eBook

Postcolonial Urban Outcasts

Chakraborty, Madhurima, Al-wazedi, Umme

2017,2016

Overview

Extending current scholarship on South Asian Urban and Literary Studies, this volume examines the role of the discontents of the South Asian city. The collection investigates how South Asian literature and literature about South Asia attends to urban margins, regardless of whether the definition of margin is spatial, psychological, gendered, or sociopolitical. That cities are a site of profound paradoxes is nowhere clearer than in South Asia, where urban areas simultaneously represent both the frontiers of globalization as well as the deeply troubling social and political inequalities of the global south. Additionally, because South Asian cities are defined by the palimpsestic confluence of, among other things, colonial oppression, anticolonial nationalism, postcolonial governance, and twenty-first century transnational capital, they are sites where the many faces of empowerment and disempowerment are elaborated. The volume brings together essays that emphasize myriad critical approaches—geospatial, urban-theoretical, diasporic, subaltern, and others. United in their critical empathy for urban outcasts, the chapters respond to central questions such as: What is the relationship between the politico-economic narratives of globally emerging South Asian cities and the dispossessed? How do South Asian cities stand in relationship to the nation and, conversely, how might South Asians in diaspora construct these cities within larger narratives of development, globalization, or as sources of authentic ethnic identities? How is the very skeleton—the space, the territory—of South Asian cities marked with and by exclusionary politics? How do the aesthetic and formal choices undertaken by writers determine the potential for and limit to emancipation of urban outcasts from their oppressive circumstances? Considering fiction, nonfiction, comics, and genre fiction from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka; literature from the twentieth and the twenty-first century; and works that are Anglophone and those that are in translation, this book will be valuable to a range of disciplines. Madhurima Chakraborty is Assistant Professor of Postcolonial Literature in the Department of English, Columbia College Chicago, USA. Umme Al-wazedi is Associate Professor of Postcolonial Literature in the Department of English and Co-Program Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Augustana College, USA. Table of Contents Introduction Madhurima Chakraborty Section One: Urban Outcasts, Urban Subalterns 1. Recasting the Outcast: Hyderabadi Subjectivities in Two Literary Texts Nazia Akhtar 2. The Margins of Postcolonial Urbanity: Reading Critical Irrealism in Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Fiction Sourit Bhattacharya 3. \"Someone called India\": Urban Space and the Tribal Subject in Mahasweta Devi’s \"Douloti the Bountiful\" Jay Rajiva 4. \"Stuck at Pause\": Representations of the Comatose City in Delhi Calm Amit Baishya Section Two: The National, The Global, and the Diaspora 5. Unmoored: Passing, Slumming, and Return-Writing in New India Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan 6. Lahore, Lahore Aye : Bapsi Sidhwa and Mohsin Hamid’s City Fictions Claire Chambers 7. Between Aspiration and Imagination: Exploring Native-Cosmopolitanism in Adib Khan’s Spiral Road and Mohammad Hanif’s Our Lady of Alice Bhatti Payel Chattopadhyay Mukherjee, Arnapurna Rath and Koshy Tharakan 8. Portrayal of a Dystopic Dhaka: On Diaspora Reproductions of Bangladeshi Urbanity Maswood Akhter Section Three: The Space of the Margins 9. Imag(in)ing the city: A Study of Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi Nishat Haider 10. Gendering Place and Possibility in Shashi Deshpande’s That Long Silence and Kavery Nambisan’s A Town Like Ours Lauren J. Lacey and Joy E. Ochs 11. Delhi at the Margins: Heterotopic Imagination, Bricolage, and Alternative Urbanity in Trickster City Sanjukta Poddar Section Four: Forms of Urban Outcasting 12. Carl Muller’s Palimpsestic Urban Elegy in Colombo: A Novel Maryse Jayasuriya 13. The fiction of Anosh Irani: the magic of a traumatized community Kelly A. Minerva 14. New Capital? Representing Bangalore in Recent Crime Fiction Anna Guttman

• Publisher: Routledge,Taylor and Francis,Taylor & Francis Group
• Subject: Adib Khan / Ahmed Ali / Anosh Irani / Asian Literature / Bangladeshi Literature / Bapsi Sidhwa / Carl Muller / Cities and towns in literature / Global South / History and criticism / Indian Literature / Kavery Nambisan / Literature / Literature & Culture / Mahasweta Devi / Marginality, Social, in literature / Mohammad Hanif / Mohsin Hamid / Nabarun Bhattacharya / Outcasts in literature / Post-Colonial Studies / Postcolonial / Postcolonial Literature / Postcolonial Studies / Postcolonialism in literature / Shashi Deshpande / South Asia / South Asian Literature / South Asian literature (English) / South Asian literature (English) -- History and criticism / South Asian literature -- History and criticism / Spatiality / Urban Studies / Vishwajyoti Ghosh
• ISBN: 113867723X, 9781138677234, 0367878771, 9780367878771