New Book in the Works: "The Archive Writes Back: Minoritized Literatures and the Digital Textual Paradigm"

While I was on sabbatical this past academic year, I was working on a new book. It's going to be called The Archive Writes Back: Minoritized Literatures and the Digital Textual Paradigm.  Earlier this spring, I sent out the first three chapters and a proposal, and was fortunate to receive an advance contract on it. 

I've still got some more writing to do, but below is a detailed description of the project. It is essentially an encapsulation of the past ten years' of digital humanities / digital collections work I have been doing. In addition to sharing what I've learned from doing these projects, I'm aiming to ask a bigger question about how and whether the turn to digital text will change how we think about and teach literature. (I think it can and should -- in fact it's already happening, though thus far most people teaching in the humanities haven't really started to think through the paradigm shift we're experiencing.)

The Archive Writes Back: Minoritized Literatures and the Digital Textual Paradigm 

Digital Humanities scholarship has had a major impact on humanities scholarship across a range of areas, from digital archives and collections to the emerging field of cultural analytics. Specifically, the advent of electronic text in its many modalities reopens fundamental questions in the fields of book history and archival studies, while also inviting entirely new areas of inquiry related to the status and identity of the text and the evolution of printed as well as digital texts as technologies and instruments of power and authority. However, thus far few scholars have attended to the implications of the digital textual paradigm for minoritized literatures in either the U.S. or the Global South. Does the prospect of increased access to previously marginalized voices through digital collections change not just what we might read but how we read? 

More broadly, The Archive Writes Back asks: How can we use digital humanities approaches to the text and the archive to center the voices of marginalized communities, in order to facilitate both the recovery and transformation of knowledge in literary studies?

Teaching Notes: Amitav Ghosh's "The Great Derangement"

The Great Derangement Cover

I've been teaching a class on "Global Climate Fiction" for graduate students this fall. It's a version of a class I've taught before at different levels, including an undergrad class as well as an earlier grad class called "Postcolonial Ecocriticism."

A mainstay of these classes is Amitav Ghosh's essay, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016). In some classes, we've just covered part 1 of the book, but this fall we read the entire book.

On The Great Derangement, Part 1

The Great Derangement is a powerful example of inventive, highly accessible, socially engaged literary criticism in action. An accomplished novelist with a long career behind him, Ghosh is interested in the role of cultural work (including the work of fiction) in addressing the climate crisis. He suggests, at various points, that writers of serious literary fiction have been failing to address the crisis:

“But the truth, as is now widely acknowledged, is that we have entered a time when the wild has become the norm: if certain literary forms are unable to negotiate these torrents, then they will have failed—and their failures will have to be counted as an aspect of the broader imaginative and cultural failure that lies at the heart of the climate crisis.” (The Great Derangement)

He’s also interested in when and how scientific paradigms (i.e., gradualism vs. catastrophism) might be applicable to analyzing and categorizing works of literature. Along the way, he introduces a number of analytics that professional scholars could probably explore further.

Ghosh takes, at times, a very broad approach to the topic – he can draw on his knowledge of 19th century Bengali novels, Romantic poetry, contemporary literary fiction, and so on. Very few scholarly accounts of these topics would attempt to do the same – we tend to be much more specialized and limited to specific periods and regions. Sometimes that broad scope can also cause problems, since he at times makes claims that might cause questions or doubts. (If you say that a certain genre or niche in the literary world can’t represent climate change, what happens when someone published a book that tries to do that?) Put more positively, his overly general claims might create opportunities that scholars have then attempted to engage – to fill in the gaps in his account of topics like the oil encounter or, more generally, representations of climate change.

Slides for ACH (2026):

 I'm giving a talk at the Association for Computing in the Humanities conference, which is being held virtually June 24-26 this year. My talk will be on June 26 in the morning. The talk describes a newer digital collection, Adivasi Writers.

2025: My Year in Books

1. General Interest Recommendations

Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me. This was a standout for me this year -- Roy's beautifully written memoir of her rocky relationship with her mother. It is also a compelling intellectual autobiography that follows the arc of Roy's career, from her early days (training as an architect; acting in and then writing for films and television), to her more contemporary social justice interventions. The God of Small Things was a work of fiction, but every major character was based on a real person, and many of the difficult things that happened to the children in the novel are based on events experienced by Roy and her family. I especially appreciated the section in Mother Mary Comes To Me on the architect Laurie Baker, someone I'd not heard of before. 

Even now -- and after many, many years of teaching books like The God of Small Things -- I've still never seen Roy's early films (Massey Sahib, directed by Pradip Krishen; In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, which Roy wrote; and Electric Moon, which, frankly, I'd never even heard of!)

Massey Sahib (1989) is a kind of loose adaptation of Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson transposed to India; there's a version of it on up on YouTube here.

There's a version of In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1990) here. (This film, which is based on Roy's experience in a school of architecture in Delhi in the 1970s, seems like the place to start)

I don't see any versions of Electric Moon (1992) online. (Probably ok; in her account of it in the memoir, Roy suggests that this film, a hybrid British-Indian production made with BBC funding, was a bit of a misfire.)

Caoilinn Hughes, The Alternatives. File under: thoughtful climate fiction. A readable but somewhat idiosyncratic novel of ideas; what would it really mean to move to rural Ireland and drop off the grid? What sacrifices would it require, especially in terms of your personal relationships and your family? At the center of this smart novel are four sisters, each with a Ph.D. -- one a philosopher, one a geologist, one a caterer, and the fourth a political scientist. The debates between the sisters form the core of the novel. Some of the philosophy might be a little abstruse for readers (Kant!), though Hughes does find ways to make it accessible enough and relevant to the core ethical dilemmas she wants to explore. 

Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore. File under: climate fiction + thriller. A novel set on a remote island outpost near Antarctica (Shearwater Island), with a group of caretakers whose main job is to protect a doomsday seed bank. The novel has the stylized language and lyricism of literary fiction, though in the second half it turns more into a thriller plot. Overall, it made me curious to visit the place itself, though given its remoteness that seems far-fetched. (Let's start by getting ourselves to Australia or New Zealand first...)

Percival Everett, James. I'm guessing most people in my circle have read this brilliant rewriting of Huckleberry Finn from Jim/James' point of view -- it was on everybody's top ten lists last year. I finally read it this year; it's very good. I especially liked the investment in James' interest in writing his own story: "With my pencil, I wrote myself into being. Wrote myself to here." Also: "I can tell you that I am a man who is cognizant of his world, a man who has a family, who loves a family, who has been torn from his family, a man who can read and write, a man who will not let his story be self-related, but self-written." This theme of the novel reminded me of other 'postcolonial' texts that write back to the Anglo-American Canon -- and that thematize the act of writing as a central part of coming to own one's subjectivity (see: J.M. Coetzee's Foe). I've never taught Uncle Tom's Cabin, but if I were to do that in the future, I would do it alongside James. 

Teaching Notes: "The God of Small Things" General Overview and Context

Briefly Introducing Arundhati Roy and The God of Small Things

Arundhati Roy is one of the most successful in the ‘new wave’ of Indian writers in English that emerged in the late 1990s. (Writers like Amitav Ghosh, Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, and Rohinton Mistry all emerged on the scene in the 1970s and 80s). Her first novel, The God of Small Things, was a bestseller around the English-speaking world upon its release in 1997, and won Roy the prestigious Booker Prize in 1998. Surprising many of her fans, Roy took a long break from writing fiction after The God of Small Things, and became known as an activist and political essayist, who frequently wrote to criticize undemocratic policies of the Indian government as well as the American prosecution of the “War on Terror” after 9/11. She’s also well-known for her interventions on behalf of environmental justice (especially for Indian indigenous communities, known as “tribals” or “adivasis”) as well as her advocacy for Dalits and other low-caste communities. Many of these themes are visible in one way or another in The God of Small Things; the issue of caste is obvious, but the environmental justice might be more of a subtext, though there are hints of it from the very beginning (“Some days he walked along the banks of the river that smelled of shit and pesticides bought with World Bank loans. Most of the fish had died. The ones that survived suffered from fin-rot and had broken out in boils” [14]). The seemingly throwaway line about the World Bank points to a theme Roy later addressed at length in her nonfiction writing – the ecological destruction caused by large-scale development programs associated with the World Bank.

Roy finally published her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, in 2017. It’s a fascinating book in many ways, with a transgender protagonist (pretty  unusual in Indian fiction) and a plot involving the Indian government’s response to the Kashmiri secessionist movement. It’s closely attentive to important events in recent Indian politics. If you like this book, you might enjoy that newer novel as well, though on the whole the newer book is a little messier and less well-structured than this one (some reviewers complained that Roy needed a stronger editor…).  

A Bit About Mary Roy: Finally, a book that might bear reading in close proximity to The God of Small Things might be Roy’s recent memoir, Mother Mary Comes To Me (2025). Mother Mary tells a version of the story that makes it clear The God of Small Things is actually largely autobiographical – she really did have a family member in Ayemenem, Kerala who started a pickle factory. Like Rahel in the novel, Roy did leave her family behind to study architecture in Delhi, and decided to stay away. (However, unlike Rahel, she didn’t marry an American man or move to the U.S.) Her mother (real life: Mary Roy; “Ammu” [mother] in the novel) really was a kind of black sheep of the family, who ended up starting a school in part because she had been exiled from her own family and denied access to her father’s property. (Under the old law, a daughter’s inheritance was limited to one-quarter of a son’s share or 5000 rupees – whichever was less – or nothing at all if dowry had been given on marriage. When their father P.V. Isaac died without a will, the real Mary Roy sued her brother, George Isaac, for access to their father’s property. The case eventually went to the Supreme Court; she won the case in 1986, though the results were tied up in court. Mary Roy finally received access to her share of the property in 2010; it was worth 2 Crores (20 million rupees).  (One place this all comes up early in the novel is with reference to who owns the pickle factory that was started by their Mammachi (their mother). Chacko claims complete ownership, which Ammu protests (“Thanks to our wonderful male chauvinist society.”) Chacko’s facetious response has an ominous undertone: “What’s yours is mine and what’s mine is also mine” [57]). 

Despite this rather heroic story of feminist perseverance, Roy’s portrait of her mother is at times pretty unsparing in the memoir – it depicts a woman who could be abusive to her own children even as she was subject to all manner of social marginalization because of her life choices. And Roy really does have a brother (not her twin) with whom she has had a complicated relationship. 

Modernist Studies Association 2024: A few notes

I was recently at the Modernist Studies Association Conference in Chicago. I've been going to the conference on and off for many years (going back to the early 2000s?). Lately, I've been going there to present on materials relevant to my digital projects. If interested, slides from my presentation are here.

I'm not going to try and give a comprehensive account of what I saw and did at MSA, but below are a few highlights. Overall, the vibe was good -- despite the wild week in US politics, everyone seemed eager to talk about their research. Indeed, in a few cases (especially with some of the material related to queer and trans writers), it seemed like there was a more intense relevance in light of the growing anti-trans tendency in public discourse. 

Saturday Keynote: Nella Larsen's Passing

It was fun to have the Saturday keynote be a screening of the 2021 Netflix adaptation of Passing, followed by a panel discussing it. The film was great (I hadn't seen it!), and the panel discussion following, with Rafael Walker, Pardis Dabashi, and Cyraina Johnson-Roullier, was lively and enlightening. My main takeaway from the panelists was that the film is a pretty faithful adaptation of the novel, but it's more optimistic about love and less pessimistic about the affect of racism on personal relationships than Larsen's book. 

 

Queer and Trans Writing

Panel attended: Transing modernism/queering modernism

Jaime Harker, University of Mississippi 

Chris Coffman, University of Alaska, Fairbanks 

Aaron Stone, University of Virginia 

Mat Fournier, Ithaca College Marquis Bey, Northwestern University 

Marquis Bey, Northwestern University

This was a standout panel. Papers on Bryher, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, and more

The idea of thinking about Bryher as a trans figure seems especially worthwhile. Also, the paper on Orlando mentioned some recent adaptations of the novel, including a film called Orlando: My Political Biography as well as a 2019 opera adaptation by Olga Neuwirth.

There were also a couple of papers that were theoretical / auto-theory interventions on the concept of dysphoria, and the concept of gender itself (memorable phrase: "from gender dysphoria to gender euphoria"). 

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At another panel I attended, I saw another paper dealing with trans issues -- Michael Mayne of Denison University. He had rewritten parts of his paper at the last minute to reflect the results of the election. (In recent years, 664 anti-trans bills have been proposed by state legislatures. In the recent election, 41% of the ads for Trump were anti-Trans ads. 

The Well of Loneliness is increasingly being read as a trans novel (including by scholars like Jack Halberstam and Leslie Feinberg). Mayne's emphasis was on the idea of transness as abjection in Hall's novel. He also mentioned Julia Serano's idea of "Effemimania" (a term I hadn't heard before), and Susan Stryker's idea of the prospect of trans writers reclaiming the "monster." 

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At another panel, Pamela Caughie gave a presentation on "Bloombsury's Gender Politics," where she alluded to the painter Dora Carrington, who was not quite trans, though she did engage in some transgressive gender play, and who was certainly queer and polyamorous (key line: "How I hate being a girl! Tied with female encumbrances and hanging flesh"). 

Caughie also mentioned many other writers who were new to me, including Rosamund Lehmann (Dusty Answer, 1927), and Denton Welch (Maiden Voyage, 1943). 

Early Postcolonials

For many years, the MSA has been a welcoming place for people doing work on what we might think of as "early postcolonial" literature (1950-1980, roughly). This is the era of people like Naipaul and Lamming, Khushwant Singh, Mulk Raj Anand, C.L.R. James, etc. 

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On the panel where I presented, Ben Fried gave a paper on the relationship between V.S. Naipaul and his publisher, Andre Deutsch. Deutsch was a Jewish immigrant who fled from German-occupied Europe. Deutsch and Diana Athill worked together to form a new publishing house (Allan Wingate), which published Naipaul and many other postcolonial writers. Throughout his early career, Naipaul struggled with the tension of being a highly culturally grounded writer at a time when publishers were looking for "universal" appeal. 

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On another panel, I saw a paper by Rochona Mojumdar of the University of Chicago. She was interested in the dialogue between Mrinal Sen's early 1970s "Calcutta Trilogy" and radical Latin America in the "Third Cinema" movement -- specifically, Fernando Solanas' revolutionary classic, La Hora de Los Hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces), and Sen's Padatik (1973). There's an interesting moment of borrowing or appropriation in Sen's film -- where he takes the exact footage of police beating protestors that also appears in Solanas' film. 

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I also attended this panel:

R28. Mediating Empire: Comparative Colonialisms, Comparative Media Studies

Chair: Jessica Berman, University of Maryland, Baltimore County 

Daniel Morse, University of Nevada, Reno 

Stephen Pasqualina, University of Detroit-Mercy 

Abhipsa Chakraborty, SUNY Buffalo 

Nasia Anam, University of Nevada, Reno

This was another standout panel, with papers on radio adaptations of Raja Rao's Kanthapura, CLR James' broadcasts on the BBC, and more. Recent scholarship on the BBC's radio broadcasts has really expanded our understanding of how postcolonial literature emerged as a new formation during and after World War II.

Of note: Daniel Morse's book Radio Empire and Peter Kalliney's The Aesthetic Cold War.

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On Sunday morning, I was in a Digital Humanities Seminar, on "Modernism in/and as Data." It was a fun and productive discussion.

Fall Teaching: "Decolonizing (Digital) Humanities"

[Updated January 2022] 

I'm teaching a grad seminar on Digital Humanities this fall. I'm structuring most of the hands-on work around two Text Corpora I've been developing, one on African American Literature, and the other on Colonial South Asian Literature. 

If the Canon has been the defining structure of traditional literary studies, in the DH framework the starting point is the Corpus. You can do a lot with a group of texts structured this way -- from Text Analysis, to Natural Language Processing, to thinking about Archives and Editions. As with the Canon, the questions you can ask and the knowledge you can produce are strongly determined by what's included or excluded from the Corpus. 

Course Description (short version): 

This course introduces students to the emerging field of digital humanities scholarship with an emphasis on social justice-oriented projects and practices. The course will begin with a pair of foundational units that aim to define digital humanities as a field, and also to frame what’s at stake. What are the Humanities and why do they matter in the 21st century? How might the advent of digital humanities methods impact how we read and interpret literary texts? Some topics we’ll consider include: Quantifying the Canon, Race, Empire & Gender in Digital Archives, and an introduction to Corpus Text Analysis. Along the way, we’ll explore specific Digital Humanities projects that exemplify those areas, and play and learn with digital tools and do some basic coding. The final weeks of the course will be devoted to collaborative, student-driven projects. No programming or web development experience is necessary, but a willingness to experiment and ‘break things’ is essential to the learning process envisioned in this course.

Mimicry and Hybridity in Plain English (Updated and Expanded)

Update from April 2017: I added a new section called "Close Reading Bhabha's 'Signs Taken For Wonders.'" Also, for folks assigning this in a classroom, there is a downloadable PDF version of this essay here. 

(Hindi version of this page) 

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When the terms “mimicry” and “hybridity” are invoked in literary criticism, or in classrooms looking at literature from Asia, Africa, or the Caribbean, as well as their respective diasporas, there is usually a footnote somewhere to two essays by Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” and “Signs Taken For Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority Under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817.” But students who look at those essays, or glosses of those essays in books like Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts, generally come away only more confused. Though his usage of a term like “hybridity” is quite original, Bhabha’s terminology is closely derived from ideas and terminology from Freud and French thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan. I do respect the sophistication of Bhabha’s thinking -- and the following is not meant to be an attack on his work -- but I do not think his essays were ever meant to be read as pedagogical starting points.

What I propose to do here is define these complex terms, mimicry and hybridity, in plain English, using references from Bhabha's own writings, but also from other sites -- from specific cultural contexts, historical events, and works of literature art that aren't under Bhabha's purview. The point is not to tie the ideas up nicely, the way one might for an Encyclopedia entry, for example. Rather, my hope is to provide a starting point for initiating conversations about these concepts that might lead to a more productive discussion in the classroom than Bhabha's essays tend to do alone.

"I'm Happy to Own All Of It": Teju Cole's "Known and Strange Things"

I have been reading and reveling in Teju Cole's new collection of essays, Known and Strange Things, over the past week. Many of the essays here were published earlier in magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, and Granta.

And indeed, I had read several of them before, but spread out over years and often sandwiched into lots of other online reading that sometimes diluted their impact. As a result, I did not see the true implications of important essays like "Unnamed Lake" or "A True Picture of Black Skin" in those earlier reads. Seeing them in print and in the context of other essays on overlapping topics helps the author drive the point home. (Another reminder of the limits of our online media + text consumption ecosystem.)

The collection as a whole is divided into three sections, including essays on writers and literature, essays on photography, and travel writings. The travel writings I found particularly engrossing; Cole has visited dozens of countries since he became a literary star after the publication of Open City in 2011. I also see in the travel writings echoes of the voices of other great travel writers, including Conrad, Naipaul and more contemporaneously, Amitava Kumar... There's a very precise balance in these essays of the personal voice and experience with a journalist's eye for broad questions of general interest. I would not be surprised if we were to see more travel writing from Teju Cole in the future.

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James Baldwin, Barack Obama, and Cole's Cosmopolitanism

One essay I had missed outright is the first essay in the collection after Known and Strange Things' prologue. Here it's published as "Black Body"; it was first published in The New Yorker in August 2014 as "Black Body: Rereading James Baldwin's 'Stranger in the Village.'" This essay encapsulates at once Teju Cole's originality -- his distinctive voice and unique way of thinking -- while also underscoring his deep filiation with earlier generations writers and intellectuals, both from the Black Atlantic tradition and from the Postcolonial / Global tradition.

The signature of Cole's outlook to global culture is eclecticism:

There’s no world in which I would surrender the intimidating beauty of Yoruba-language poetry for, say, Shakespeare’s sonnets, nor one in which I’d prefer the chamber orchestras of Brandenburg to the koras of Mali. I’m happy to own all of it. This carefree confidence is, in part, the gift of time. It is a dividend of the struggle of people from earlier generations. I feel no alienation in museums. But this question of filiation tormented Baldwin considerably. He was sensitive to what was great in world art, and sensitive to his own sense of exclusion from it. He made a similar list in the title essay of “Notes of a Native Son” (one begins to feel that lists like this had been flung at him during arguments): “In some subtle way, in a really profound way, I brought to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the Stones of Paris, to the Cathedral at Chartres, and the Empire State Building a special attitude. These were not really my creations, they did not contain my history; I might search them in vain forever for any reflection of myself. I was an interloper; this was not my heritage.” The lines throb with sadness. What he loves does not love him in return.

This is where I part ways with Baldwin. I disagree not with his particular sorrow but with the self-abnegation that pinned him to it. Bach, so profoundly human, is my heritage. I am not an interloper when I look at a Rembrandt portrait. I care for them more than some white people do, just as some white people care more for aspects of African art than I do. (link)

This is a remarkable statement -- and I can't help but see my own evolution on these topics expressed perfectly in these eloquent paragraphs. I had a deep sense of cultural dispossession as a young person -- in which I remember perceiving a sense of exclusion that resembled James Baldwin's -- though more recently (really, as I have grown into my shoes as a literature professor) I have had a growing sense of cultural ownership in the mainstream of Euro-American life that resembles Cole's: "I'm happy to own all of it."

For many postcolonial academics based in the West, the dilemma of whether to embrace a European cultural heritage or to develop a sense of identity based on the recovery of a sense of lineage to Africanness or Asianness has been a long-term preoccupation with no easy answer. But it doesn't have to be either-or. A Nigerian writer in New York can have a world-class knowledge of Euro-American photography and modern classical music (Mahler!) and also make and share playlists of contemporary Nigerian dance songs. For my own part, I can teach and write about everything from Bollywood movies to Milton without embarrassment. I can own all of it too. (As a side note, Cole also recently made up a playlist for Known and Strange Things. You can see it here.)

To be clear, eclecticism and cosmopolitanism should not be confused with loyalty to dominant cultural institutions. Nor would Cole allow that his passion for "serious" photography, writing, and music means he is more interested in "aesthetics" than "politics." If anything, Cole's voice -- as embodied in the essays contained in this collection -- seems to suggest that what makes certain works of art powerful is in fact often precisely their embrace of an urgent politics (and this is as true of W.G. Sebald's novels as it is of Derek Walcott's poems). In other words, aesthetics need not be seen as separate from politics; our preoccupations with the latter can be what drives us to strive to make something beautiful and meaningful in response to terrible exigencies in the world around us. Or: Out of passionate politics can come great art.

Another essay that beautifully encapsulates Cole's unique status as a hybrid figure is his essay, "The Reprint" (it does not appear to be available online) recounting the night Barack Obama defeated John McCain in the Presidential elections of 2008. Cole was on-hand in Harlem to witness the crowd's reaction as the news was announced late in the evening.

One reason Obama is an important figure in understanding where Cole is coming from might be their shared connection to Africa:

The argument could be made that he wasn't really 'the first African American to be voted into the office, because he was African American only in a special, and technical, sense, the same way I was African American: a black person who held American citizenship. But the history of most blacks in this country--the history of slavery, Reconstruction, systematic disenfranchisement, and the civil rights movement--was not my history. My history was one of emigration, adaptation, and a different flavor of exile. I was only a latter-day sharer in the sorrow and the glory of the African American experience. 

[...] Obama, at the core of his experience, is hybrid. The significant achievement is not that, as a black man, he became president. It is that, as a certain kind of outsider American --of which the Kenyan father, Indonesian school, and biracial origin, not to mention the three non-Anglo names, are markers--he was able to work his way into the very center of American life. [...] His victory, I would think, should resonate even more strongly with these out-of-place characters who have been toiling in the shadows of the American story: the graduate students with funny accents, the pizza-delivery guys with no papers, Americans, regardless of color, who remember a time when they were not Americans. (249-250)

Cole doesn't underline it for us, but it's pretty clear that the link he drew between President Obama nd himself in the first paragraph quoted above also holds for the second. He is very much an "out-of-place" character (as am I) -- though at this point he is no longer "toiling in the shadows of the American story."

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Photography and Blackness

Another essay in the collection that I found quite powerful is "A True Picture of Black Skin" (first published in the New York Times Magazine in February 2015). The jumping off-point for this essay is the Roy DeCarava photograph, "Mississippi Freedom Marcher, Washington DC, 1963."

Cole's comments on this photograph and on the complex historical legacy of photographing black skin are quite smart. We might begin with the elegant explication of the photo itself:

One such image left me short of breath the first time I saw it. It’s of a young woman whose face is at once relaxed and intense. She is apparently in bright sunshine, but both her face and the rest of the picture give off a feeling of modulated darkness; we can see her beautiful features, but they are underlit somehow. Only later did I learn the picture’s title, “Mississippi Freedom Marcher, Washington, D.C., 1963” which helps explain the young woman’s serene and resolute expression. It is an expression suitable for the event she’s attending, the most famous civil rights march of them all. The title also confirms the sense that she’s standing in a great crowd, even though we see only half of one other person’s face (a boy’s, indistinct in the foreground) and, behind the young woman, the barest suggestion of two other bodies.

Cole goes on after this to talk about why the history of photographing African American people (and people of African descent more generally) has been so fraught -- a history that has both ideological and material, technological elements. Camera light meters and developing processes were designed with light skin tones in mind, meaning that even when African and African-American people have been photographed with respect and dignity, the photos have not always "come out" right. Cole argues that DeCarava developed his own emulsion process to produce images like the one above.

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The Ethical Responsibility Not to Turn Away

I'll end this brief review with an account of another essay that left me floored, "Death in the Browser Tab" (New York Times Magazine, May 2015). Again, this is one that I somehow missed when it was printed last year. The theme here is the growing pattern of seeing people getting killed in videos posted online. Often these are black people. The most immediate trigger event for this particular reflection was the shooting of Walter Scott in Charleston, South Carolina -- but the list was long in 2015 and has become, sadly, even longer with a series of further "deaths in the browser tab" we've seen this year.

(Incidentally, here's something I wrote last year that attempted to link the Ferguson event to a police murder that galvanized Malcolm X and other black radicals in 1963.)

Cole shows that there is a long and fraught legacy of thematizing death in photography, which goes back to the 19th century tradition of "postmortem pictures." This was transformed in the twentieth century, as cameras become more portable and faster shutter speeds meant that by the 1960s, still photographers could capture the moment of death in a way that had never been possible earlier. (In this context Cole mentions Eddie Adams' famous photo of the death of a South Vietnamese general in 1969.)

The videographic afterimage of a real event is always peculiar. When the event is a homicide, it can cross over into the uncanny: the sudden, unjust and irrevocable end of the long story of what one person was, whom he loved, all she hoped, all he achieved, all she didn’t, becomes available for viewing and reviewing. A month after I went to North Charleston, back in Brooklyn and writing about the shooting, I find a direct approach difficult. 

I write about Holbein’s “Pictures of Death,” and about Robert Capa’s photograph and Eddie Adams’s. I write about “The Two Drovers,” about Robin tramping through the borderlands intent on murder. I write about my morning in North Charleston, the gloomy drive there and back and the wilted flowers on the chain-link fence on Craig Road. If you set enough tangents around a circle, you begin to recreate the shape of the circle itself. Finally, I start to watch footage of Scott’s last moments. It’s the third time, and it makes me uneasy and unhappy. The video begins with the man holding the camera racing toward the fence. A few seconds later, Walter Scott breaks away from Michael Slager. Slager plants his feet and raises his gun. There is still time. He shoots once, then thrice in quick succession. Scott continues to run. There is still time. That is when I stop the video and exit the browser.

We are well beyond the ethical dilemma many people discuss regarding the effect of these videos: is it right to watch these images? Is there a kind of pornography of violence at some point? Indeed, I couldn't help but think of some comments from Julius, the protagonist of Cole's Open City, along the lines of: must we watch every act of violence? The fallout of that refusal which, when we first encounter it early in the novel, might even seduce us into agreeing, is pretty stark: people who don't want to engage the pornography of violence might well have an instance of it in their own past they are trying to hide.

I think Cole's reflections here (also expressed in the essay earlier in the collection, "Unnamed Lake") seem to suggest we actually do have an ethical responsibility to witness these deaths. But their impact on us is complex and sometimes hard to read. We are traumatized by them, hurt by them, and (in my case) depressed by our sense of powerlessness to stop this pervasive violence. Insofar as we sometimes see these shootings from the point of view of the shooters (police body cams) we are implicated in the violence in unsettling ways. We do have a right to limit the experience -- to close the browser tab when it becomes too much. But we simply cannot not watch. 

Notes on MLA 2013

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has already put up some stories about MLA 2013, including this article covering the growing attention payed to "Alt Ac" (Alternative academia) career tracks, and this one focusing on the general theme for the conference, "Avenues of Access," which was explored by the MLA's President, Michael Berube in his address, as well as in numerous presidential forums interspersed throughout the conference that focused on facets of "Access" broadly construed. (The panels on that theme were on everything from "Open Access" journals, to questions of access and diversity in the Digital Humanities, to disability studies.)

I would recommend the above Chronicle links (not paywalled, I don't think) for anyone looking for a general sense of the MLA this year. (Update: or check out this link at Inside Higher Ed, on the MLA's Big [Digital] Tent.)

Below are my own particular notes on the panels that I ended up attending, starting with the one I organized. My goal in writing these notes is not to "opinionate" about the papers or evaluate them, but rather to simply give some thumbnail sketches, and maybe offer up a link or two for people interested in these topics who weren't able to attend. The notes and links are also, needless to say, for myself -- there's lots of "further reading" for me to do in the links and references below.

In general, I attended three "Digital Humanities" panels, two panels related to South Asian literature, one panel on modern Anglo-Irish literature, a panel on "Public Poetry," and a panel on Modern British Literature and the State. I also branched out a bit from my core interests and saw a panel on 19th century American literature ("Secularism's Technologies"), which featured both Michael Warner and Amy Hollywood -- two scholars I admire -- talking about secularism.

Click on "Read More" to read my notes on the panels I attended.

"Commonwealth" and "Postcolonial" Studies Journals: Some History

A few years ago, when I was going up for tenure at Lehigh, I did a blog post compiling links to several postcolonial studies journals I was looking at as possible venues for publication. At that time I was not in the habit of regularly reading academic journals; like a lot of people, I tended to focus more on academic books. For various reasons, I've been both reading academic journals more regularly and closely in recent years, and publishing in them more frequently since 2007.

I also don't think I mentioned here that this past summer I joined the Editorial Board of the Northampton, UK-based Journal of Postcolonial Writing as an Associate Editor. And as I've grown more involved with the inner workings of a busy academic journal, I've gotten interested in the complicated 'career arc' of this particualr journal (formerly World Literatures Written in English) as well as others like it -- journals founded in the 1960s and 70s, often with an approach quite different from what they currently print.

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Another quick prefatory comment: I have been helping out a colleague at another university with an article she's working on, on the institutional history of the field -- specifically, the interaction between "Postcolonial" literary studies and "Commonwealth"  literary studies, and the goal of this blog post to put together some of my own thoughts related to the different journals.

"Commonwealth" refers, of course, to literature of the British Commonwealth of Nations, an organization with 54 member nations, all but two of which were former British colonies. The Commonwealth idea was conceived in the 1880s, as a way to grant semi-autonomy to settler colonies like New Zealand and Australia, and it rapidly expanded after Indian and Pakistani independence (since both new nations joined the Commonwealth). Beginning with the Harare Declaration (1971), the Commonwealth has been 'post-colonially correct' -- which is to say, it has clearly indicated that member countries are a group of sovereign states on an equal footing. It has also focused on alleviating poverty and fostering development in poorer countries.

And clearly, the Commonwealth concept was not really in question this past summer, when Delhi hosted the Commonwealth Games, which was according to some observers an astounding success and to others a total catastrophe. (The fact that many Commonwealth nations are also cricket-playing nations probably doesn't hurt the popular and mass-cultural recognition of the term.) All in all, the Commonwealth of Nations organization seems to be alive and well; indeed, there are several pending applications for membership from countries that were never British colonies -- Algeria and Sudan, for instance. As to what precisely the organization actually does, that might be the subject of another post.

Despite the change in the status of the Commonwealth of Nations, the term "Commonwealth Literature," as most people know, has largely gone out of fashion in recent years. The most famous critique of the idea of Commonwealth Literature is probably Salman Rushdie's 1983 essay "Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist" (republished in Imaginary Homelands, 1990). And following Rushdie, the most significant event marking the decline of Commonwealth Lit. might be Amitav Ghosh's famous decision, in 2001, not to accept the regional Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia) for his book, The Glass Palace. Ghosh objected to the idea and term "Commonwealth," but he also had a problem with the English-only requirement for the prize. (Other Commonwealth Literature institutions, such as the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, do not have an Anglophone literature-only policy.) The core of Ghosh's complaint, however, was evident in the following sentences:

So far as I can determine, The Glass Palace is eligible for the Commonwealth Prize partly because it was written in English and partly because I happen to belong to a region that was once conquered and ruled by Imperial Britain. Of the many reasons why a book's merits may be recognized these seem to me to be the least persuasive. That the past engenders the present is of course undeniable; it is equally undeniable that the reasons why I write in English are ultimately rooted in my country's history. Yet, the ways in which we remember the past are not determined solely by the brute facts of time: they are also open to choice, reflection and judgment. The issue of how the past is to be remembered lies at the heart of The Glass Palace and I feel that I would be betraying the spirit of my book if I were to allow it to be incorporated within that particular memorialization of Empire that passes under the rubric of "the Commonwealth". I therefore ask that I be permitted to withdraw The Glass Palace from your competition. 

Ghosh's comments (the full letter is reproduced here, along with further comments in support from Amitava Kumar) remain at a somewhat abstract level. I interpret him to mean something like this: yes, we have to acknowledge the history and legacy of colonialism (indeed, The Glass Palace is largely about that history). But we should have the right to redefine our present selves separately from that legacy. The larger point seems to be that the term "Commonwealth writers" or "Commonwealth Literature" cannot help but be a kind of celebration of British colonialism.

The British Journal of Commonwealth Literature is still going strong despite the critiques of the word Commonwealth such as Ghosh's and Rushdie's. In 2005, two editors of the journal wrote an introduction on the fortieth anniversary of the journal, defending their decision not to update the title despite the changing fortunes of "Commonwealth":

Nevertheless, more than a dozen years on, the decision to keep the Journal’s original title seems right. Although post-colonial studies have come to occupy a central position in the metropolitan academy’s curricula, the term has frequently been rejected by writers and readers, who see it as a strait-jacket that encloses them within a limited and predictable range of political agendas. “Post-colonialism”, particularly when used in the singular, offers a curious mirror-image of the “one-world” discourse of globalization, which it supposedly contests. At its worst it is an exclusive term, which homogenizes the “rest of the world” in a counter-image of the older European imperialisms or US neo-imperialism. Meanwhile multinational publishers commodify and disseminate the work of cosmopolitan writers who interpret “other” societies for a Western or “global” readership. Arguably “Commonwealth literature”, with its emphasis on inclusivity, continues to be more genuinely eclectic and to invite approaches that can be related to a broader-based set of non-Western humanisms. (John Thieme. Editorial: "JCL Forty Years On," JCL 40:1, 2005)

There's a valid point here, though it's too bad John Thieme doesn't respond directly to the critique made by Ghosh, which we quoted above. Instead, his approach is to suggest that Commonwealth continues to work as a pragmatic signifier, in large part because "Postcolonial" is, as he sees it, worse. It's also unfortunate that he doesn't cite any specific scholars or theorists whose definition matches the "post-colonialism" he doesn't like.

The person cited by Thieme and Alistair Niven as instrumental in the founding of JCL (and the Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies -- ACLALS) is A. N. Jeffares. Jeffares, who was Irish (and a scholar of Yeats), was responsible for the first ever conference devoted to Commonwealth Literature at the University of Leeds, in 1964. The proceedings of that conference were published in book form by Heinemann, as Commonwealth Literature: Unity and Diversity in a Common Culture. Jeffares' introduction to the conference (and the volume that it provoked) are widely cited by scholars who have thought about the status of Commonwealth literature since then, including especially Tim Watson (2000).

Interestingly, though he's credited as the driving force behind the advent of Commonwealth literary studies, Jeffares was not the first editor of JCL, though he did go on to serve as the first editor of the Canadian journal Ariel: A Review of International Literature (founded in 1970 at the University of Calgary, where it remains). Ariel bypassed the terminological morass by always defining itself as focused on "international" literature -- which means its first issues could comfortably and without contradiction contain essays on all sorts of topics, from George Herbert, to Canadian authors, to the Caribbean writer Wilson Harris. Over time, and with subsequent editorships, Ariel has come to be seen as primarily (though not exclusively), a "postcolonial" journal. The journal published a pair of special issues in 1995 debating the pros and cons of the postcolonial turn in literary studies, and then returned to the subject in another special issue in 2000.

Another journal that was founded in the 1960s/70s was World Literature in English. WLWE was first based at the University of Texas for several years, before moving to University of Guelph (where it was edited by Diana Bryden for several years). The journal had a brief stint based in Singapore (under the editorship of Kirpal Singh), before finding its current home at the University of Northampton, UK.

Importantly, in 2005, WLWE deviated from the path set by JCL when it did change names, becoming, under Janet Wilson's editorship, the Journal of Postcolonial Writing (JPW). In her brief editorial announcing the change, Wilson did not say much about the debates over terms such as "world literature," "Commonwealth literature" or "postcolonial literature"; she simply suggested that the move from WLWE to JPW was a way of moving towards "theoretical respectability."

Even as these journals were either changing (or, in JCL's case, not changing), several new postcolonial literature and theory journals came into being in the 1980s and 1990s, including especially Wasafiri (University of Kent), Interventions (whose first editor was Robert JC Young, then at Oxford), Journal of Postcolonial Studies (Melbourne), Jouvert (a U.S.-based online journal, now defunct), Kunapipi (another Australian journal, which I think is also defunct), Diaspora (a cultural studies and anthropology journal, by and large), The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies (based at George Southern University), and Postcolonial Text (also based in Australia). Of these newer journals (and I may be missing some), the most influential have perhaps been Wasafiri and Interventions. 

One major journal that I haven't mentioned is Transition, which was started in Uganda in 1961, with a pan-Africanist focus (publishing essays by writers like Ngugi, Achebe... and Skip Gates!). Transition was famously edited by Wole Soyinka until it was disbanded in 1976. The journal was then revived in the 1990s, though it was published in the U.S. (it's now housed at Indiana University Press), and in its reincarnation it seems to be quite a different beast. There are also "Area Studies" literature journals, specifically South Asian Review (with which I have been involved, in the past), as well as the solidly established Research in African Literatures. But these journals, as important as they may be in their respective fields, are still not as widely circulating or as influential as their more 'transnational' (postcolonial, commonwealth) peers. Area studies is, in short, still an academic ghetto: it's still much better for you if you say you teach and write on "Postcolonial literature" than "Indian literature" or "Nigerian literature." That's unfortunate, but it seems to be a fact of life in the British and North American academies. (I wrote about this a bit in the second half of an essay in the South Asian Review issue I guest-edited with Kavita Daiya a few years ago: see here).

So where does that leave us? On the one hand, the proliferation of the new Postcolonial journals, alongside the continued vibrancy (and frequent self-reinvention) of the older Commonwealth and World Literature journals, suggests the field is bigger and more established than it's ever been. Even so, certain critiques of the term "postcolonial" seem to have struck a chord (Aijaz Ahmed, Arif Dirlik, Ella Shohat, and more recently David Scott) -- and they haven't gone away. In the inaugural essay to Interventions, Robert Young seemed to acknowledge as much when he wrote:

Whatever one might say about the troubled term 'postcolonial' -- and we take the discussions of that on board, but as read -- one characteristic aspect of postcolonial writing, be it creative or critical, involves its historical and political agenda, which in broad terms give it common objectives. This is the reason why, just as with feminism, postcolonialism offers a politics rather than a coherent theoretical methodology. Indeed you could go so far as to argue that strictly speaking there is no such thing as postcolonial theory as such -- rather  there are shared political perceptions and agenda which employ an eclectic range of theories in their service. Moreover, as with some feminisms, a substantial constituency of postcolonial writing is radically anti-theoretical, giving a primacy to the value of individual consciousness and experience. Postcolonialism's curious combination of heterogeneous theories with a sometimes problematic or even condescending counter-affirmation of the truth of experiential knowledge, is an articulation too easily characterized either as the postcolonial predicament or as a disjunction between the western academy and 'Third World' conditions of existence. (Robert JC Young, 1998. Full essay available on the author's website here)

I thought this was an interesting way of putting things: there may not be a theoretical commonality, but there is a shared political praxis. What's surprising about this claim is of course that so many critics of postcolonial theory have questioned precisely that -- for Left (Marxist) critics of Postcolonial studies, the problem has always been that much Postcolonial theory has distanced itself from Marxism or from a concrete political agenda. Someone like Arundhati Roy may be admired by many Postcolonial intellectuals, but almost no one is actually standing up and agreeing with her on, say, the Maoist insurgency in eastern and southern India. It sometimes seems that being 'postcolonial' is a way of positioning oneself as generally aligned with the plight of poor, non-western societies -- without having to make hard ideological choices regarding how to alleviate the suffering of people in those societies.

The debates that follow Young's opening volley in the first few issues of Interventions are quite fascinating, though it would make this blog post too long to actually engage that material substantively (perhaps in a subsequent post).

One big issue I have been thinking about is the status of the American academy in particular vis a vis the advent and institutionalization of Postcolonial Studies. Some critics have argued that Postcolonial Studies was really initiated in the American academy, and that the various and proliferating institutional appearances of postcolonial studies groups and journals are nothing more than attempts to copy an intellectual model initiated in the U.S. The best support for this way of seeing things comes from the fact that so many key figures have taught in American universities, including especially the theory 'triumvirate' of Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and Edward Said. But one could also question this reading of American dominance, since the U.S. still does not have a regular "postcolonial studies" national association or conference (by contrast, the UK has a Postcolonial Studies Association). Moreover, of the journals I've named here, the vast majority are in fact based at institutions or with publishers outside of the U.S. -- the UK, Canada, and Australia -- suggesting that the supposed dominance of American academic institutions may be overstated.

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So here are my discussion questions for readers -- feel free to write in at Facebook or in comments here, as you wish, if you have any thoughts.

First, is postcolonial literary studies and theory primarily an 'American' academic institution in your perception?

Second, does "postcolonial studies" mean something different in the different places where it is institutionally (academically) practiced (i.e., can we compare its status in the UK with its status in Canada, its status in India, or its status in Australia)?


Third, is the field rising or falling? Has it been superseded by "globalization studies"?

Fourth, what is the status of the literary in current postcolonial theory? While many of the initial concepts in postcolonial theory came from literary theorists, it has sometimes seemed to me more recently that the momentum for postcolonial studies in recent years has shifted to the social sciences, particularly cultural anthropology.

Five Types of Hybridity: Steve Yao in Wasafiri

A little while ago I did a long post on the concept of 'hybridity', hoping to provide a resource useful for people who teach on this topic the classroom (along the lines of my earlier "Introduction to Edward Said & Orientalism"). My intention was to simplify a complex concept in postcolonial theory for a general readership, but I don't think I entirely succeeded -- since the essay I wrote raised three new problems for each conceptual problem it addressed.

Cultural hybridity is simply quite difficult to define, in part because it's a metaphor from biology, and we have to remember that metaphors can fit literary or cultural artifacts well or poorly. Hybridity can also be hard to pin down in part because it's become so widespread (if one takes a look at contemporary American popular music, for example, it's hard to find very much that isn't in some way hybridizing hip hop culture with the conventions of mainstream pop.).

One essay I came across recently, "Towards a Taxonomy of Hybridity" by Steve Yao (Wasafiri, 2003), seems to suggest that it might actually be helpful to embrace, rather than shy away from, the biologism in the idea of hybridity. I cannot post the whole essay for copyright reasons, and unfortunately it is not online as far as I can tell (if readers would like a copy, send me an email and I will send it to you). Here is how Yao sets up his "taxonomy" of hybridity:

Closer consideration of'hybridity's' biologistic foundations can help to delineate a more refined critical 'taxonomy'. As Robert J C Young has usefully pointed out, the English word 'hybrid' stems from the Latin term hybrida, meaning 'the offspring of a tame sow and a wild boar', or more generally according to another source, an 'animal whose parents belong to different varieties or to different species'.' Hence the word also meant a 'person whose parents belong to different ethnic groups, probably of non Indo-European origin'. Going back even further, a commonly held etymology relates the term 'hybrid' to the Greek word hubris, or the quality of overweening pride most closely associated with the heroes of classical tragedy. More specifically, hubris implies a going beyond one's proper station, as in presuming to the status of a god or committing rape. Based on its historical development, then, the term 'hybridity' carries with it a sense of sexual, and implicitly violent, transgression of 'natural' categories that produces a new entity with a complex and multiply determined lineage. Hence the notion entails a necessarily biologistic conception of (reproductive interaction between categorically separated 'types'. This inherent biologism finds its clearest expression, moreover, in the strictest current botanical sense of'hybridity', which designates the union of genetic material from parents of two different genotypes that results in the simultaneous expression of traits from both within a single organism. Transposing this idea of generative fusion to the domain of culture implies mutually constitutive and reinforcing signification between different cultures and traditions.

[...] I propose a new 'taxonomy' of hybridisation that explicitly acknowledges and builds upon 'hybridity's' biologistic foundations. Differentiating among various techniques for combining cultural traditions and/or linguistic systems, this taxonomy includes the following categories: 'cross-fertilisation', 'mimicry', 'grafting', 'transplantation', and 'mutation'.'

In subsequent pages, Yao goes on to show that Marilyn Chen's polyglot poetry (she inserts Chinese characters in her English-language poems, and plays on complex etymologies of Mandarin words in English verses) might be seen as "cross-fertilization": "At this moment in the lyric the Chinese language shapes the poetic articulation of English, thereby constituting an instance of productive cultural interaction."

[Examples of Marilyn Chen's poetry -- though without any Mandarin characters -- can be found here.]

Another example of "cross-fertilization" that comes to mind might be Agha Shahid Ali's attempt to encourage the use of the Ghazal form in English, which I talked about here.

SALA Conference Program 2009

For the past few years I've been posting the program of the annual South Asian Literary Association conference here. I won't be at the conference this year, but there are some really interesting features on the program, so I thought I would post the program all the same. People who are in Philadelphia on 12/26 and 12/27 might want to stop by.

As a hint, the events not to miss are at the end -- the plenary with Wendy Doniger and Rupa Viswanath on 12/27, and the special commemorative session on Meenakshi Mukherjee with Gayatri Spivak and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan that follows.

The Sacred and the Secular in South Asian Literature and Culture

Tenth Annual South Asian Literary Association (SALA) Conference Program
December 26-27, 2009
Radisson Plaza—Warwick Hotel, Philadelphia
1701 Locust Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103

Saturday, December 26

4:00-5:15: Session 1

1A. Sikhism and Religious Signification and Demarcation

Gina Singh, California State University-Long Beach, “Sikh Women: Markers of Insurgency”

Sharanpal Ruprai, York University, “The Top Knot: Sikh Women Weaving Gender into the Turban”

Rajender Kaur, William Paterson University, “Marking History, Tracing Diasporic Sikh Subnationalism and Subjectivity in Anita Rau Badami’s Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?”

1B. Religion and the South Asian Novel

Bina Gogineni, Columbia University, “God and the Novel in India”

Roger McNamara, Loyola University Chicago, “Secular Narratives and Parsi Identity in Rohinton Mistry’s Family Matters”

Prasad Bidaye, University of Toronto, “Thus Spake the Brahmin: The Rhetoric of Caste in Raja Rao’s The Serpent and the Rope”

1C. South Asian Protest Discourse

Namrata Mitra, Purdue University, “The Limits of the Secular: Riots and State Violence in Contemporary India”

Simran Chadha, Dyal Singh College, Delhi University, “Of Virgins, Martyrs, and Suicide Bombers”

Amber Fatima Riaz, University of Western Ontario, “The Blasphemy of Protest: Challenging Religiosity and the Zenana in Tehmina Durrani’s Blasphemy”

1D. Enchantments in Theory

Bed Giri, Dartmouth College, “Modernity Re-enchanted? On Postcolonial Modernity”

Ashmita Khasnabish, Boston University, “Reason versus Spirituality: Sri Aurobindao, Amartya Sen, and Mira Nair”

Mary Jo Caruso, St. John’s University, "Building a Community of India: Rabindranath Tagore and the Fusing of the Sacred and the Secular”

5:30-6:45: Session 2

2A. V. S. Naipaul: Diasporic and Transnational Contexts

Jayshree Singh, Bhupal Nobles Girls’ P. G. College, Udaipur, India, “The Context and Construction of Religion and Art vs. Reality: A Critical Study of Selected Travel Writing of V. S. Naipaul”

Bidhan Roy, California State University-Los Angeles, “Encountering Islam: Muslims, Travel Narrative and Globalization in V. S. Naipaul’s Beyond Belief”

Abdollah Zahiri, Seneca College, “A Contrapuntal Reading of Naipaul’s India: A Wounded Civilization: The Bhakti Movement”

2B. Religion, War, Terror, and Violence: The Effects of Trauma on the South Asian Child

Krista Paquin, University of the Fraser Valley, “Children of the Divide: Physical and Psychological Trauma on Children in Cracking India and ‘Pali’”

Mark Balmforth, University of Washington-Seattle, “Struggling to Abide by Sri Lanka: An Attempt to Engage in Responsible International Youth Activism”

Summer Pervez, University of the Fraser Valley, “The Absence of Childhood: Narratives of Kashmir”

2C. Sri Lanka and Gendered Spaces

Nalin Jayasena, Miami University, “Gendered Geopolitics in the Sri Lankan Armed Conflict: Santosh Sivan’s The Terrorist and Mani Ratnam’s A Peck on the Cheek”

Arch Mayfield, Wayland Baptist University, “Cultural Challenges in Sri Lanka: The Gonnoruwa Anicut Project”

Maryse Jayasuriya, University of Texas at El Paso, “Women Writing Religious Difference in Contemporary Sri Lanka”

2D. Diaspora and Postcolonial Writing

Sukanya Gupta, Louisiana State University, “In Search of ‘Destiny’: Cyril Dabydeen’s The Wizard Swami”

Jaspal K. Singh, Northern Michigan University. “Trauma of Exile and the Muslim Indian Diaspora in South Africa: Dual Ontology in Ahmed Essop’s Fiction”

Sohrab Homi Fracis, Independent, “From Darkness into Light: Zoroastrian Mythology and Secular Awakening in My A Man of the World”

Sunday, December 27

8:45-10:00: Session 3

3A. Partition Narratives

Shumona Dasgupta, St. Cloud State University, “Constructing Community: Negotiating Violence and National Identity in Partition Texts”

Prabhjot Parmar, University of Western Ontario, “Bridging the Communal Divide: Manoj Punj’s Shaheed-e-Mohabbat, Boota Singh”

Amrita Ghosh, Drew University, “Towards Alternative Imaginaries: Subversive Border Crossings in Qurrantulain Hyder’s Sita Betrayed”

3B. Anatomies of Postcolonial Theory

Maya Sharma, Eugenio Maria de Hostos Community College/CUNY, “The White Tiger as an Anatomy of Postcoloniality”

Waseem Anwar, Forman Christian College University, “Theorizing the Pakistani Post-Postcolonial Real: Ambivalent, Emerging, Amorphous, or Even Beyond!”

Moumin Quazi, Tarleton State University, “A Post-Structural Study of Binary Oppositions in Vikram Seth’s Two Lives”

3C. Songs and the Subaltern

Ira Raja, La Trobe University/University of Delhi, “Living to Tell: Mirabai and the Challenge of Categories”

Sheshalatha Reddy, University of Mary Washington, “‘In brotherhood of diverse creeds’: Hyderabad/India in the ‘speech and song and struggle’ of Sarojini Naidu

Aparajita De, University of Maryland, “The Caged Bird Sings: The Politics of Subaltern Agency in Pinjar”

3D. Arundhati Roy and the Secular

Rajiv Menon, The George Washington University, “’Whose God’s Own Country?’: Caste and Politics in Guruvayur and Roy’s The God’s of Small Things”

Navneet Kumar, University of Calgary, “Humanism, Secularism, and Universalism: Edward Said and Arundhati Roy”

Nicole Tabor, Moravian College, “Secular International Fantasy and Sacred Kathakali in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things”

10:15-11:45: Session 4

4A. Sacred or Secular? History and Identity in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction

Madhuparna Mitra, University of North Texas, “History as Trope: Jhumpa Lahiri’s Narrative Habits”

Farha Shariff, University of Alberta, Canada, “Negotiating Cultural Identities: Second-Generation South Asian Identities and Contemporary Postcolonial Text”

Christine Vogt-William, Emory University, “Reflections on the Sancrosanctity of Names and Naming in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake”

4B. The South Asian Secular Citizen Body

Sukanya Banerjee, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, “Bureaucratic Modernity, Moderate Nationalism, and the Secular Citizen Body”

Sami Ullah Band, Kashmir, India, “Whether the Secularism in Kashmir Has Stood the Test of Time”

Indrani Mitra, Mount St. Mary’s University, “Gendered Spaces, Minority Identities and Secular Formations: A Muslim Woman’s Voice”

Suhaan Mehta, The Ohio State University, “Other Stories: Aesthetics and Ideology in Kashmir Pending”

4C. Religion and Class/Caste

Chinnaiah Jangam, Wagner College, “Sanitizing the Sacred Space: Hinduization of Dalit Identity in Telegu Country, 1900-1935”

Smita Jha, Indian Institute of Technology-Roorkee, “Crisis of Indian Secularism: A Study of Untouchable, Waiting for the Mahatma, and Train to Pakistan”

George J. Filip, Arcadia University, “What’s in a Name? Hinduism, Christianity, and the Evolution of Dalit Identity”

Deepika Bahri, Emory University, “The Sign of the Cross: Colonialism, Christianity, and Class in South Asian Literature and Film”

4D. Constructions of South Asian Political Identities

Nivedita Majumdar, City University of New York, “Reclaiming the Secular: An Engagement with the Politics of Religious Identity in India”

Chandrima Chakraborty, McMaster University, “Masculine Asceticisms and the Indian Nation”
Nyla Ali Khan, University of Nebraska-Kearney, “Forces of Regionalism and Communalism in South Asia”
Anupama Arora, University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, “Pandita Ramabai’s Encounter with American Orientalism”

1-2:15: Session 5

5A. Spiritual and Material Imagery in South Asian Poetry

Cynthia A. Leenerts, East Stroudsburg University, “Divine Migrations: Religious and Spiritual Imagery in Meena Alexander’s Poetry”

Mahwash Shoaib, Independent, “‘The grief of broken flesh’”: The Dialectic of Desire and Death in Agha Shahid Ali’s Lyrics”

5B. Bollywood and the Representation of Religion

Monia Acciari, University of Manchester, “Jhoom Barabar Jhoom: Worshipping the Star”
Karen Remedios, Southern Connecticut State University, “The Depiction of Christians in Indian Cinema: A Study of Essentialism”
Jogamaya Bayer, Independent, “Jodhaa: A Myth or a Fantasy of an Emperor?”

5C. Salman Rushdie and Postcolonial Epistemological Anxiety

Melissa Lam, Chinese University of Hong Kong, “Religious Autonomy and Midnight’s Children”

Umme Al-wazedi, Augustana College, “The Rise of Fundamentalism and the Negotiations of the Islamic Laws in South Asia: (Political) Shari’a, Fatwa, and the Taslima Nasrin and Salman Rushdie Affair”

Pennie Ticen, Virginia Military Institute, “Skeptical Belief and Faithful Questioning: The Satanic Verses 20 Years Later”

2:30-3:30: “A Conversation with Meena Alexander,” winner of the SALA 2009 Distinguished Achievement Award, Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York, Teacher in the MFA program at Hunter College and the Ph.D. Program at the Graduate Center, moderated by Cynthia Leenerts, East Stroudsburg University, and Lopamudra Basu, University of Wisconsin-Stout, with Parvinder Mehta, The University of Toledo, with an award presentation by Dr. P. S. Chauhan, Arcadia University

3:45-4:45: Plenary Keynote Roundtable Discussion: “India: Religion, Politics, and Culture,” with Wendy Doniger, Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions in the University of Chicago Divinity School; also in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, the Committee on Social Thought, and the College; and Rupa Viswanath, University of Pennsylvania, with a presentation by Dr. P. S. Chauhan, Arcadia University

5:30-6:30: Commemorative Panel: “Remembering Meenakshi Mukherjee: The Teacher and the Scholar,” led by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Columbia University, with Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan, New York University, Amritjit Singh, Ohio University, and Anupama Arora, University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, with introductions by Rajender Kaur, William Paterson University

Fall Teaching: "Global English" and "Converts and Rebels"

This post is partly inspired by Tim Burke's recent post, asking why more web-oriented academics don't post drafts of their syllabi on their blogs or websites.

I'm teaching two undergraduate-oriented classes this fall. One is called "Global English," and it's a senior "capstone" course, while the other is a more general, upper-level course called "Converts and Rebels: Debating Religion in Modern British Literature."

1. "Converts and Rebels" (English 395)

Here is the course description for "Converts and Rebels":

Though the modern period was generally a time when religious institutions were in decline, several major British writers from the early twentieth century had intense religious conversion experiences, leaving an impact on the literature of the period as a whole. These conversions, many of which involved Roman Catholicism, were seen as controversial by mainstream English society. Analogously, and just as importantly, several important writers found themselves falling out of religious faith in dramatic fashion, suggesting that the period as a whole was one of intense religious ferment. Is it possible to view religious conversion as a "subversive" activity? How might religious conversion relate to the aesthetics and ideological premises of literary modernism, which is so central to our understanding of this period? Writers whose work and lives will be explored in this course include T.S. Eliot (poems), James Joyce ("Portrait of the Artist"), Oscar Wilde ("Salome"), John Henry Newman ("Loss and Gain"), Salman Rushdie ("The Satanic Verses"), W.H. Auden, Evelyn Waugh ("Brideshead Revisited"), Graham Greene ("End of the Affair"), and Iris Murdoch ("The Bell").

In this course, I'll be building on ideas related to my first book ("Literary Secularism"), and using James Wood's "Broken Estate" as a conceptual jumping off point.

In terms of period, I decided to start with a little material based in the Victorian period. Though he's not talked about very much outside of Catholic circles, it seems to me like John Henry Newman is a key figure -- someone who had influence on quite a number of writers who converted to Catholicism, or thought about it.

I have been debating whether to bring in people who converted out of minority faith traditions to Christianity. Benjamin Disraeli seems like an obvious figure to consider, though in his case he never appeared to be especially passionate in his Anglicanism. As far as I know, he never directly addressed his personal experience of conversion, though some of his novels are clearly about figures who might be described as "crypto-Jews" (I'm using the term along lines described by Michael Ragussis). I'll also be using Ellis Hanson's "Decadence and Catholicism" to help triangulate some of the interesting questions about sexuality and religious conversion (especially Catholic conversion) circulating in the fin de siecle.

I decided against assigning C.S. Lewis for this course, though I may use a few short passages from "Surprised by Joy," and I will certainly mention his conversion experience as an important one. I haven't found his non-fiction writing related to his conversion interesting enough to have something to say about it in a classroom.

I was strongly tempted to assign The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman, but decided against it at the last minute. If I do a version of this course again, I might do both The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and The Golden Compass -- thinking of the latter as a kind of refutation of the former.

This is a new course for me. Though I know a fair amount twentieth-century writers like Graham Greene, Salman Rushdie, Evelyn Waugh, and Iris Murdoch, Victorian figures like Newman are a bit of a stretch. I'm open to suggestions for biographical and critical sources that might be relevant -- as well as primary texts or authors readers would recommend for a course like this.

2. "Global English" (English 290/Senior Seminar)

Here is the course description for this course:

The English language has traveled, and found a home in many parts of the world that were formerly colonized by Great Britain, especially Ireland, Scotland, India, Africa, and the Caribbean. With the rise of English as a literary language in those areas has come a new slate of anxieties and questions. Some writers have noted the uncomfortable fact that English seems to be tied to the history of colonial domination; it is the 'master's' language, and should be rejected. Others (like Joyce) have expressed their discomfort with English, but have nevertheless written in English with affection. It need not be an either/or proposition, and this course will aim to explore the global embrace, not without its anxieties, of English as a literary language. Along the way, a few critical terms and concepts related to linguistics will be introduced (i.e., slang, dialect, creole, patois, acrolect, and basolect, to name just a few). Authors will include a mix of short and long works by James Joyce, Arundhati Roy ("God of Small Things"), Irvine Welsh ("Trainspotting"), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ("Purple Hibiscus"), Amitav Ghosh ("Sea of Poppies"), Brian Friel ("Translations"), G.V. Desani ("All About H. Hatterr"), Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, J.M. Synge ("Playboy of the Western World"), and Ken Saro-Wiwa ("Sozaboy").

The reading list could be much longer than it is; indeed, one could easily have a whole semester's worth of material just based on language questions in any of the particular national literatures that will be at issue here -- including Ireland, Anglophone West Africa, the Caribbean, and India, respectively. I decided to make the approach of the course comparative because the overlap between different national experiences of "Englishness" seems like it might be interesting to a broad group of students. I was also tempted by Junot Diaz's "Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," though in the end bringing in the Dominican diasporic experience seemed to a bit too far afield. (Again, perhaps next time.)

We'll be using scholarship by David Crystal ("English as a Global Language"), and also Dohra Ahmed's anthology, "Rotten English." I would be grateful for any suggestions on criticism or theory here as well.