Interpreting Homes In South Asian Literature

Contributed articles.

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. What are the pleasures of reading translations of South Asian literature, and what does it take to enjoy a translated text? This volume provides opportunities to explore such questions by bringing together a whole set of new translations by David Shulman, noted scholar of South Asia. The translated selections come from a variety of Indian languages, genres, and periods, from the classical to the contemporary. The translations are accompanied by short essays written to help readers engage and enjoy them. Some of these essays provide background to enhance reading of the translation, whereas others model how to expand appreciation in comparative and broader ways. Together, the translations and the accompanying essays form an essential guide for people interested in literature and art from South Asia.

As a school of criticism, the central argument in Postcolonial studies revolves around dismantling the dominant narrative of colonial or imperial history. A colonization process not only captures the native people and culture but their lands too. Proper reading of postcolonial theory would be by understanding the epistemology of colonized environment or vice-versa. Even after decolonization the ideology of imperialism is persistent in native memory and thought. An embeddedness in native psyche not only nurtures imperialism but manifests them with the footprints of colonial masters. In postcolonial countries the discourse of social and economic justice is deeply rooted in ecology. As a consequence, environmental activists from postcolonial nations tend to see any modern policy as a disguised form of neocolonialism or imperial dominance, globalization and modernization. Since the shocks of imperialism and globalization are most strongly felt in the third world countries, most of them being former colonies, this edited volume intends to explore texts by South Asian writers examining how these writers and their characters cope with the destruction of the environment. This edited volume plans to seek out the writings of epistemological understanding of our environment. Moreover, the volume would also see a critical entanglement of race, class, gender, culture, modernization, globalization, nation and trans-nation etc. Furthermore, this book will attempt to show how different genres of literature ranging from fiction to non-fiction can bring out inimitable insights into varied understanding of postcolonial and ecocritical studies.

Tracing a literary lineage for works from different genres, it identifies key trends in recent South Asian American and British Asian literature by considering the favoured formal and aesthetic modes of major writers and by relating their work to differen

As a school of criticism, the central argument in Postcolonial studies revolves around dismantling the dominant narrative of colonial or imperial history. A colonization process not only captures the native people and culture but their lands too. Proper reading of postcolonial theory would be by understanding the epistemology of colonized environment or vice-versa. Even after decolonization the ideology of imperialism is persistent in native memory and thought. An embeddedness in native psyche not only nurtures imperialism but manifests them with the footprints of colonial masters. In postcolonial countries the discourse of social and economic justice is deeply rooted in ecology. As a consequence, environmental activists from postcolonial nations tend to see any modern policy as a disguised form of neocolonialism or imperial dominance, globalization and modernization. Since the shocks of imperialism and globalization are most strongly felt in the third world countries, most of them being former colonies, this edited volume intends to explore texts by South Asian writers examining how these writers and their characters cope with the destruction of the environment. This edited volume plans to seek out the writings of epistemological understanding of our environment. Moreover, the volume would also see a critical entanglement of race, class, gender, culture, modernization, globalization, nation and trans-nation etc. Furthermore, this book will attempt to show how different genres of literature ranging from fiction to non-fiction can bring out inimitable insights into varied understanding of postcolonial and ecocritical studies.

This book collects essays that take on the excavatory, critical, and generative work of rethinking the relationship between South Asia and the world. In examining what kind of new relationships are uncovered between these two geopolitical groupings, the chapters in this book argue that South Asian literature and literary criticism can reframe the common narrative of the powerful Global North and a disenfranchised Global South. This is not always a comforting reframing since it must account for the oppressive roles that South Asian nations sometimes play in regional and intranational theatres. Through myriad disciplinary groundings, theoretical approaches, and objects of study, the essays in this book collectively argue that South Asian literature allows us to think more critically about both the liberatory possibilities of South Asia as a grouping (of nations but also of ideas and aesthetics) as well as the elisions that may happen under such categorization. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the South Asia Review.