcolonial Ethics is a timely and urgent monograph, allowing us to imagine what it feels like to be the victim of genocide, abuse, dehumanization, torture and violence, something which many Muslims in Palestine, Kashmir, Pakistan, Myanmar, Syria, Iraq and China have to endure. Most importantly, the book emphasizes the continued relevance of creative literature’s potential to intervene in and transform our understanding of a conceptual and political field, as well as advanced technologies of power and domination. The book makes a substantial theoretical contribution by drawing on wide-ranging angles and dimensions of contempora...
Insurgent Empire
Much has been written on the how colonial subjects took up British and European ideas and turned them against empire when making claims to freedom and self-determination. The possibility of reverse influence has been largely overlooked. Insurgent Empire shows how Britain's enslaved and colonial subjects were not merely victims of empire and subsequent beneficiaries of its crises of conscience but also agents whose resistance both contributed to their own liberation and shaped British ideas about freedom and who could be free. Insurgent Empire examines dissent over the question of empire in Britain and shows how it was influenced by rebellions and resistance in the colonies from the West Indies and East Africa to Egypt and India. It also shows how a pivotal role in fomenting dissent was played by anti-colonial campaigners based in London at the heart of the empire.
Women of the Mafia
Women of the Mafia dives into the Neapolitan criminal underworld of the Camorra as seen and lived by the women who inhabit it. It tells their life stories and unpacks the gender dynamics by examining their participation as active agents in the organization as leaders, managers, foot soldiers, and enablers. Felia Allum shows that these women are true partners in crime. The author offers an innovative interdisciplinary analysis that demystifies the notion that the Camorra is a sexist, male-centric organization. She links her analysis of Camorra culture within the wider Neapolitan context to show how mothers and women act and are treated in the private sphere of the household and how the family helps explain the power women have found in the Neapolitan Camorra. It is civil society and law enforcement agencies that continue to see the Camorra using traditional gender assumptions which render women irrelevant and lacking independent agency in the criminal underworld. In Women of the Mafia, Allum debunks these assumptions by revealing the power and influence of women in the Camorra.
Emotional Transitions in Contemporary Afrodiasporic Women’s Writing
This book is an in-depth study of the category "stranger" as represented in four contemporary Afrodiasporic novels of female authorship: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, Sefi Atta’s A Bit of Difference, NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names and Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers. Examined from an interdisciplinary perspective that brings together different approaches to the figure of the stranger and Affect Theory, the plurality of experiences of estrangement, disorientation and unbelonging portrayed in these texts allows expansion upon Sara Ahmed’s (2000) investigation of "stranger fetishism" and, in so doing, contributes to the recent call for a more nuanced understanding of...
