Transcultural Humanities in South Asia: Critical Essays on Literature and Culture

Description

This volume looks at the implications of transcultural humanities in South Asia. It is becoming a crucial area of research within literary and cultural studies, with its indeterminate periodisation, its temporal and spatial non-linearity, its territoriality and intersectionality. Drawing on contributors from around the globe, the entries look at literature and poetics, theory and praxis, borders and nations, politics, partition, gender and sexuality, the environment, representations in art, and pedagogy and the transcultural classroom. Using key literary and cultural examples and case studies, the contributors look at current developments in postcolonial transcultural and transnational standpoints and their possible educational outcomes. This broad and comprehensive book also speaks volumes to the value of the humanities, and the significance of South Asian contexts. It will be of particular interest to those working on postcolonial studies, literary studies, Asian Studies and more. Cover Half Title Title Copyright Dedication Contents Acknowledgements List of contributors Foreword Introduction: transcultural humanities in South Asia: constrictions and connections Part I Theorising the transcultural humanities: reimagined possibilities 1 Humanities and hope 2 Reimagining the humanities in a transcultural, post-truth world 3 Post-cultural crises and the pandemic: what humanities? 4 Beyond pillars and ‘posts’: transcultural humanities in South Asian literary studies 5 The role of transcultural humanities in times of crisis: Nadeem Aslam, Karan Mahajan and Kashmir Part II Borderless zones: tracing a poetics for transcultural 6 Is there life in this author? the living author and the business and importance of the humanities in South Asia 7 Sri Lankan literature and territoriality: the politics of literary criticism 8 [Trans]cultural contact zones – a comparative study of archetypes: Persian dastan and Greek epic traditions 9 Zones of every being: transcultural decolonisation and border thinking in contemporary India 10 Languaging gesture/gesturing language: a case for rekhti poetry Part III Postcolonial inquisition and transcultural intersections: politics, place, identity, migration 11 Migration and the lesson of irony – on the political meaning of humanities: Saadat Hasan Manto and Søren Kierkegaard 12 From post- to para-colonialism: (trans)national and cultural intersections in post-1988 Pakistani anglophone fiction 13 Bhutan, Western Arunachal Pradesh and modern state-making: literary-[Trans]cultural mappings in Moi Akou Janam Lom and The Circle of Karma 14 Migrant voices: an inquisition of the ‘other’ literature in Bangladesh 15 Beyond identity politics: transcultural and multiple allegiances in Parajuly’s Land Where I Flee Part IV Homing transculturation: nation, Partition, periphery 16 Borders, belonging and diasporic aesthetics: tracing a transcultural conceptualisation of home in South Asian Partition fiction 17 The nation and its peripheries: borderland narratives and theories of liminality 18 The Long Partition: reading some Partition writers transculturally 19 Reconstructing Partition memories in the new millennium 20 Transcultural location of home in the fiction of Gao Xingjian Part V Expressions of transculturality: theatre, art, communication, curricula 21 Memory in theatre, theatre in memory: experiencing the ‘self/selves’ in Swadeshi theatre (1905–1911) 22 Locating the transcultural humanities in South Asian art: frescoes in the Lahore Fort Seh-Dara 23 Responses to 9/11: caricatures and Pashto poetry from Pakistan 24 years of freedom of speech and expression in Pakistan: an intracultural analysis of press/media in time and social processes 25 Learning to be ‘glocal’: reflections on transgressive theories and transcultural flows in a Pakistani ELT classroom and curriculum Part VI Transcultural transformations: ethics, ideology, dilemma 26 Aging, literature and the humanities: transcultural perspectives on literary gerontology in South Asia 27 A Hindu in Pakistan (2011) and A Mad Man’s Diary (2014): distantiation, cultural transformation and redefinition of Pakistani minorities 28 Ethics and empathy in Sri Lankan representations of refugees 29 Dark moon, bright crescent: Tagore in China 30 Transcultural dilemma in Tahmima Anam’s The Good Muslim: an analysis of Bangladesh through the competing visions of Maya and Sohail Part VII Transcultural solidarities: gender and sexuality 31 Envisioning the role of South Asian gender and sexuality studies in the transcultural humanities 32 The outsourcing of pregnancy: transnational surrogacy in contemporary South Asian literature 33 Socioreligious dichotomies and Indian re-feminism: a transcultural construct of goddesses and women in Sidhwa’s and Mehta’s Water 34 Memoirs, Muslim women and transcultural symbolic solidarities 35 Borders, women and South Asian transculturality Afterword: transculturalism, the way forward . . . Index