1st Edition

Postcolonial Urban Outcasts City Margins in South Asian Literature

Edited By Madhurima Chakraborty, Umme Al-wazedi Copyright 2017
    294 Pages
    by Routledge

    294 Pages 3 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Extending current scholarship on South Asian Urban and Literary Studies, this volume examines the role of the discontents of the South Asian city. The collection investigates how South Asian literature and literature about South Asia attends to urban margins, regardless of whether the definition of margin is spatial, psychological, gendered, or sociopolitical. That cities are a site of profound paradoxes is nowhere clearer than in South Asia, where urban areas simultaneously represent both the frontiers of globalization as well as the deeply troubling social and political inequalities of the global south. Additionally, because South Asian cities are defined by the palimpsestic confluence of, among other things, colonial oppression, anticolonial nationalism, postcolonial governance, and twenty-first century transnational capital, they are sites where the many faces of empowerment and disempowerment are elaborated. The volume brings together essays that emphasize myriad critical approaches—geospatial, urban-theoretical, diasporic, subaltern, and others. United in their critical empathy for urban outcasts, the chapters respond to central questions such as: What is the relationship between the politico-economic narratives of globally emerging South Asian cities and the dispossessed? How do South Asian cities stand in relationship to the nation and, conversely, how might South Asians in diaspora construct these cities within larger narratives of development, globalization, or as sources of authentic ethnic identities? How is the very skeleton—the space, the territory—of South Asian cities marked with and by exclusionary politics? How do the aesthetic and formal choices undertaken by writers determine the potential for and limit to emancipation of urban outcasts from their oppressive circumstances? Considering fiction, nonfiction, comics, and genre fiction from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka; literature from the twentieth and the twenty-first century; and w

    Table of Contents





    Introduction: Whose City?



    Madhurima Chakraborty





    Part I: Urban Outcasts, Urban Subalterns



    1. Recasting the Outcast: Hyderabadi Subjectivities in Two Literary Texts



    Nazia Akhtar





    2. The Margins of Postcolonial Urbanity: Reading Critical Irrealism in Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Fiction



    Sourit Bhattacharya





    3. "Someone called India": Urban Space and the Tribal Subject in Mahasweta Devi’s "Douloti



    the Bountiful"



    Jay Rajiva





    4. "Stuck at Pause": Representations of the Comatose City in Delhi Calm



    Amit Baishya





    Part II: The National, The Global, and the Diaspora





    5. Unmoored: Passing, Slumming, and Return-Writing in New India



    Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan





    6. Lahore, Lahore Hai: Bapsi Sidhwa and Mohsin Hamid’s City Fictions



    Claire Chambers





    7. Between Aspiration and Imagination: Exploring Native-Cosmopolitanism in Adib



    Khan’s Spiral Road and Mohammad Hanif’s Our Lady of Alice Bhatti



    Payel Chattopadhyay Mukherjee, Arnapurna Rath and Koshy Tharakan





    8. Portrayal of a Dystopic Dhaka: On Diaspora Reproductions of Bangladeshi Urbanity



    Maswood Akhter





    Part III: The Space of the Margins





    9. Imag(in)ing the city: A Study of Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi



    Nishat Haider





    10. Gendering Place and Possibility in Shashi Deshpande’s That Long Silence and Kavery



    Nambisan’s A Town Like Ours



    Lauren J. Lacey and Joy E. Ochs





    11. Delhi at the Margins: Heterotopic Imagination, Bricolage, and Alternative Urbanity in Trickster City



    Sanjukta Poddar





    Part IV: Forms of Urban Outcasting





    12. Carl Muller’s Palimpse

    Biography

    Madhurima Chakraborty is Assistant Professor of Postcolonial Literature in the Department of English, Columbia College Chicago, USA.



    Umme Al-wazedi is Associate Professor of Postcolonial Literature in the Department of English and Co-Program Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Augustana College, USA.