Writing Disaster in South Asian Literature and Culture : The Limits of Empathy and Cosmopolitan Imagination

Writing Disaster in South Asian Literature and Culture: The Limits of Empathy and Cosmopolitan Imagination looks at the myriad ways in which disaster events (both man-made and natural) are perceived and represented in South Asian literature and culture. This book explores the affective mechanisms of empathy and imaginary identification which are conditioned and reiterated by biopolitical statist regimes of power to preempt and coopt any radical agential or cognitive intervention which might be evinced by the event of the disaster. The contributors also examine South Asian disasters vis-a-vis the registers of ecological crises, migration events, civil and liberation wars, and pandemics to understand the multifarious ways in which such 'disasters' are used as tropes to peddle certain structures of interpellation in the collective consciousness. Cover Contents Introduction Ecological Disasters and the Statist Contours of Conditional Empathy Ecological Crises to Socio-Political Disaster Ecological Disaster and The River of Stories Simulations of the Future Magic Realism and Trauma Migration, Displacement, and the Cosmopolitan Gaze:The Monolingualism of the Disaster Imagination Can Disaster be Known in the Light of Language? Fear of Refugee and Disaster Systemic Strategies of Identity Constructions and Deliberate Exclusions Disasters and Other Heterotopias: Disaster Poetics and the Re-writing of the Postcolonial Nation-State Re-imagining Disaster Capitalism through Fecopoetics and the Literature of Waste War, Religion, and Terror Global Catastrophe, Local Residues The Vanishing Dead Pandemics, Public Health Disasters, and Bio-political Regimes of Control Marked by Disposable Deaths Gendered Empathy and Its Impact on Efficient Pandemic Management Index About the Contributors