States of Disconnect : The China-India Literary Relation in the Twentieth Century

__States of Disconnect__ examines the breakdown of transnationalism through readings of literary texts that express aversion to pairing ideas of China and India. Adhira Mangalagiri proposes the concept of “disconnect”: a crisis of transnationalism perceptible in moments when a connection is severed, interrupted, or disavowed. In an interconnected world, literature moves through transnational networks, crosses borders, and bridges diverse cultures. In these ways, literature can bring people closer together. Today, as hopes for globalization wane and exclusionary nationalism is on the march, can literature still offer new ways of relating with others? Comparative literature has long been under the spell of circulation, contact, connectivity, and mobility—what if it instead sought out their antitheses? States of Disconnect examines the breakdown of transnationalism through readings of literary texts that express aversion to pairing ideas of China and India. Focusing on practices of comparison, Adhira Mangalagiri considers how these texts articulate the undesirability or impossibility of relating with national others, tracing portrayals of violence, silence, and distance. She proposes the concept of "disconnect": a crisis of transnationalism perceptible in moments when a connection is severed, interrupted, or disavowed. Despite their apparent insularity, texts of disconnect offer possibilities for relating ethically across national borders while resisting both narrow nationalisms and globalized habits of thought. Reading a variety of largely untranslated twentieth-century Chinese and Hindi short stories, novels, and poems, Mangalagiri develops three new strategies for comparison—friction, ellipses, and contingency—that together comprise a critical vocabulary of disconnect. Foregrounding transnationalism's discontents, States of Disconnect offers a different path by which literary texts can cultivate a critical sensibility for making sense of a world rife with division. "States of Disconnect develops a critical vocabulary for apprehending disconnect, a defining condition of our times. In a world caught between the waning of globalized hyper-connectivity and the reemergence of reactionary nationalisms, this book offers ways of relating with cultural others anew, against both the unequal flows of globalization and the exclusionary paradigms of narrow nationalisms. Disconnect, the book argues, is not the antonym of connection but a state of being that makes possible new ways of relating with cultural others in moments conventionally seen as detrimental to connection, such as violence, hostility, or even indifference. Focusing on the case of China and India, the book studies the dialogic capacities of disconnect, and as such, offers a new approach to transnational literary comparison"-- Provided by publisher