Insurgent Cultures: World Literatures and Violence from the Global South

Moving beyond the normative frames of terrorism and counter-terrorism, this book shows how world literatures from the Global South can be used to examine the multiple modalities of violence that pervade contemporary world politics, such as communalism, factionalism, peasant wars, banditry, nationalist struggles, resource wars and acts of vengeance. The comparative approach of this book enables a theoretical realignment of insurgency from the mobilization of violence for grand, mythic, and ideological causes – as seen through the eyes of the state – to the violence for small causes, namely, the splintered violence conjured under conceptual rubrics such as divine violence, intimate violence, routine violence, everyday violence, inherited violence, and subterranean violence. Analyzing novels, autobiographies, journalistic accounts from key regions, such as Nigeria, Myanmar (Burma), India, and the Middle East, Insurgent Cultures provides a new understanding of the narratives of violence in the Global South. Cover Half-title Title page Imprints page Dedication Table of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Toward Post-Terrorism? Mythic Violence and Enchanted Solidarity Splintered Violence and Disenchanted Solidarity Unframing the Insurgent: Violence at the Limits of Literary Criticism Narrating Insurgency: World, Periphery, and the Vernacular Plan of the Book Notes Chapter 1 Precarious Riches: Oil, Insurgency, and Violence in Nigerian Literature The Violent Precariat Absent Presences in Michael Peel’s A Swamp Full of Dollars Present Absences in Helon Habila’s Oil on Water Subterranean Violence: Present Absences of Oil Unrest in Tony Nwaka’s Lords of the Creek Oil, Oil Everywhere, Nor Any Drop to Fry: Routine Violence in Christie Watson’s Tiny Sunbirds Far Away Notes Chapter 2 Intimate Violence: Rebels, Heroes, and Insurgent Sovereignties in Burmese Anglophone Literature The Elusive Terrorist: Tropes, Figures, and the Intimacy of Violence Intimacy and Militancy in From the Land of Green Ghosts and Road to Rangoon Intimate Sovereignty? Affective In/Justice in Wendy Law-Yone’s Irrawaddy Tango From Intimate Violence to Insurgent Sovereignty: Aung San Suu Kyi’s Freedom from Fear and Pascal Khoo Thwe’s From the Land of Green Ghosts Notes Chapter 3 Violent Solidarities: Narrating the Maoist Insurgency in India Solidarity, Sovereignty, and Divine Violence in Three Naxalite Novels (Dis)enchanted Solidarity and Useless Suffering Divine Violence and Useful Suffering Affects, Justice, and Solidarities in Arundhati Roy’s Walking with the Comrades and Sudeep Chakravarti’s Red Sun: Travels in a Naxalite Country Notes Chapter 4 Violent Worlds: Vernacular Agency in Middle Eastern Literature Of the Sublime, Divine, Secular, and the Vernacular Violence and the Vernacular Ennobling the Dead: Thanatopolitics in The Corpse Washer Globe versus World: Necropolitics and Thanatopolitics in The City Always Wins Notes Epilogue: The Moral Burden of the Insurgent Notes Index