Author: Ajay Navaria Publisher: ISBN: 9781459699748 Category : Languages : en Pages : 192
Book Description
The narrator of the lead story in this collection occupies an 'unclaimed terrain', as do many of Ajay Navaria's characters. Journeying from a Dantewada village in India's east to the town of Nagpur and from there to Mumbai, the Byronic protagonist is raped, works as a masseur and then as a gigolo even while pursuing his education. The city teaches him the many meanings of labour, and he is freed - if ultimately destroyed - by its infinite possibilities for self - invention. As complex as they are political, Navaria's characters - ranging from a brahmin labourer to a dalit male prostitute - are neither black nor white, neither clearly good nor evil. They inhabit a grey zone; they linger in the transitional space between past object and future subject, between caste and democracy. Unclaimed Terrain represents Giramondo's commitment to South Asian literature and to writing which explores social difference and inequality.
Author: Laura R. Brueck Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231166044 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 238
Book Description
Writing Resistance is the first close study of the growing body of contemporary Hindi-language Dalit (low caste) literature in India. The Dalit literary movement has had an immense sociopolitical and literary impact on various Indian linguistic regions, yet few scholars have attempted to situate the form within contemporary critical frameworks. Laura R. BrueckÕs approach goes beyond recognizing and celebrating the subaltern speaking, emphasizing the sociopolitical perspectives and literary strategies of a range of contemporary Dalit writers working in Hindi. Brueck explores several essential questions: what makes Dalit literature Dalit? What makes it good? Why is this genre important, and where does it oppose or intersect with other bodies of Indian literature? She follows the debate among Dalit writers as they establish a specifically Dalit literary critical approach, underscoring the significance of the Dalit literary sphere as a ÒcounterpublicÓ generating contemporary Dalit social and political identities. Brueck then performs close readings of contemporary Hindi Dalit literary prose narratives, focusing on the aesthetic and stylistic strategies deployed by writers whose class, gender, and geographic backgrounds shape their distinct voices. By reading Dalit literature as literature, this study unravels the complexities of its sociopolitical and identity-based origins.
Author: Ajay Navaria Publisher: ISBN: 9781922146892 Category : Short stories Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
The narrator of the lead story in this collection occupies an 'unclaimed terrain', as do many of Ajay Navaria's characters. Journeying from a Dantewada village in India's east to the town of Nagpur and from there to Mumbai, the Byronic protagonist is raped, works as a masseur and then as a gigolo even while pursuing his education. The city teaches him the many meanings of labour, and he is freed - if ultimately destroyed - by its infinite possibilities for self-invention. As complex as they are political, Navaria's characters - ranging from a brahmin labourer to a dalit male prostitute - are neither black nor white, neither clearly good nor evil. They inhabit a grey zone; they linger in the transitional space between past object and future subject, between caste and democracy. Unclaimed Terrain represents Giramondo's commitment to South Asian literature and to writing which explores social difference and inequality.
Author: Cathy Caruth Publisher: JHU Press ISBN: 0801896487 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 204
Book Description
In the prevailing account of English empiricism, Locke conceived of self-understanding as a matter of mere observation, bound closely to the laws of physical perception. English Romantic poets and German critical philosophers challenged Locke's conception, arguing that it failed to account adequately for the power of thought to turn upon itself—to detach itself from the laws of the physical world. Cathy Caruth reinterprets questions at the heart of empiricism by treating Locke's text not simply as philosophical doctrine but also as a narrative in which "experience" plays an unexpected and uncanny role. Rediscovering traces and transformations of this narrative in Wordsworth, Kant, and Freud, Caruth argues that these authors must not be read only as rejecting or overcoming empirical doctrine but also as reencountering in their own narratives the complex and difficult relation between language and experience. Beginning her inquiry with the moment of empirical self-reflection in Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding—when a mad mother mourns her dead child—Caruth asks what it means that empiricism represents itself as an act of mourning and explores why scenes of mourning reappear in later texts such as Wordsworth's Prelude, Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science and Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, and Freud's Civilization. From these readings Caruth traces a recurring narrative of radical loss and the continual displacement of the object or the agent of loss. In Locke it is the mother who mourns her dead child, while in Wordsworth it is the child who mourns the dead mother. In Kant the father murders the son, while in Freud the sons murder the father. As she traces this pattern, Caruth shows that the conceptual claims of each text to move beyond empiricism are implicit claims to move beyond reference. Yet the narrative of death in each text, she argues, leaves a referential residue that cannot be reclaimed by empirical or conceptual logic. Caruth thus reveals, in each of these authors, a tension between the abstraction of a conceptual language freed from reference and the compelling referential resistance of particular stories to abstraction.
Author: Ulka Anjaria Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1316299783 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 449
Book Description
A History of the Indian Novel in English traces the development of the Indian novel from its beginnings in the late nineteenth century up until the present day. Beginning with an extensive introduction that charts important theoretical contributions to the field, this History includes extensive essays that shed light on the legacy of English in Indian writing. Organized thematically, these essays examine how English was 'made Indian' by writers who used the language to address specifically Indian concerns. Such concerns revolved around the question of what it means to be modern as well as how the novel could be used for anti-colonial activism. By the 1980s, the Indian novel in English was a global phenomenon, and India is now the third largest publisher of English-language books. Written by a host of leading scholars, this History invites readers to question conventional accounts of India's literary history.
Author: Christoforos Romanos Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1040230857 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 231
Book Description
In addition to being a fundamental concept for planning the water infrastructure which supports extensive agricultural economies across Southeast Asia, knowledge of the Mekong River’s hydrological catchments has calibrated the control of land, resources and people. Liquid Territories shows how and why the areal dimensions of the Mekong’s basin, delta and floodplain have become a critical geographic reference for human activities. This book concentrates on the way knowledge of the river’s catchments has been recorded on, and extracted from, maps. Repeatedly drawn by geographers, engineers and cartographers since before the start of European colonization, the book describes how cartographic projections of the basin, delta and floodplain have affected geopolitical strategy, the exercise of military power and anthropogenic modifications of the terrain. Drawing on the discourses of hydrology, geography and cartography, as well as military science, colonial politics and regional planning, the book explains why the spatial articulation of surface water flows is reflected in the configuration of national boundaries, soils and settlements today. Focusing on geographic concepts, the book provides insights into the process of urbanization in Southeast Asia, the region’s colonial and post-colonial history, the Mekong River’s political ecology, the scales of contemporary water management and the design of territory. This book will be relevant to academics who are interested specifically in the Mekong River and Lower Mekong Basin as well as in integrated water management planning. It would be especially relevant to architects, urbanists and landscape architects.
Author: James C. Scott Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 0300252986 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 462
Book Description
“One of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century to have been published in recent decades.”—John Gray, New York Times Book Review Hailed as “a magisterial critique of top-down social planning” by the New York Times, this essential work analyzes disasters from Russia to Tanzania to uncover why states so often fail—sometimes catastrophically—in grand efforts to engineer their society or their environment, and uncovers the conditions common to all such planning disasters. “Beautifully written, this book calls into sharp relief the nature of the world we now inhabit.”—New Yorker “A tour de force.”— Charles Tilly, Columbia University
Author: Kusuma Satyanarayanan Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0192688820 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 251
Book Description
The caste system is supposed to be inescapable-you cannot change the caste into which you are born. But are there ways to elude the system? Concealing Caste tells the stories of women and men in India who, though born into communities stigmatized as 'untouchable,' are perceived by others as 'high caste.' Like the literature on racial passing in the American context, the short stories and autobiographical essays in this volume reveal the inner workings of a vicious social order, illuminating the contradictions of caste hierarchy through the experience of those who clandestinely transgress its boundaries. Concealing Caste is the first collection of Dalit writings focused on this public secret. Bringing together Dalit literature from Marathi, Telugu, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, English and Malayalam-including stories and essays never before translated-this landmark anthology illustrates the agonizing choices and at times devastating consequences faced by Dalits who experiment with identity in a society shot through with the principle of birth-based inequality.
Author: Ajay Navaria
Author: Laura R. Brueck
Author: Ajay Navaria
Author: Cathy Caruth
Author: Ulka Anjaria
Author: Christoforos Romanos
Author: Edward Noble
Author: W. C. Jameson
Author: James C. Scott
Author: Kusuma Satyanarayanan