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

"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"-- Provided by publisher This volume looks at the implications of transcultural humanities in South Asia, which is becoming a crucial area of research within literary and cultural studies. The volume also explores various complex critical dimensions of transculturation, its indeterminate periodisation, its temporal and spatial nonlinearity, its territoriality and its 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 examples and case studies, the contributors look at current developments in transcultural and transnational standpoints and their possible educational outcomes. A broad and comprehensive collection, as it also speaks about the value of the humanities and the significance of South Asian contexts, Transcultural Humanities in South Asia will be of particular interest to those working on postcolonial studies, literary studies, Asian studies and more. Cover 1 Half Title 2 Title 4 Copyright 5 Dedication 6 Contents 8 Acknowledgements 13 List of contributors 14 Foreword 22 Introduction: transcultural humanities in South Asia: constrictions and connections 24 Part I Theorising the transcultural humanities: reimagined possibilities 36 1 Humanities and hope 38 2 Reimagining the humanities in a transcultural, post-truth world 51 3 Post-cultural crises and the pandemic: what humanities? 64 4 Beyond pillars and ‘posts’: transcultural humanities in South Asian literary studies 79 5 The role of transcultural humanities in times of crisis: Nadeem Aslam, Karan Mahajan and Kashmir 91 Part II Borderless zones: tracing a poetics for transcultural 104 6 Is there life in this author? the living author and the business and importance of the humanities in South Asia 106 7 Sri Lankan literature and territoriality: the politics of literary criticism 118 8 [Trans]cultural contact zones – a comparative study of archetypes: Persian dastan and Greek epic traditions 130 9 Zones of every being: transcultural decolonisation and border thinking in contemporary India 141 10 Languaging gesture/gesturing language: a case for rekhti poetry 155 Part III Postcolonial inquisition and transcultural intersections: politics, place, identity, migration 168 11 Migration and the lesson of irony – on the political meaning of humanities: Saadat Hasan Manto and Søren Kierkegaard 170 12 From post- to para-colonialism: (trans)national and cultural intersections in post-1988 Pakistani anglophone fiction 182 13 Bhutan, Western Arunachal Pradesh and modern state-making: literary-[Trans]cultural mappings in Moi Akou Janam Lom and The Circle of Karma 195 14 Migrant voices: an inquisition of the ‘other’ literature in Bangladesh 207 15 Beyond identity politics: transcultural and multiple allegiances in Parajuly’s Land Where I Flee 220 Part IV Homing transculturation: nation, Partition, periphery 232 16 Borders, belonging and diasporic aesthetics: tracing a transcultural conceptualisation of home in South Asian Partition fiction 234 17 The nation and its peripheries: borderland narratives and theories of liminality 247 18 The Long Partition: reading some Partition writers transculturally 260 19 Reconstructing Partition memories in the new millennium 272 20 Transcultural location of home in the fiction of Gao Xingjian 285 Part V Expressions of transculturality: theatre, art, communication, curricula 298 21 Memory in theatre, theatre in memory: experiencing the ‘self/selves’ in Swadeshi theatre (1905–1911) 300 22 Locating the transcultural humanities in South Asian art: frescoes in the Lahore Fort Seh-Dara 312 23 Responses to 9/11: caricatures and Pashto poetry from Pakistan 324 24 years of freedom of speech and expression in Pakistan: an intracultural analysis of press/media in time and social processes 337 25 Learning to be ‘glocal’: reflections on transgressive theories and transcultural flows in a Pakistani ELT classroom and curriculum 349 Part VI Transcultural transformations: ethics, ideology, dilemma 362 26 Aging, literature and the humanities: transcultural perspectives on literary gerontology in South Asia 364 27 A Hindu in Pakistan (2011) and A Mad Man’s Diary (2014): distantiation, cultural transformation and redefinition of Pakistani minorities 377 28 Ethics and empathy in Sri Lankan representations of refugees 389 29 Dark moon, bright crescent: Tagore in China 401 30 Transcultural dilemma in Tahmima Anam’s The Good Muslim: an analysis of Bangladesh through the competing visions of Maya and Sohail 414 Part VII Transcultural solidarities: gender and sexuality 426 31 Envisioning the role of South Asian gender and sexuality studies in the transcultural humanities 428 32 The outsourcing of pregnancy: transnational surrogacy in contemporary South Asian literature 441 33 Socioreligious dichotomies and Indian re-feminism: a transcultural construct of goddesses and women in Sidhwa’s and Mehta’s Water 455 34 Memoirs, Muslim women and transcultural symbolic solidarities 468 35 Borders, women and South Asian transculturality 481 Afterword: transculturalism, the way forward . . . 494 Index 498