After New India: Diasporas, Anglophonisms, Returns by Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan
After New India: Diasporas, Anglophonisms, Returns by Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric and the Designated Emphasis in Gender, Women and Sexuality in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Shannon Jackson, Co-Chair Professor Colleen Lye, Co-Chair Professor Pheng Cheah Professor Lawrence Cohen Professor Michael Mascuch Professor Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan Summer 2016 © Copyright by Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, 2016. All rights reserved. Abstract After New India: Diasporas, Anglophonisms, Returns by Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric Designated Emphasis in Gender, Women and Sexuality University of California, Berkeley Professor Shannon Jackson, Co-Chair Professor Colleen Lye, Co-Chair After New India is a literary and cultural study of the Anglophone discourse on the rise of a “New India” after the economic liberalization of the country in the early 1990s. The project asks whether India’s putatively “global” ascendance has, in fact, as both popular and critical sources aver, decentered expatriate writers and exhausted diasporic tropes that were central to the writing and study of Indian Anglophone literature as “postcolonial” literature. In order to pursue this question, I focus on the contemporary literary registration of three aspects of India’s rise that map onto my sub-titular terms, “diasporas, Anglophonisms, returns”: first, the epochal, but ultimately counterfactual, temporal inversion in which India begins to represent world futurity vis-à-vis its diasporas in the West; second, the literary-critical discourse on the simultaneous globalization and indigenization of Indian English; and third, the empirical social fact of reverse migration to India, specifically by Indian Anglophone writers from the United States and United Kingdom.
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