SOUTH ASIAN LITERARY ASSOCIATION ANNUAL CONFERENCE

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SOUTH ASIAN LITERATURES IN THE WORLD January -, theWit Chicago N. State St. Chicago, IL USA ______

CONFERENCE ABSTRACTS

Conference Co-Chairs: Madhurima Chakraborty, Columbia College Chicago Nalini Iyer, Seattle University

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SATURDAY JANUARY ,

:-: PM Lincoln: Executive Committee Meeting

DAY : SUNDAY, JANUARY ,

: AM: REGISTRATION DESK OPENS

:-: AM Wilde: CONFERENCE COMMENCEMENT

● John C. Hawley, SALA President ● Madhurima Chakraborty, Conference co-chair. “South Asian Literatures in the World.”

SESSION : :-: AM Wilde Locating the Inventions of South Asia—Opening Plenary (Roundtable)

The opening, plenary panel for our conference interrogates the many locations—geographical, theoretical, literary textual, and political—in which South Asia continues to be invented, and the consequences of such invention. What have been the contexts in which the idea of South Asia has been invented, and with what consequences? What does it mean to speak of a collective that might, in diaspora, provide a sense of community even though corresponding nations are in political conflict with each other? How do academic programs and institutions shape the discourse of South Asia? How do theoretical or disciplinary academic approaches to South Asia see the opportunities and challenges of such inventions? How can we as academics confront and attend to the blind spots that inhere in regional cultural studies through our scholarship, teaching, programmatic development, and creative endeavors?

Chair: Nalini Iyer, Seattle University

● Neilesh Bose, University of Victoria ● Rajani Sudan, Southern Methodist University ● Susan Andrade, University of Pittsburgh ● Ana Cristina Mendes, University of Lisbon, Center for English Studies ● Waseem Anwar, Forman Christian College, Lahore

SESSION : :-: AM A Wilde Gender, Environment, and Crisis in South Asian Graphic Narratives (Roundtable)

This roundtable addresses how transnational displacement, environmental conflict, minority experience, postcolonial masculinity, and Hindu mythology appear in South Asian graphic narratives. Exploring questions about graphic narratives as a medium as well as a political project, we examine how this medium maps intra-South Asia conflict and community. Unlike the popular Amar Chitra Katha series, the contemporary graphic narrative in South Asia has a critical edge: in this archive, in works by Sarnath Banerjee, Vishwajyoti Ghosh, Amruta Patil, and others, gender-based violence, forced migration, multinational corporations, and water wars fissure social experience. Eschewing a North- American diaspora-centric approach, this panel studies how this new archive offers new perspectives on minority experience, transnational displacement, and ethnic conflict. We investigate the graphic narrative as a form that articulates postcolonial modernities.

Chair: Kavita Daiya, George Washington University

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● Kavita Daiya, George Washington University. “Migration Stories.” ● Lopamudra Basu, University of Wisconsin-Stout. “Postcolonial Masculinities in Sarnath Banerjee’s Novels.” ● Sukanya Gupta, University of Southern Indiana. “Sarnath Banerjee’s All Quiet in Vikaspuri as Text/Image Activism & Cli-Fi.” ● Nidhi Shrivastava, University of Western Ontario. “Priya’s Shakti: Recasting of Familiar Mythological Constructs in Order to Criticize Rape Culture.”

B Cibo Matto The Politics of Kashmir Chair: Abdollah Zahiri, Seneca College

● Rituparna Mitra, Marlboro College. “The Ghazal and the Gathering of Worlds in Ali’s ‘The Country Without a Post Office’.”

The Anglophone novel has been recognized in much of recent scholarship (Shameem Black, Pheng Cheah) as a world-making genre that forces open ways of “relating and being-with” (Cheah) alternate to the norms that constitute the neo-liberal/colonial order. Anglophone poetry, Amir Mufti reminds us, mediates these transactions and relationships in very different ways that are equally urgent, but less studied (Forget English!). My paper examines the poetry of Agha Shahid Ali, with attention to its harnessing of vernacular cosmopolitanisms, by which I mean world systems and historicities that challenge Eurocentric modernities. The worlding of the ghazal has been imbricated historically in ways of “relating and being-with” drawn from encounters between South, West and Central Asia. Kumkum Sangari, among others, urges us to recognize that these exchanges constitute other passages to the secular modern. Ali’s work, I will show, illuminates these very passages. At the same time, Ali’s use of the ghazal (as a structure of feeling transposed into English) mobilizes affective repertoires and histories that challenge nation-statist norms in contemporary South Asia, especially its Partition along religious lines. My reading of Ali’s poems from his collection A Country Without a Post Office, written at the height of the Indian state’s counter-insurgency against Kashmir’s tehreek for azaadi, will be attentive to both these critical projects. I am, moreover, interested in mining the affective and cultural reserves of the ghazal constellation (the complex of emotions evoked, the performative, communal aspects, etc.) to draw out its role in representation of global violence in the post-Cold War era. For instance, poems like “The Correspondent,” bringing together Kashmir and Bosnia, interrogate Eurocentric understandings of trauma and witnessing that privilege universalist humanitarian responses. It allows instead a more complex, comparative understanding of suffering. In sum, the shattered worlds gathered together in Ali’s poetry help reconstitute a global South Asia.

● Wafa Hamid, Lady Shriram College for Women, University of Delhi. “‘Discourses of Silence’: (Re)Writing Cashemere, Kashmir, Kashimir in Agha Shahid Ali’s Poetry.”

Although India is a site of one of the most populous democracies, it has also been the epicentre of many conflicts. Kashmir has been caught in a vortex of turmoil ever since its accession to the State of India in 1947. State orchestrated violence through draconian laws like AFSPA along with cross-border infiltration have destabilized the society where the intermittent end of physical violence does not actualize peace and people have little agency when the very providers of security become indistinguishable from the repressors.

The act of writing, in such times of conflict becomes a continuous transgression questioning the history of Kashmir as not sacrosanct but a narrative consisting of presences and absences. If history dislocates, literature attempts to relocate; if the past is a narrative, philosophy attempts to deconstruct it; if religion is no comfort, poetry offers a redemptive. The paper will focus on the poetry of one such poet, Agha Shahid Ali, whose ghazals in particular "redress the ruptures in history and collective memory". It studies the poet's attempt to trace the complex history of Kashmir and its relations with India to provide a rubric of understanding present. Poetry acts SALA Conference Schedule/5

as a medium of resistance to archive silenced voices. The primary focus is to provide a paradigm for understanding writing as testimony and resistance, a vehicle of affect which inscribes "people/Kashmir" into culture, creating a narrative of the margins. The paper will precisely look at these paradigmatic issues and will try to bring out the impact of poetry of the people who are continually silenced and written over. As reality lies shattered, the poet understands the fissures and fractures in the past along with the impossibility of return while transforming this loss into a redemptive promise through his poetic vision.

● Upasana Dutta, University of Chicago. “The Broken Body, the Stuttering Image: Malik Sajad’s Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir.”

Comparisons to Art Spiegelman’s Maus tend to inevitably appear when speaking of Malik Sajad’s Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir (henceforth Munnu). Munnu, like Maus, is a graphic novel that deploys the stylistic device of anthropomorphization as a key element in telling the story of a minority beset by great physical and emotional trauma. However, there is a notable way in which Munnu distinguishes itself from Maus precisely in the way in which the former uses this device. Sajad anthropomorphizes hanguls, the Kashmir stag, to represent Kashmiris within the narrative. However, the members of the Indian armed forces, as well as every other individual appearing on the pages of Munnu (Indian journalists, foreign social activists) retain their human form; unlike Maus, where Germans and Jews are pitted off in the traditional predator-prey binary of cat and mouse. This paper undertakes a close reading of anthropomorphization in Munnu, with reference to Spiegelman, and Elaine Scarry’s Body in Pain, to ponder a few questions about the role of the graphic novel in representing the body in a conflict zone. How does the novel create, circulate, and mark lines of demarcation between various iterations of South Asian identity? What does it mean for Kashmiri bodies alone to be shifted from the visual register of human to animal when Munnu makes explicit mention of other animal bodies (crows, dogs, rats) living in the margins? Conversely, what does retaining the human form of the armed forces imply about their culpability in and contribution to the Kashmir conflict, when the bearers of trauma in the conflict are represented by an animal endangered by specifically human activity? And finally, perhaps most importantly, what might the novel be attempting to tell us, specifically in its stutters and ruptures, about besieged, broken, and brutalized Kashmiri bodies?

● Prithwa Deb, Debraj Roy College, Golaghat, Assam. “Nation, Identity and Body: Reading the Disputed Boundaries in Contemporary South Asian Graphic Narrative.”

South Asian nations have multiple geographies though we label it as one single unit. The nations though collective are often in conflict. The nations of South Asia are engaged in territorial imperialism which they have imbibed from their colonial experience. The boundary conflicts and the collective trauma have curbed the regional stability. Such conflict of boundaries and the cartographical tension is present in the state of Kashmir. The first attack of Kashmir by Pakistan in 1947 has created a conflict within and without the United Nations. The Global North as well as Global South (China, especially) took deep interest and has influenced both India and Pakistan. The culture, tradition and socio-political scenario, the identity of Kashmiri has been caught between the interest of India as well as Pakistan and also the powers of the Global South have an important role to play. The paper shall attempt to explore the political situation of Kashmir through a contemporary graphic narrative Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir by Malik Sajad. It will examine the trauma, the ongoing political crises and the fractured human body which is divided between the political and the biological dialectic. My understanding will be put around the questions of historical contingencies and the role of the state machinery. Should we consider the truth only in the form of the testimonies of pain or shall we delve into the role of the state apparatus? Where do we locate Kashmir? Is it the crackdown parade where the bodies are made to act according to the command of the militant? Is it their constant suffering? Or is it a critique of the burden of the map?

C Churchill Aravind Adiga and the Contours of South Asia Chair: Waseem Anwar, Forman Christian College, Lahore ● Md. Rezaul Haque, St. John’s University, New York. “Going beyond the Binary of Self and Other: SALA Conference Schedule/6

The Case of South Asian English Fiction.”

In the present paper, I take up three works of fiction by writers based in diaspora and “home.” The texts are Jhumpa Lahiri’s “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” (1999), Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) and Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know (2014). What unites this supposedly incongruous group of fictions is the way they treat what typically appears as Other(s) in South Asian national imaginations. Mainstream discourse in India, for example, tends to represent Muslims/Pakistanis as an Other to define the Indian Self. On the other hand, Pakistanis are mostly represented as murderers and rapists in post-1971 discourse from Bangladesh. Going against the grain, both Lahiri and Rahman represent Muslims/Pakistanis rather as human beings torn apart by global forces over which they have little control. Depictions like these can go a long way towards healing past wounds and thus building a bridge of understanding between seemingly irreconcilable adversaries such as India and Pakistan. Adiga goes a step further. Not only does he suggest how a Global South can be formed but also shows the impediments lying on the way to realizing the dream. If China and India – the two economic giants of the current century – come together, the formation will definitely pose a viable counter force to the neocolonial dominance of the Global North. But the same formation might pose a threat to the smaller nations in the Global South. An even greater obstacle lies within – the raging disparity of education, opportunity and wealth between the classes (in India). The “dark” India Adiga paints in his debut novel unravels the self-legitimizing rhetoric of “shining” India. These local/national injustices need to be addressed first before injustices at the global front are confronted.

● Matthew Nelson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “‘My Shanghai’: China and Fantasies of Futurity in Adiga’s Last Man in Tower”

In his journalistic writing, Aravind Adiga has advocated “a healthy fear of China.” It is a fear that crops up in nearly all of Adiga’s fiction as well, if only in dialogic asides, as in his most recent novel, Selection Day. For Adiga, China is a necessary spur to India’s imagination of the future. Less a serious interlocutor and partner in commerce than a specter haunting India’s self-understanding, China figures in Adiga’s work as an affectively charged call to fantasy. This paper tracks the circuits of that call in Adiga’s 2011 novel, Last Man in Tower, which depicts the attempt of a developer to erect a building—called “the Shanghai”—that will (he hopes) culminate his life’s work and establish him “finally” as no longer up-and-coming but arrived, even as (he knows) it will kill him in the process. Throughout the novel, “China,” “Shanghai,” and “Singapore” all serve to name a fantasy for him of frictionless capital and infinite translatability between money and all forms of desire/futurity. The drama of the novel plays out primarily between him and the titular “last man” who refuses to have any vision of futurity and hence remains unable to “account” for in the transactions of global capital. By tracing the various affective exchanges around fantasies named “China,” and by situating those within Adiga’s extraliterary writing on the “real” China, I hope to show how Last Man in Tower contributes to the formation of a new cultural imaginary of Asia and India’s place within it. In doing so, I draw on recent studies of post-millennial South Asian fiction and the construction of a “New India” by E. Dawson Varughese and Manisha Basu, among others.

● Amrita De, SUNY Binghamton. “Of Regional, Homosocial Interactions and the Act of ‘Writing Itself Into Being’: Locating The White Tiger in South Asian Literary Imagination.”

Adiga's White Tiger presents a critique of neoliberal India. Balram, the unreliable narrator is the provocative interlocutor caught in the interstitial space between rural India and urban, neoliberal India. He announces that it is time for the ‘brown’ people and the ‘yellow’ people to take over alluding to a neoliberal utopia where the socio-political hierarchy of the ‘first-world-third world’ binary has been destabilized. This paper reads the novel as an allegorical representation of the state of South Asian literatures in the world. Driven by an urgency to decolonize and jettison its past, South Asian Literatures are consistently “writing itself into being”–like Balram who murders his master and takes his name. The novel is predicated on this crucial doublespeak. Balram, the dalit narrator, is educating us about the vices of neoliberal India, but the reader now knows that he goes by the name of Ashok Sharma, as opposed to Balram Halwai. The reader also knows that these textual acrobatics is performed by diasporic author, Adiga who is thrice removed from Balram—through his location, his class and caste lived experience and finally through his access to the language, English. While much of South Asian literary SALA Conference Schedule/7

theory is engaged with binaries—of first-world-third-world interactions, of nation-state dynamics and center- periphery contestations—not much has been written about ‘regional subjectivities.’ Drawing on the above, this paper reflects on the importance of local, regional embodied space where multiple variants of hegemonic masculinities thrive as an additional lens through which the idea of ‘South Asia’ can be imagined. Through the various homosocial, masculine interactions, the reader gets an insight into regional India. If rural India is the microcosm, South Asia is the macrocosm where all the socio-political transactions (both within and without the text) are performed.

● Ambreen Hai, Smith College. “Indian and Sri Lankan Connections and Disconnections: Male-Male Servant-Employer Relations in Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger and Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef.”

White Tiger (2008) has drawn much critical attention, but none have addressed its similarities to Reef, another South Asian novel shortlisted for the Booker (1994). Both construct a male servant’s voice to explore, from his perspective, the evolving relationship between a migrant village boy and his urban upper-class male employer: in both, the servant develops a homoerotic attachment to and desire to emulate (through clothing, gestures) his master; in both, the servant narrator expresses jealousy of the master’s woman who breaks into their homosocial intimacy, and for whom he then develops a triangular desire; in both, the servant is able to break free of his dependence on his employer with the master’s death. However, where Adiga focuses on the exploitation and corruption of the master and the system he inhabits, where Balram has to brutally kill his master to escape, Gunesekera presents the benevolence of the master who educates Triton and helps him escape their violence torn country to build a new future. This paper will explore South-South relations by comparing these Indian and Sri Lankan transnational fictions that address both domestic classed and global relations. By placing these texts in conversation, in their broader contexts, I explore how they cast fresh light on each other and on the questions they pose. How do they address postcolonial servitude, the internal colonization of the underclasses by an emergent postcolonial elite, or the failure to deliver the promises of independence to among the most vulnerable of the nation’s population? What is the significance of White Tiger’s turn to China, and Reef’s to Britain, as each imagines another nation as site of refuge or ironic alternative to its own?

SESSION : : AM-: PM

A Wilde The Indian Ocean and the Past Present of Empire Chair: Pallavi Rastogi, Louisiana State University

● Nienke Boer, Yale-NUS College. “Oceanic Tales, Imperial Legacies: Robinson Crusoe in the Indian Ocean.”

This essay examines how earlier precedents of forced migration and literary narrative continue to echo in contemporary renditions and rationales. Boer’s primary site of attention is the Chagos Archipelago in the middle of the Indian Ocean, once populated by descendants of European plantation owners, East African enslaved people, and South Asian indentured laborers. In 1973, however, all the islands’ inhabitants were forcibly deported to Mauritius and the Seychelles by the British government, and these individuals are now seeking legal redress in the U.K. More recently, on Diego Garcia, the largest of the Chagos islands, the U.S. government has allegedly held suspected terrorists at a CIA “black site.” The archipelago, as classified correspondence has shown, is understood in part through Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Although that 1719 novel was set in the Atlantic Ocean, Boer shows how British-imperial imaginaries traveled to the ocean on the other side of the African continent, where they have been repeatedly invoked vis-à-vis involuntary human displacement and imprisonment.

● Sean M. Kennedy, CUNY-Grad Center. “Corruption: A Pre-History from Fanqui-Town.” SALA Conference Schedule/8

Although “corruption” has become a buzzword across the Global South, where cronyism, kickbacks, and pay-to- play schemes are thought to be endemic to postcolonial nation-states, Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke (2011) shows that corruption is both an export from the Global North to the Global South and a formative element of global economic affairs. The novel, based in extensive historical research, vividly portrays the corruption that went hand in hand with formal commerce through and on the banks of the Indian Ocean during the mercantilist era. This corruption is especially prevalent in the wildly heterogeneous “Fanqui-town,” or foreign enclave, on the edge of Canton, now Guangzhou, China. Moreover, this corruption, the novel implies, is a subset of the overall corruptive dynamics inherent in the colonial encounter: namely, the attempted corruption of one nation’s formal and customary laws by an imperial power, and the corrosion of nationalist norms of race, gender, and sexuality through the heterogeneous social exchanges that make up daily life in the interstices of empires.

● Usha Rungoo, SUNY Purchase. “The Shipping Container and the Human Cargo Ship: Bridging (Neo)Colonial Histories in Amal Sewtohul’s Made in Mauritius.”

Examining Made in Mauritius, this essay traces the trope of the shipping container in relation to the novel’s protagonist, who travels around the world with or inside of his shipping container. Rungoo posits this container as a metaphor that holds together the histories and geographies packed in the protagonist’s identity and the identities of Indo-Mauritians overall. Her reading of Made in Mauritius (2013) emphasizes Mauritius’s foundation as a site of mercantilism, colonization, and capitalism. She argues that Sewtohul’s use of the shipping container updates Paul Gilroy’s trope of the slave ship and that of the Indian indenture ship as a signifier for the commodification of bodies, the displacement of peoples and cultures, and the birth of Creole societies. This resignification also allows Sewtohul to bridge the scholarship of the Black Atlantic with that of the kaala pani (the crossing of the “dark water” by millions of Indian indentured laborers) while connecting these historical experiences on and across two oceans to current forms of forced labor and migrations.

● Neelofer Qadir, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “‘Kifa Urongo’: Structures of Unfreedom in Paradise.”

This paper will examine Afro-Asian collaborations and conflicts through the optic of unfree labor, circuits of capital, and the caravan trade as represented in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s 1994 novel, Paradise. Stretching the boundaries of Indian Ocean studies scholarship that has focused primarily on port cities and maritime networks – whether influenced by the millenia-old monsoon winds or colonial transport labor – to consider their relation to the African interior, this paper engages the problematic of un/freedom and the South Asian finance that participated in underwriting it in the context of local and regional histories of slavery. Following Indian Ocean historian Gwyn Campbell, whose work reveals the highly variegated nature of slavery and forced/coerced labor in the region, this reading focuses on the kinship and religious networks through which the novel’s central tensions are articulated. By attending to the caravan trade and relations of debt that mediate it, we can develop a more robust critique of the cultural politics that sustain unfree labor within the Global South; in particular, we can capture a more textured sense of the racialized dynamics of exchange between Africa and Asia without exclusively routing them through the histories of European conquest.

B Cibo Matto South Asia in Conflict: The Ethics and Politics of Postcolonial Witnessing Chair: Kavita Daiya, George Washington University

● Amanda Lagji, Pitzer College. “The Enduring Spectacle of the Aftermath: Embodying the Blast in The Association of Small Bombs”

After his two sons die in a “small bomb” blast in a Delhi market, Vikas Khurana, a documentary filmmaker in Karan Mahajan’s 2016 novel The Association of Small Bombs, grapples with his grief by turning to art. But the content and form confound him: “How,” he asks himself, “to make a documentary about terror?” (Mahajan 76). Vikas’s question can be asked more broadly: How can (and should) one create art about terror? And what is the SALA Conference Schedule/9

relationship between terror and spectacle? Much scholarship on terrorism and literature produced in the twenty-first century centers 9/11 and the American War on Terror. Part of the decentering work that the novel undertakes is its positioning of 9/11 in the global imagination. Mansoor Ahmed studies in California when 9/11 occurs and witnesses the spectacle unfold on the television, and he tries to connect with his American peers by recounting his own intimate experience as a victim of terror—even as immigrants of South Asian descent are being profiled, harassed, and bullied in the wake of 9/11. Further, while 9/11 has been figured in American politics as a moment of unique and exceptional rupture and discontinuity, Mahajan insists on the seismic impact of the “smaller” bombings that are quickly forgotten or reported by local rather than global media. The novel also emphasizes wider South Asian regional context—upcoming elections in Kashmir—to understand the Delhi market blast that constitutes the “ground zero” of Mahajan’s novel. This paper will investigate the relationship between aftermath, time, witnessing, and spectacle through The Association of Small Bombs, and focus specifically on the way Mahajan characters come to embody—literally, and figuratively—the temporality of a bomb’s aftermath.

● Purnima Bose, Indiana University. “History and Rumor in Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes.”

In Provincializing Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty famously urges scholars to decenter the "west" by excavating the history of capitalism in order to tell the stories of the "rest." Such a decentering enables subaltern historiography and unsettles accounts of global history that have reductively privileged the metropole. South Asian literature provides a rich archive for responding to Chakrabarty's imperative: In their representation of quotidian experiences, novels flesh out the subjectivity of characters thereby contributing analyses of historical agency that reverberates across the national, regional, and transnational registers, giving us a new purchase on international conflicts. Mohammed Hanif's A Case of Exploding Mangoes, a darkly comic novel about Zia ul-Haq's 1988 death, weaves rumors about his gruesome death together with historical details such as the case of Safia Bibi, the thirteen-year old blind girl whose rape tested the Zina Ordinance, to suggest that all segments of Pakistan's social classes conspire in his assassination. While not a prominent feature of reviews of the novel, Pakistan's role in Afghanistan as a conduit for the weapons and drug trade during the Soviet Occupation are the palimpsest for the plot. The novel, thus, opens up a critique of the Cold War in its exploration of the dynamics of regional conflict. This paper focuses on Hanif's fictionalization of the rivalry between the US and USSR in South Asia, the effects of which continue to be experienced in the region today. A Case of Exploding Mangoes demonstrates that all politics are spectacle and the powerful role of rumor in challenging the silences of official history.

● Saumya Lal, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “Precarious Empathy and the Crisis of Witnessing in Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator.”

Representations of political conflicts within and between postcolonial countries remain haunted by the risk of being co-opted into (neo)colonial stereotypes of the Global South as chaotic and primitive. Postcolonial writers have attempted to resist this appropriation even as they engage with the crisis of primary witnessing – that is, the disruption of the epistemic and emotional underpinnings of witnessing – that violent conflicts almost inevitably produce. In this paper, I suggest that Mirza Waheed’s novel The Collaborator, which looks at the Kashmir conflict during the 1990s, negotiates this challenge by highlighting the precariousness of empathy during conflicts, which significantly affects the lens of witnessing. In doing so, it makes readers consider their own positionality in the act of secondary witnessing through the text. The novel’s unnamed protagonist observes how the political upheaval around him gradually transforms the grounds of his relationships with other (both friends and enemies) almost beyond recognition, rendering the conditions of possibility of empathy extremely precarious. For instance, he is exasperated by his father’s appeasement of the Indian army captain, Kadian, who in return employs the protagonist as a collector of weapons from corpses. While witnessing the dead bodies of young Kashmiris like himself makes the protagonist seethe with empathic anger, a sense of numb resignation leads him to practice his aim by shooting at the corpses. In contrast, he fails to execute his plan to shoot Kadian, as a momentary empathic connection holds him back. Although the novel presents a largely sympathetic portrayal of the protagonist, it also complicates the reader’s empathy for him by raising questions about his complicity. By staging the precariousness of empathy across various registers, the novel thus compels readers – SALA Conference Schedule/10

both within and outside South Asia – to reconsider the terms on which particular representations of the Kashmir conflict engage them in witnessing.

● Maryse Jayasuriya, University of Texas at El Paso. “Ethics and Empathy in Sri Lankan Representations of Refugees.”

In the nine years since the end of the military conflict in Sri Lanka, one of the most brutal and high-profile intra- South Asian conflicts of the last century, many literary texts about the trauma of war—particularly the brutalities at the end of the war—have begun to appear. This paper considers how Sri Lankan Anglophone authors who have significant transnational profiles (Vander Poorten in the United Kingdom and Singapore, and Arudpragasam in the United States) have written about refugees and displaced persons. In Vander Poorten’s poem “Love Displaced,” the speaker is a displaced person in a camp agonizing over what might have happened to a loved one—the speaker’s love is a “bullet lodged deep” in the belly, and waking up from a dream of lovemaking “is barbed wire/ slicing the lips.” Arudpragasam’s novel The Story of a Brief Marriage focuses on Dinesh, a young man in a refugee camp being shelled by the Sri Lankan security forces; Dinesh, after losing his home and all his loved ones within a few months, attempts to understand his plight while trying to connect to Ganga, a young woman he has married in the camp. While these literary works fulfill one of the functions of literature by bearing witness to and creating empathy for people who have endured trauma, the poem and the novel also underscore the ethical implications of attempting to imagine and convey unspeakable grief and suffering and raise the question of whether such empathy is attainable in texts that work to avoid exploitation and voyeurism. My paper shows that, as they write Sri Lanka’s conflicts in the world of Anglophone literature, these writers carry out a careful balancing act between empathy and appropriation.

C Churchill South Asian Waterways: Contemporary Migratory and Sexual Flows Chair: Christopher Ian Foster, Jackson State University

● Christopher Ian Foster, Jackson State University. “From A. R. F. Webber’s Sunlit Western Waters to Shani Mootoo’s Gulf of Paria: On the Intersection of Migration and Sexuality in South Asian Caribbean Literature.”

This presentation intersects migration and sexuality in the context of the South-Asian Caribbean and its diasporas. Utilizing an archive of queer Caribbean literature that reflects both diaspora and sexuality I ask: Are there overlaps in the ways that sexual norms and the management of immigration are regulated or otherwise shaped? How do these issues relate to citizenship in a particular nation? What are the ways in which queer Caribbean diaspora literature redresses or discloses the violences of heteronationalism, heteropatriarchy, or anti-immigrant ideology and practice? Indeed, it was only in 1990 that the immigration policy restricting “homosexual” immigration to the United States was lifted (originally instituted in 1952), and other such policies and their correlating ideologies exist around the world. It is therefore necessary to parse how they work and how they intersect through the study of the ways in which they are represented in literature. From Eliot Bliss’ 1934 Luminous Isle and Mayotte Capécia’s 1948 I am a Martinican Woman to Nicole Dennis-Benn’s 2016 Here Comes the Sun and Shani Mootoo’s 2017 Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab, Caribbean literature has represented both same-sex sexuality and migration in important ways. Here I broach the questions of their overlap.

● Rahul K. Gairola, Murdoch University. “Peering Outside of the Pink Tent: Postcolonial DH along the Queer Rim of the Indian Ocean.”

This paper surveys how digital culture and praxis is apart from yet connected throughout three postcolonial cities that were once jewels in the British Empire’s crown: Durban in South Africa, Chennai in southern India, and Perth in western Australia. I track the Zulu, Tamil, Hindi, and English circuits of queer communities networked across the Indian Ocean rim. I show how the digital milieu in this sector of the Global South (itself a SALA Conference Schedule/11

problematic term) is shaped by its displacement from the male/female binary, and instead enables a flexibility that reflects the acceptance of the third gender. These three loci, I will show, enable counter-practices in the digital Global South for queer subjects who are neither at home in English or at home online.

● Respondent: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Columbia University.

:-: PM—LUNCH SESSION : :-: PM Wilde Professionalization Panel I: Publications: Challenges and Opportunities (Roundtable) Chair: Nalini Iyer, Incoming Editor, South Asian Review

● John C. Hawley, Professor, Santa Clara University ● Ranjit Arab, Senior Acquisitions Editor, University of Iowa Press ● Rebecca Guest, Managing Editor, Arts & Humanities Journals, Taylor & Francis ● Sage Milo, Development Editor, Digital Resources, Taylor & Francis

SESSION : :-: PM Wilde The World of South Asian Literature: A Creative Writing Panel Chair: Madhurima Chakraborty, Columbia College Chicago

● Mary Anne Mohanraj, University of Illinois Chicago. “Putting Sri Lankans in Space.” ● S. Shankar, University of Hawai‘i. “Challenges of Literary Invention: Writing in English What is Outside English.” ● Samrat Upadhyay, Indiana University. “Translating South Asia.” ● Oindrila Mukherjee, Grand Valley State University. “This or That?: The Conundrum of Writing Contemporary South Asia.”

:-: PM Wilde: GENERAL BUSINESS MEETING

:-: PM: DINNER ON YOUR OWN

:-: PM Wilde: HUMARA MUSHAIRA Chair: Amritjit Singh, Ohio University

DAY : MONDAY, JANUARY ,

: AM: REGISTRATION DESK OPENS

SESSION : :-: AM

A Wilde Professionalization Panel II: Altered Expectations in Uncertain Times (Roundtable) Chair: Moumin Quazi, Tarleton State University; Aniruddha Mukhopadhyay, Texas A&M University- Kingsville SALA Conference Schedule/12

● Aniruddha Mukhopadhyay, Texas A&M University-Kingsville. “Going on the Job Market as an International Grad Student.” ● Cynthia Leenerts, East Stroudsburg University. “Stickin' to the Union: Solidarity in the Face of Uncertain Times.” ● Robin E. Field, King’s College. “Planning Your Long-Term Career Arc.” ● Moumin Quazi, Tarleton State University. “A New Professor’s Changing Expectations for New Faculty.” B Cibo Matto South Asia and Diasporas before World War II Chair: Nalini Iyer, Seattle University

● Prabhjot Parmar, University of the Fraser Valley. “‘The corner of a picture’”: Literary Representations of Indian Soldiers in the Great War.”

Taken from Timothy Findley’s novel The Wars, the title of this paper—“the corner of a picture”—serves as a metaphor to illuminate the contribution of soldiers from undivided India within the wider context of the Great War. Other than receiving the attention of some historians of the Great War, the Indian experiences have remained largely outside the British/European literary canon. First published in , Mulk Raj Anand’s novel Across the Black Waters disrupts the largely Eurocentric narrative of the Great War by drawing exclusive attention to the contribution of the IEF in France. In tandem with selected novels that focus either entirely or partially on Indian soldiers fighting in the First World War, this paper explores representations of the Indian troops by authors writing in English and vernacular from their colonial and postcolonial locations in India and elsewhere. Retrieving experiences and recuperating histories to unfold the complexities of race, class, caste, and sexuality on the Western Front, Mesopotamia, British East Africa, and Greece, the paper examines the crossing of boundaries—geographical, cultural, and sociological—and the textured intersection of history, testimony, and literary traditions. By establishing a dialogue between selected novels and archival photographs, letters, and testimonies, the paper demonstrates how different authors, drawing from a variety of sources, including oral testimony, complicate the notions of subjectivity in light of questions arising out of British imperialism in India. It suggests that simultaneously revealing and critiquing complex codes of behaviour, they effectively interweave the multi-layered boundaries of race, class, caste, and rank that are further complicated by the introduction of gender and sexuality.

● Clara A. B. Joseph, University of Calgary. “The Account of Priest Joseph (): Why an Indian Christian Text Does (Not) Matter.”

In his essay, “Subaltern Studies in Retrospect and Reminiscence,” Dipesh Chakrabarty shares that he was initially surprised but later convinced to notice that his mentor, Ranajit Guha, was linking th century acts of oppression and ideologies of landlords against peasants to the ancient and religious legal text, the Manusmriti. An awareness of the ways in which deep structures of oppression pervade systems and that too across time caused the change in Chakrabarty’s reaction. He goes on to conclude, “the problem of the archaic in the modern is not just a problem for less developed countries,” meaning that the West too is susceptible to the issue; but the point I wish to make is that the “archaic” texts in India Studies force studies on the Indian Christian outside the shared cultural code. Similarly, in the West, when this archaic text is the “English Bible” or other privileged religious or secular texts, even the Christian element in India remains alien as either post/colonial missionary accounts or simply irrelevant. “The Account of Priest Joseph,” also known as “The Narratives of Joseph the Indian,” is an early th century interview with a Thomas Christian priest who joined the famous traveler, Pedro Alvares Cabral, on his return trip to Lisbon. This text, on the other hand, disrupts the priority of Christianity for colonial events in the th and th century not by removing Christianity from the equation but by shifting the spotlight to the figure of an Eastern Christian. Therefore, my paper will examine this text to consider: a) how and why Global Early Modern Studies rejects this text b) how and why Postcolonial Studies is equally uninterested in this text c) what the significance is of the narrator of this text receiving a proto-national identity.

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● Abdollah Zahiri, Seneca College (King Campus). “South by the Southwest: Ghadar Activists in Iran in the ’s and ’s.”

This paper engages with Ghadar activists in an unlikely place: Iran. Characterized by Robert Young as a “Semi- colony”, Iran does not spatially fit in the postcolonialscape taken for South Asia. This writer plans to investigate the cultural production of of South Asian identity in West Asia as a global phenomenon. In this context the anti- British activities of the Ghadar activists in Iran will be probed especially in view of the fact that Iran served as a conduit to convey revolutionary literature originating from San Francisco and destined for India through Soviet collaboration. It will further probe the notion of a global South Asia spatially and conceptually that would lead to a theoretical intervention that would push the scope of postcolonial theory to accommodate West Asia. This spatial accommodation would shed light on local histories of a “semi-colony” that in terms of Walter Mingolo’s text, Local Histories/Global Design, would bring a trajectory of local histories that indelibly are intertwined with the history of the Empire especially at the threshold of the consolidation of Pax Americana in place of Pax Britannica. Added to this historic juxtaposition is the other rivalries in Iran—well worth the subject of a spy novel—that will come to light during this study of Ghadar activism in Iran, a bone of contention among Britain, Germany, and the United States. Through the lens of Ghadar activism in Iran this paper will shed light on a global south Asia west of the British Empire, the theatre of this western scramble enacted by players across the Atlantic for hegemony.

● Amrita Mishra, University of Texas at Austin. “Indenture's Intimacies: Effects of Early Indian Nationalism in Raise the Lanterns High and Sea of Poppies.”

Indo-Caribbean and indentured labor studies largely theorizes south-south transnationalism by exploring the ways that “Indianness”—through social structures, religious practices, and language at the least—has informed Indo-Caribbean identity formation. Yet little scholarship examines the opposite direction, or how indenture—in terms of the creation of an Indian labour diaspora and displacement of Indian subjects, labourers’ material realities, or indenture’s discursive treatment in colonial Commissioners’ Report—affected or produced Indian national identity. Tejaswini Niranjana laments over this common impasse in Caribbean and South Asian studies: “one cannot talk about Trinidad without talking about India… the obverse, however, is clearly not true; one can talk endlessly about India without the Caribbean.” Scholars who do consider the influence of indenture on Indian national identity usually locate such a relationship in the twentieth century Indian anti-colonial movement that Gandhi’s anti-indenture campaign made indenture’s abolition so central to. Indo-Caribbeanists particularly use this campaign to determine how Indian nationalist ideology—particularly Partha Chatterjee’s formulation of bhadramila—depended upon representations of indenture and specifically of coolie/indentured women as morally depraved or sexually transgressive (a trope initially produced by colonial reports). This paper takes such interventions further through the imaginative space of two contemporary novels, Lakshmi Persaud’s Raise the Lanterns High and Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies, to suggest an earlier influence of indenture: that the “new woman” discourse’s creation and the separation of home and world relied upon indenture, whose beginnings historically coincide. By demonstrating a potential nineteenth century “centripetal” relationship between India and the Caribbean, following John Mackenzie’s conceptualization of colonial cultural forces intended centrifugally from metropole to colony acting inwards to inform metropolitan identity, I assert that such transnationalisms can crucially change how we understand the formation of nationalism.

C Churchill Transnational Circulations of South Asia Chair: Maryse Jayasuriya, University of Texas at El Paso

● Supurna Dasgupta, University of Chicago. “The ‘slithering fish’: Feeding the Global ‘Popular’ through South Asian Anglophone Poetry.”

This paper is an effort at understanding the global anxieties that underlie the formation of the category of the ‘popular’ in the anglophone South Asian poetic imagination. Beyond the dominant, residual and emergent SALA Conference Schedule/14

(Raymond Williams), what continues to elude the critical scholar of ‘culture’ is the location of the ‘popular’. Does the ‘popular’ reside within the dominant majority, does it lurk in the shadows of the dwindling residual, or does it seek to rupture both of these through the emergent? Within a fast globalizing world of food tourism and slum tourism, the ‘popular’ has specific geographies and thus it often coalesces with the ‘glocal’: portraying local chapters in a global history of rethinking consumption. I examine the ambiguous framing of the ‘popular’ in South Asian anglophone evocations of food: how the local citizen functions, how the global citizen imagines. It may be observed that in these poems, food constitutes the slippery lines between deprivation and privilege, public and private, as well as the people and the popular in these poems. I want to read craving and food as a spatio-temporal matrix, an ever-elusive Bakhtinian chronotope in a transcultural globalizing planet, and I argue that South Asian food-poetry releases these “two histories” (Dipesh Chakraborty) of inhabiting the world among its readers. For that I seek to chart access to privilege as modes of defining the ‘popular’ in two types of South Asian English poetry. The first by the India-based bilingual translator-poet Jayanta Mahapatra, and the second by the London-based diasporic Pakistani author Imtiaz Dharker. Mahapatra’s double-edged depiction of food in the midst of grave deprivation censures the neo-liberal global voyeuristic eye. Dharker’s travelling banquet reconstructs a recognizably South Asian cornucopia frequently echoed in diasporic circuits of varying privileges. Based on this contrast, I ask if the global south’s relation to poetic depiction of food sways between people’s lived materiality and ‘popular’ metaphoricity. This paper re-imagines the global audience with whom such poetry would resonate, wondering what worlds are being created through these South Asian eyes, and what ethics govern the consumption of this food-poetry.

It may be observed that in these poems food constitutes the slippery lines between deprivation and privilege, public and private, as well as the people and the popular in these poems. This paper reads craving and food as a spatio-temporal matrix like ever-elusive Bakhtinian chronotopes, and seeks to chart access to privilege in two different kinds of South Asian English poetry: the first by the India-based bilingual translator and poet Jayanta Mahapatra, and the second by the London-based diasporic author Imtiaz Dharker. This access to privilege is gained only through a popular imagination of ‘culture’ and ‘belonging’. Does the global south’s relation to food operate upon a tension between materiality and metaphoricity? This paper explores the relationship between the Anglophone poet-narrator and reader in each case to re-imagine the global audience with whom such poetry resonates, who consumes this food-poetry.

● Sayanti Mondal, Illinois State University. “Picturing Experience: Performing Transnational Identity in Bhajju Shyam’s The London Jungle Book.”

The paper would look in depth into how animal symbolism in Gond art plays an important role in helping a traditional Gond artist, Bhajju Shyam, relay his first experience of London visit through the book titled The London Jungle Book (). Shyam takes recourse to the multimodal forms of expression as a mark of his transnational identity, a scope of performing his identity that had been shaped in the culturally variant city of London. He uses art as the only medium of expressing himself. The book subverts the normative mainstream identity construction of the marginal communities and instead examines how the periphery, too, can construct the centre and tell a tale through a different perspective. Shyam, not just overthrows the dominant power equation, but also emphasizes on the importance of translingualism. His efforts highlight how there are alternative modes of narrating the same story. In addition, the publishing house, Tara Books, and the city of London serve as sites of contact zones and assist in the evolvement of Shyam’s hybrid identity. It is in these two sites that the two discreet cultures interact and negotiate with each other. Though Shyam’s hybrid experience did find a place in the text through his creative images, yet the marketing strategies opted by the publishing house reverses the power equation back to the center, facilitating the power game.

● Bhavya Tiwari, University of Houston. “Going Beyond English: World Literature and South Asian Literature.”

This paper proposes a comparative approach for engaging with World Literature by focusing on South Asian literatures, specifically from/about India. This essay shows that the paradigm of World Literature in the Indian context has to always be comparative, multilingual, and worldly, requiring scholars to engage with the “original” as well as the “translation,” without preferring one over the other. The presentation begins by examining the SALA Conference Schedule/15

new Anglophone writing by Chetan Bhagat that is independent from the colonial-colonizer, center-periphery, canonical-non-canonical, and local-global debates that are often used in framing the postcolonial and world literature debates. By inhabiting closely with bhasha literatures, in this case Nikhil Sachan's writings in Hindi, the new Anglophone as well as the bhasha readership, as shown in the presentation, are translational and multilingual. The engagement between the Anglophone reader and bhasha writing is furthered in the second case study that focuses on the translations of Tamil author Perumal Murugan in Hindi and English to highlight translation as a vital component in the understanding and theorizing of Indian literatures. The final case study examines the politics of translation between Anglophone literature and its transformation into the Anglophone world cinema that engages with the “slum narrative” of the Global South while also generating a parallel narrative to the Bollywood cinema, as visible in the work of Vikas Swarup and Saroo Brierley. The presentation concludes by urging scholars to employ a comparative methodology that is self-reflexive about the categories “Anglophone,” South Asia,” and “World,” and which is enmeshed in literary histories, where multilingualism and translation are points of departures in theorizing about literature that is post-postcolonial and post-global in English and beyond.

● Sohinee Roy, North Central College. “Playhouse: Art and Politics in the Bildung of a Child.”

The Indian novel in English in recent years has staked a claim as a global novel because of its planetary themes, and the success of its authors such as Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie in the West. Against this ever progressive trajectory of the Indian novel in English are the vernacular or bhasha writers who remain local in their themes and settings. Bridging the gap between the global Indian English authors and the bhasha writers, is a third group of authors who write in English but is hyper-local in their focus. Amit Chaudhuri and Saikat Majumdar belong to this category. Despite the almost exclusive evocation of the localities of North Calcutta in his novels, Majumdar’s novels in particular have found international fame. His latest novel Firebird has been published in the United States as Playhouse in 2017. Its international success is all the more impressive because Playhouse bucks the current trend towards the global in Indian English writing in its focus on the local. However, its evocation of the theatre district of North Calcutta almost as another character in its narrative has not deterred its global journey because its context compels experimentation with the form of the bildungsroman, transforming its optimistic trajectory. Exclusively focused on 1980s Calcutta, during the decline of the popular theatre as a result of state censorship, the novel is a bildungsroman that traces the transformation of the child Ori into an adult, his journey from the private sphere of his home to the public sphere of politics. But Ori’s development into a political being contrasts with his inability to outgrow a child’s tendency to conflate reality and representation. Thus Ori’s journey into adulthood and political agency is a regression into childhood that goes against the forward trajectory of the genre. I analyze this novel through the lenses of theories of the everyday to argue that this disjunction between the form and content of Playhouse points to the darkness underlying the progressive politics of Calcutta in the late 20th century. In the process the novel reveals the effect of censorship in the development of political consciousness.

SESSION : :-: AM

A Wilde Situating South Asian Anglophone Literature in the World: The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Volume . (Roundtable)

This roundtable panel brings together the editor and key contributors to Volume 10 of The Oxford History of the Novel in English. The volume, one of the last in the series, covers Anglophone fiction in South and South East Asia since 1945, and is due to be published in February 2019.

Chair: Alex Tickell, The Open University

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● Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, New York University. “The Novel of India.” ● Ruvani Ranasinha, King’s College. “Novels of Sri Lanka: Feminist Readings of Conflict within the 'Global' Economy of South Asian Fiction.” ● Kavita Daiya, George Washington University. “Gender, Sexuality, and the Family in South Asian Fiction.” ● Charlotta Salmi, Queen Mary, University of London. “Picturing South Asia: The Rise of the Regional Graphic Narrative.”

B Cibo Matto Interrogating the Space of Transnationalism Chair: Robin E. Field, King’s College

● Sagnika Chanda, University of Pittsburgh. “The Mexican and South Asian Telemigrant: Transnational Immigrant Labor and Internet Utopianism in Sleep Dealer and Digital India.”

Alex Rivera's film Sleep Dealer provides a critique of the borderless space of the Internet. The World Wide Web is perceived as a global village; however, Rivera portrays a material reality of militarized borders on the ground. The film is a nightmare/fantasy of an immigrant worker who stays put in Latin America and, via the Net, transmits their labor to a worker robot in the U.S. The pure labor crosses the border, but the worker stays out. While conceived as a critique of Internet utopianism and the politics of immigration, Rivera’s prescient film holds the truth kernel of current transnational labor, one of the major driving forces of the Indian economy. The advent of call centers in India and the Indian youth being wooed by a "Digital India" that feeds the demand for cheap transnational labor transmitted from the Global South to the Global North has crystallized what Rivera calls the "first generation of telemigrants." The worker's invisibility versus visibility of his/her labor is an important intervention in Rivera's film. Memo, the protagonist, realizes his own body as an embodiment of the redundancy that is the lot of the subaltern workers caught in the nexus of capitalist exploitation. He joins forces with Luz, who uses cyberspace for political activism. They appropriate the very exploitative information technologies to militate against neoliberal economic hegemony and labor exploitation in the borderlands. The wasted, disposable body of transnational workers rendered invisible in these spaces whose labor is appropriated into a wider hegemonic discourse of oppression, channelize the flux inherent in their precarious existence. The film highlights the shared predicament of the transnational telemigrant of Mexico and South Asia. My paper frames Sleep Dealer as a sociopolitical commentary on the dangerous underpinnings of "Digital India" BPO project under the present Indian government demonstrating shared precarities in the Global South. ● Sritama Chatterjee. “As if a map had been redrawn in front of us’: Reading Spatiality, Aesthetics of Slowness, and Ethics of ‘Worlding’ in Benyamin’s Goat Days.”

The histories of laborers, who have migrated from South Asia to the Gulf have received little attention within the corpus of South Asian literary historiography of the migrant laborer. Benyamin’s novel Aadu Jeevitham (2008), originally written in Malayalam and translated into English by Joseph Koyipally, as Goat Days (2012) remains one of the few novels that documents the struggle of the labor diaspora in the Gulf. Najeeb, who is the protagonist of the novel, ends up in a goat-rearing farm in the desert, after being cheated by a recruiting agent, who never arranged a visa for him that would allow him to work in the Gulf region.In this paper, I propose that the space of the desert in the novel, as an analytical category offers an interpretative framework to read the ‘worlding’ of South Asian Literatures through recuperation of alternative temporalities, that disrupt and resist teleological and calculable time of globalization. I demonstrate that the novel achieves the time-space continuum through aesthetics of slowness such as endurance, waiting and evasion, the realization of which is made possible by the topography of desert in the novel. I read the spatiality of the desert in Goat Days as permeable, elastic and SALA Conference Schedule/17

dynamic, thereby offering a template to read the performativity of time in the novel as a continuum, which is generative and yet resists any mode of instrumentalisation. Reading the desert as a heuristic device, in conjunction with temporalities that are provisional elicits a specific method of reading South Asian literatures, whereby the ideologically manufactured coordinates of South Asia as a geopolitical entity are decentered. In adopting such an approach, what emerges is an ethics of reading South Asia, not as an agglomeration of the ‘world’ but as a literary formation, that inhabits the world. ● Robin E. Field, King’s College. “Space and Temporality in Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘Third and Final Continent’.”

Few literary texts engage the world—as a geographical place and cultural space—as directly as Jhumpa Lahiri does in “The Third and Final Continent,” the last story in Interpreter of Maladies. The unnamed Bengali protagonist emigrates from India to England to the United States over the course of five years, a journey that nominally explains the title of the story. However, Lahiri employs a sophisticated series of symbols in this story—in particular, the first astronaut landing on the moon in 1969—to comment upon the tremendous journeys undertaken by not only the Bengali protagonist, but by his elderly white American landlady. By invoking space—first as outer space, then as the geography of the Earth, and finally as temporal space—Lahiri creates parallels between the “splendid” accomplishment of the astronauts, the “quite ordinary” immigration story of the protagonist, and the “awe”-inspiring life story of Mrs. Croft. The moon landing itself provides the symbolic underpinning of the “space” symbolism in this story. The 103-year-old Mrs. Croft is amazed by this American accomplishment; and the Bengali protagonist, in turn, is amazed by Mrs. Croft’s age and tries to imagine the changes she has lived through since 1866. When Mrs. Croft meets the new wife of the protagonist—a tense moment that could go terribly wrong, given the cultural differences between Mala and Mrs. Croft—Lahiri underscores the lack of distance between the old woman and this Bengali couple. Ultimately, the story uses the symbolism of (outer) space and real, yet unimaginable journeys to emphasizes the commonalities between two characters who find themselves navigating a strange new world. ● Kay Sohini Kumar, Stony Brook University. “Across Borders and In-Between Spaces.”

I want to analyze how South Asianists such as Mohsin Hamid (in Exit West) contest the dominant narrative surrounding immigrants. Hamid highlights how people of white ancestry have more claim to American-ness than all others, who are deemed less worthy regardless of their tenure in the US. Such questioning of the categories of ‘native’ and ‘immigrant’ also draws attention to how colonialism plays a major role in the formation of dominant ideas of nationhood, and by extension, the conception of Others, especially in the diasporic context. One of the most notable features of Exit West is that the reader is never told what country the protagonists come from. Although a significant portion of the narrative occurs in their homeland, the country is not identified by name—which allows Hamid to comment on the ongoing refugee crisis as a whole instead of focusing on one particular case. Cultural markers mentioned in the text suggest the protagonists hail from South Asia, likely Pakistan, but it could as easily be India or Bangladesh. In a world where refugees are perceived as “illegitimate Others” or the “swarms in the nation” (Ahmed), Hamid focusses on what happens at and after the moment of contact between asylum seekers and the inhabitants of the land they are seen as infiltrating—by reimagining a world where national borders are breached by a sudden apparition of magical doors that teleport people from spaces of conflict/war to more viable places in the West. As barriers between global North and global South break down, the racialized fear of the Other gradually diminishes. This leads one to question if fear of the Other is an effect of (and results in) forced modern day segregation? Can “securing the borders” be read as an attempt to preserve racial/national/ethnic purity? C Churchill Connecting in Margins Chair: Meghan Gorman-DaRif, University of Texas at Austin

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● Meghan Gorman-DaRif, University of Texas at Austin. “Decentering Division: Representations of Indian-Kenyan Solidarity in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction.”

Some , Indian indentured laborers were recruited for the construction of ‘The Lunatic Express’, as the British Uganda railway project in came to be known. Within colonial Kenya, the British established Indians as a racial group positioned between the English and the Africans, creating tensions between the two groups developed that would have profound effects on their relations into the independence era. This paper analyzes representations of the Indian community in Kenya in relation to the building of the railway through a reading of M.G. Vassanji’s The In-Between World of Vikram Lall () and Peter Kimani’s Dance of the Jakaranda (). While contemporary Kenyan writing has focused extensively on colonial histories and African resistance, the novels of Vassanji and Kimani stand out in their focus on the Indian community in Kenya, which, as Ngũgı̃ has noted, has remained largely marginal and invisible. Kimani’s novel, in particular, excavates elided histories that center on the railway as a site for British divide-and-rule tactics, and Indian-Kenyan solidarity against colonialist and capitalist exploitation. In its focus on solidarities across race, the novel defamiliarizes notions of ethnic tension in Kenya, highlighting the colonial roots of these divisions, and representing a long history of collective resistance. I argue that while Vassanji uses the railway as a metaphor for the in-betweenness of the Asian community in Kenya, Kimani establishes the railway a metaphor for the possibilities of collective resistance to colonial and postcolonial capitalist exploitation, making an important and timely intervention into imagining the African collective in the aftermath of the post-election violence of .

● Muhammad Waqas Halim, Information Technology University, Lahore & Asad Ahmad Khan, Heidelberg University. “The Untold Story of Resistance in Balochistan: Voices of Dissent in Balochi Short Stories of Anees Sharif.”

The paper aims to analyze the narrative of resistance and rejection to submit in the remote and often neglected province of Pakistan – Balochistan – through a comprehensive examination of short stories of Anees Shareef, who was part of the rebel movement against the tyrannical operations of the state of Pakistan. Most notably, the paper intends to examine expressions used against dominance of oppressive culture through the symbolic use of objects and signs. The localized version of expressions portrays a very gloomy picture that culminates a milieu of deprivation, and ultimately heralds arrival of prosperity through the blooming of a flower that is peculiar to the land of Balochistan. The blossoming of flowers is used as a sign of beginning of the spring season in the tribal belt of Balochistan where the operation by the Pakistan Military during the era of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who, incidentally, is remembered for his struggle against the martial rule of the Army. The use of metaphor and imagery is rather profusely used in the writings that demonstrated influences from the Classic Persian Literature. Furthermore, the short stories can be viewed as continuation of postcolonial narratives against oppression and hegemony against the remains of the British rule in Pakistan (then India) and perpetuates brutal traditions of the Colonial State. Balochi is vastly spoken language in Balochistan province of Pakistan. The literature in Balochi language is highly influenced by leftist traditions and Marxist culture.

● Amelie Daigle, Boston College. “Tangible Gains and Intangible Losses: Global Inequity and Labor Migration in Ratika Kapur’s The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma and Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits.”

This paper will examine how global labor migration affects family dynamics in two contemporary novels: Ratika Kapur’s The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma, which follows a middle-class woman in Delhi whose husband is working in Dubai, and Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, in which several Moroccan migrants leave their families and undertake the dangerous journey across the Strait of Gibraltar into Spain. These are set in radically different geographical and cultural contexts, yet in both novels families are forced to structurally adapt in response to the transnational labor market, with married couples living apart and breadwinners sending remittances home from abroad.

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These transnational families are both generative and disruptive. In both The Private Life and Hope, the financial gains made through migration are offset by personal losses; Mrs. Sharma struggles to raise her son without his father and in her loneliness begins an affair with another man, while after years of separation Hope’s Aziz feels he hardly knows his wife. When read in combination, these novels provoke questions about the hidden costs of globalization that may not appear on an economists’ balance sheet. They illustrate the impossible decisions made by characters who are forced to weigh tangible gains against intangible losses. While the characters in these novels are imaginary, the stakes are very real. In this paper I will argue that the intangible losses of globalization resist quantification and are best measured through the narratives we tell each other. These global novels depict the loss and disruption of social networks, and in doing so they evoke the hidden costs of labor migration driven by global economic inequity

● Jessica K. Young, New College of Florida. “‘This is a Dirge for the World…This is Saga for a Nation:’ The Air India Tragedy and (Trans)national Recognition.”

I examine the evolution of literature regarding the Air India bombing, a transnational tragedy that highlights the failure of state and international agencies to recognize and commemorate a complex tragedy. In the bombing’s immediate aftermath, families of the predominantly Indo-Canadian victims languished in administrative limbo, where Canada, their adopted nation, saw the victims as foreigners, not citizens, and India, their ancestral homeland, sought to distance itself from an act of international terrorism that resulted from its own state-sponsored violence against Sikhs. As a result, it took over twenty years of continued advocacy by the victims’ families for the Canadian government to acknowledge the event as a “domestic tragedy.” However, this later, limited recognition by the state justified Canada’s increased post-/ security and further marginalized the South Asian community while leaving the tragedy largely unclaimed and unincorporated into the state’s imaginary.

Tracing the responses to the tragedy from Bharati Mukherjee’s “The Management of Grief” to Padma Viswanathan’s The Ever After of Ashwin Rao, I examine how Air India literature expands from claims for state recognition to later works that forge transnational links across Canada and India based upon collective memories of trauma and state-sponsored violence. Most importantly, I place this literature within the evolution of claims made by victims’ families that demands Canada address not only the systemic racism against immigrants, but also its settler colonial policies that undermine the sovereignty against First Nations people. Ultimately, I argue that Viswanathan’s novel is emblematic of later Air India literature that uses the politics of rejection pioneered by indigenous activists, rather than the politics of recognition, in order to circumvent the state, thereby tying transnational histories together and producing a model for the transcultural deployment of memory against state-sponsored forgetting.

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A Wilde Cosmopolitanism and South Asian Identity Chair: John Hawley, Santa Clara University ● Brant Moscovitch, St. Anthony’s College, University of Oxford. “Cosmopolitanism and the Rise of Anti-Colonial Internationalism, -.”

Reflecting on his experience as a student in the 1930s, T. N. Kaul declared that his time studying in London transformed him from a nationalist into an internationalist. Kaul, who went on to become India’s foreign minister and hold key ambassadorial roles around the world, was representative of many colonial elites who stepped out of British classrooms to assume leading positions in countries emerging from colonial rule. His statement, noteworthy for its description of a period known for rising colonial nationalism, is also reflective of similar sentiments by other South Asians, Africans and a diverse range of colonial students in Britain during the interwar period. This amounted to an internationalist moment, yet a fractured one to be sure, embedded in power hierarchies, defined by global aspirations and local preoccupations, taking many different forms, all of SALA Conference Schedule/20

which contained the seeds of hope as well as future divisions.

This paper proposes to draw on the many memoirs of colonial elites who studied in Britain during the interwar period in hopes of offering fresh insights into the emergence and character of cosmopolitanism and internationalism among colonial nationalists during the end of empire and decolonisation. Their memoirs raise several important questions, including: how did internationalism, as conceived by South Asian diasporas, compare to pan-Africanism and black internationalism? How did the migration of students affect evolving conceptions of cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism in Britain? How did developments in Britain compare with other contemporary colonial diasporic expressions, especially in France, centre of the ‘Négritude’ literary movement? How dependable are memoirs in assessing these problems?

In addressing the above questions, I aim to add to our understanding of how South Asian diasporas interacted with other colonial groups, while delineating the relationship between nationalism, internationalism, empire and the global, and the shadowy border areas between them. ● Sarah Beth Mohler, Truman State University. “Russian Literary Imagination’s Influence on South Asian Literature: A Close Analysis of Tolstoy’s Influence on Seth and Mueenuddin.” Russia, like India and Pakistan, is a culture situated between East and West that has long struggled with its desire to emulate and be accepted by both while keeping its own cultural identity intact. Likewise, many of the social issues Russian 19th-century authors wrote about (the social problems rooted in a feudal society with little class mobility and the divide between urban centers and remote rural districts) have resonated with South Asian writers to this day. Russian literature’s appeal to South Asian writers has been further enhanced by not being bound up with the colonial and cultural imperialism associated with British literature. This paper will examine the influence Tolstoy has had on two prominent Indian and Pakistani authors, Vikram Seth and Daniyal Mueenuddin. Although critics have compared Seth’s A Suitable Boy to Tolstoy’s War and Peace due to the size and epic scope of both novels, Seth, an avowed admirer of Russian literature, has not stated publicly that Tolstoy was an inspiration. By pointing out structural similarities, common methods of characterization, and thematic resonances, I will show that the counterpoint Seth sets up between Lata’s and Maan’s love stories in A Suitable Boy mirrors the way Tolstoy configures Anna’s and Levin’s in Anna Karenina, while Seth’s methods of political critique are closer to those Tolstoy employs in War and Peace. I will compare and contrast the influence I perceive Tolstoy has had on Seth with the influence Tolstoy has had on Mueenuddin, who has definitively cited Tolstoy as an inspiration, by analyzing the themes of revenge and mercy in Mueenuddin’s “Nawabdin Electrician” and Tolstoy’s War and Peace to demonstrate how rich the intersection between Russian literature and South Asian literature continues to be. ● Arnab Dutta Roy, University of Connecticut. “Cosmopolitanism and Tradition: A Critique of U.R. Ananthamurthy's Samskara.”

Arguments on cosmopolitanism are broadly of two kinds. Commonly, the idea is either dismissed as hegemonic (Cheah, Lowe) or it is seen as a Eurocentric system of ethics (Himmelfarb, Scarry). As such, a more cross-cultural evaluation of the topic is often overlooked. Some alternate studies (Hogan, Appiah) identify ‘cosmopolitan’ as those components of culture (such as ideas, stories, music, and food) that are widely shared by people through cultural contact. As such, they treat cosmopolitanism as ethical principles that promote the view that such shared practices should strengthen social relations between communities, along with the cultural identities of the individuals/groups practicing them. In this paper, I show that cosmopolitanisms are cultivated independently within traditional practices in India. In doing so, I also demonstrate that they are often evoked as ethical responses to norms of ‘purity’ deployed through exclusionary interpretations of tradition.

For this purpose, I consider U.R. Ananthamurthy’s Kannada novel Samskara. Ananthamurthy highlights two kinds of traditional interactions within the communal settings of a small Hindu village in modern Karnataka. He shows that dominant social interactions are determined through Brahminical norms of ‘purity,’ that are discriminatory to women, lower caste groups, and Muslims. Here, he demonstrates that such norms are often SALA Conference Schedule/21

justified through exclusionary interpretations of Hindu social ethics rooted in scriptures such as Manusmriti. However, more importantly, he shows that more egalitarian interpretations of social ethics, drawn from alternate traditional sources including precolonial Hindu epics, Buddhism, Sufism, and other regional folk cultures, allow oppressed characters in the novel to form inter-group solidarities as a way of collectively resisting such absolutist impositions. This non-coercive understanding of cosmopolitanism is largely missing in current academic discussions on the topic, with implications that extend well beyond Ananthamurthy’s novel. ● Maswood Akhter, Fulbright Scholar, Regis College. “‘Universal’ or ‘Culture-Specific’?: Raising the Issue of Critical Injustice (and Academic Apartheid) in the Reception of South Asian/Postcolonial Literature.”

In academic practices as well as in popular imagination, it is often the norm to assume “universality” to be the supreme achievement, and ultimate value, of a literary text; the customary reception of a postcolonial or South Asian text, however, presents a misfortune’s child. Neither academic experts nor general readers deem her qualified for universality, rather, the obsessive debate in her case revolve around her cultural specificity: she is more often creative elaborations of pre-existing white stereotypes about her, or at her best, “authentic” ethnic representative reclaiming her own narratives that were snatched. South Asian/Postcolonial Writing is thus perceived as a literary phenomenon that is essentially culture-specific, and incapable of addressing general human condition and concerns. I consider such politics of reception as example of critical injustice, which is, in effect, tantamount to academic racism, where universality remains only a western prerogative (remember the fate of Monica Ali’s post-Brick Lane affairs with European settings). Through an engaged analysis of some thematic and stylistic choices in selected South Asian/Postcolonial writings, my paper prepares a case against reductive definitions and pigeonholing of such texts, showing how one can easily comprehend the universality of certain struggles and expectations portrayed in them even when they carry unmistakable signatures of their respective cultures. I end on a note of celebration: many of the postcolonial/South Asian or diasporic authors, with their “hybridized” writerly consciousness and positionality, are, in fact, better able to portray variegated human reality compared to their western counterparts! B Cibo Matto The Unwanted Chair: Shazia Rahman, Western Illinois University

● Tavleen Purewal, University of Toronto. “‘Final Humiliation’: Opaque Relations of Shame in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss.”

In the tradition of diagnosing the affective modalities of governance to better understand systems of control and hierarchy, Dipyesh Anand articulates the right-wing Hindu nationalism of India as a “politics of fear” and hatred. However, it is in the parallel tradition of exploring the affective registers of resistance to these regimes – like in Leela Ghandi’s study of friendship – that I position my paper. Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss portrays a transformative affect of resistance through the father-son kinship of Biju, the family cook for the protagonist, and his son Biju who returns to Kalimpong from working illegally in the Global South conditions of labour in New York. The two meet at the end of the novel in what I suggest are postures of queerness, because the humiliations from their socioeconomic positions and their experiences in the patriarchal geopolitics of Gorkhaland and Hindu nationalism produce them as objects of shame and silence, as not-men. Biju returns home to encounter Gorkha soldiers that strip him of his belongings, leaving him to wear a woman’s dress. He meets his father in this outfit, and they embrace silently.

I argue that shame as a bodily phenomenon (Sara Ahmed) modulates an opacity between two subjects to preserve their irreducibility in the conditions of South Asian conflicts that render the Diasporic return to home, for Biju, a shameful one. I explore how globalizations of violence at work in New York and in Kalimpong leave these two characters without options of anger or hatred, but only shame. Coupled with the queer postures, the SALA Conference Schedule/22

shame creates a submissive position (Juana Maria Rodriguez) for these identities that perhaps then produce together one of the most affirmative and understanding moments of decolonial love.

● Binod Paudyal, Northern Arizona University. “Undesirability: Refugees and the Undocumented in South Asian Diasporic Literature.”

This paper examines the politics of undesirability, particularly in relation to the discussion of refugees and undocumented immigrants in US political and social discourses, in Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss and Hamid’s Exit West. By considering “undesirability” as a trope, this paper maps the journeys of “undesirable” subjects in what some critics are calling “the Trump era” in order to demonstrate the production of South Asian American identity as a global phenomenon, beyond the hegemonic norms of U.S. national and geographical borders. The failed adventure of Biju, an illegal immigrant in Desai’s novel, in New York, and the painful journey of Saeed and Nadia, two refugees in Hamid’s novel, to the west reflect the complexity of the contemporary world characterized by global migratory politics and global war on terror. Although illegal immigrants, refugees, and the invisible class are an important fabric of the contemporary South Asian diaspora in the United States, their presence and experiences are often ignored, perhaps because of the new visibility of South Asian Americans in literature and media, as well as because of the visible portrayal of South Asian Americans as the model minority in the American public sphere. Nevertheless, the supposed success story of South Asian Americans as the model minority silences, invalidates, and marginalizes the experiences of refugees and undocumented immigrants like Biju, Saeed, and Nadia, relegating them to undesirability. Using a transnational approach, responsive to an era of the “global war on terror,” global cultural citizenship, as well as the increasing nativism, this paper challenges us to reconsider the scope of South Asian American literary work, which transforms in fundamental ways the assumed relationship between the United States and South Asia and the formation of American identity.

● Shazia Rahman, Western Illinois University. “Postcolonial International Conflict Through an Animal Studies Lens.”

Nadeem Aslam’s novel The Blind Man’s Garden () describes the post-/ international conflict in Afghanistan and its effect on a Pakistani character named Mikal who lives close to the border with Afghanistan. Mikal speaks Pashto which Americans assume only Afghans speak and when he is captured by Americans, they find it hard to figure out whether he is Afghan or Pakistani. The slippage between these national identities is mirrored in the slippage between human and nonhuman in Mikal’s mind. While postcolonial theory illuminates the more human-centred aspects of the novel, a new trend in reading international conflict is to consider its effects on human and nonhuman alike. Such an environmental approach amplifies descriptions of the nonhuman land, rivers, and animals of that place refusing to think of them as merely setting or background to human concerns. As postcolonial ecocritics Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin () elegantly state, “What the postcolonial/ecocritical alliance brings out, above all, is the need for a broadly materialist understanding of the changing relationship between people, animals and environment” (). This changing relationship is both influenced by and influences the many different discourses of international conflict. In this paper, I will use an ecocritical lens to read Aslam’s novel to emphasize that our complete disregard for nonhuman animals is similar to the way in which we other some of our fellow humans. I argue that the character of Mikal’s desire to seek love and healing rather than war is linked to a wolf cub, various dogs, and, most of all, a snow leopard cub who influences Mikal’s decision to rescue an American soldier by risking his own life and well-being. As a result, Mikal’s openness to animals is shown to lead him to be more open to human others despite the presence of fierce exclusionary rhetoric.

● Sreyashi Ray, University of Minnesota. “Pachyderms, Tribals and the Precarity of Postcolonial Animality: A Comparative Reading of Mahasweta Devi’s Fiction.”

This paper is a comparative analysis of Bengali writer-activist Mahasweta Devi’s novella Jagmohan’s Death and Libyan novelist Ibrahim al-Koni’s novel Gold Dust, which attempts to understand how vernacular literatures from the Global South offer new perspectives for animal studies through their articulation of human-nonhuman transactions and interspecies intimacies within postcolonial spaces. In Jagmohan’s Death, Devi critiques the postcolonial politics of ethnicity, religious corruption and the feudal land-system in post-Emergency India SALA Conference Schedule/23

through her effective articulation of the relationship between an elephant and his caretaker, who travel through the forest-belts and mining-affected regions in the east. Al-Koni’s novel explores the relationship between a camel and a man from Tuareg tribal communities in the Sahara Desert. By bringing these two South-Asian and Arabic literary texts in conversation, this paper has two objectives: first, it shows how both human and nonhuman animals are made expendable within the systemic structures of biopolitical violence in peripheral spaces. Second, through an exploration of interspecies intimacy and relationships of inter-dependence between human and nonhuman animals that actively resist anthropocentric understandings of species vulnerability, this paper analyzes how animals, as companion species, reanimate the marginalized subjectivity of human beings in such conflict-ridden peripheral spaces of the Global South.

C Churchill Resistance, Borders, Conflict in South Asian Literature Chair: Rahul K. Gairola, Murdoch University

● Nudrat Kamal, Habib University, Karachi. “Borders, Diaspora, and Belonging: Tracing the Conceptualization of Home in South Asian Partition Fiction.”

This paper will trace the evolution of the conceptualization of home in South Asian Partition fiction, from vernacular fiction written in the immediate aftermath of Partition to more recent Anglophone novels on Partition that circulate globally and are part of the global South Asian literary imagination. The paper will argue that in much of the fiction written in the immediate aftermath of , there is a struggle in continuing to conceive of home as a spatial category, grounded in the geography of the physical land. As this spatial conceptualization of home becomes increasingly untenable due to the reality of many homes being geopolitically out of reach because of Partition, there is a movement toward a more temporal conceptualization of home which includes fragmentation, ambivalence and plurality, as well as an increasing awareness of the porousness of the boundaries between home and the world. This conceptualization of home is embraced more fully and developed further in more recent Anglophone “global” novels about Partition written by South Asian authors who themselves belong to a diaspora in the West and are thus part of a wider global circulation of texts. These Partition novels explore diasporic ideas of belonging and homeland through the utilization of postcolonial cosmopolitanism and post-migratory metaphors, as theorized by Ahmed Gamal and Carine Mardorossian. Tracing the evolution of the conceptualization of home in three Urdu short stories (Saadat Hasan Manto’s ‘Toba Tek Singh’, Jamila Hashmi’s ‘Exile’ and Mohammad Ali Ashraf’s ‘Separated from the Flock’) and two Anglophone novels (Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines and Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows) this paper will examine the shift in Partition texts from the spatial to the temporal home through a diasporic lens.

● Md. Alamgir Hossain, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “University, Neoliberalism, and the Undercommons: Resistance in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist.”

This paper explores the relation among the university, neo-liberalism, and resistance as presented in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. I argue that the university, in Hamid’s novel, sustains capitalism but at the same time provides space for scholar-activists to recognize the “undercommons” from where they can resist imperialism for a better world based on equality, fellow feelings, mutual respect, and solidarity. To sustain my argument about the university/education and resistance in the novel, I use the concept of the “undercommons” as developed by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. However, although Harney and Moten use the term in relation to the university, I extend its use beyond the institution and apply it to non-institutional space and mode of resistance as well. Analyzing Changez’s decolonial practices at a Pakistani university, the response of the authority to anti-imperialist activists, the presence of an American stranger in Pakistan, and the sinister ending of the novel, the paper concludes that although Hamid points to the potential of the university to resist imperialism, he problematizes and questions the success of the scholar-activist’s decolonizing mission and his decolonial practices especially in a third world setting.

● Asif Iqbal, Michigan State University. “Partition of East Bengal in Shahidulla Kaiser’s Sangsaptak.” SALA Conference Schedule/24

Bengal’s partition in has traditionally been explained as a tragedy or loss in literary criticism. We see the continuation of this trend in the critical viewpoints presented in Ananya Jahanara Kabir’s Partition’s Post- amnesias: , and Modern South Asia () and Debali Mookerjea-Leonard’s Literature, Gender, and the Trauma of Partition: The Paradox of Independence (). While the works discuss in detail the on-going legacy of Partition in contemporary South Asia, they privilege the Indian perspective on the event at the expense of the experiences of the East Bengalis, who are now citizens of Bangladesh. In order to consider East Bengal and its relation to Partition, we need to take into consideration the political struggle that have shaped the East Bengali vision of the decolonial moment. In fact, the events leading to defined the identity of East Bengal’s people, who happened to be Bengali and Muslim at the same time. Their struggle against the Hindu middle-class and the zamindari system is captured in literary works too. Some of these works include Abul Fazl’s Ranga Probhat (), Abu Rushd’s Nongor (), and Shahidulla Kaiser’s Sangshaptak (). This paper seeks to address the Bengali Muslim experience of Partition by providing a close reading of Shahidulla Kaiser’s Sangshaptak (). The paper will also argue that the Bengali Muslim vision of Partition intersects the popular demand for a homeland for the Muslims in the form of Pakistan.

● Arun Kumar Pokhrel, Oklahoma State University. “Global Subaltern Spaces: Landscape, Community, and Historical Memory in Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss.”

Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss () is often placed under the rubric of a new kind of British novel, what Berthold Schoene calls “the Cosmopolitan Novel,” or what can be called the “New Cosmopolitan Writing” of South Asian diaspora, “represent[ing] a contemporary phase in globalization” (Rajan and Sharma , ). The shifting narrative of Desai’s Inheritance focuses on the geographic locations of Kalimpong and New York to develop a postcolonial sense of community. While the New York-based narrative focuses on migration, and shows how culture intersects with material realities, the Kalimpong portion highlights the rebellion of Nepali- Indians and demonstrates the complex interplay of natural landscape, local communities, and migration. Desai views the resurgence of ethnic nationalist waves in India, including the Gorkha movement, in part as the remnants of British colonialism that created deeper social antagonisms and racial divisions. The novel shows how people belonging to different classes and ethnicities have differing relationships to the physical environment, and how their imagination of the nation or community differs accordingly. In this regard, one of my main claims is that it is essential to understand the complex socio-historical and environmental dynamics behind the rise of Gorkha ethno-nationalism so as to better understand an instantiation of economic globalization in a distant corner of the world. What, for example, are the blocked aspirations of a Nepali community that made, and still make, the demand for the Gorkhaland attractive? Is it only an “ethnic” issue, or one of social and environmental justice that, under certain pressures, had been rechanneled into ethno-nationalism? What about the representation of non-Gorkha underclass in the novel? How does a global diasporic community of undocumented immigrants in New York fit into the narrative of cosmopolitanism, or global cultural citizenship?

:-: PM LUNCH. ● Wilde: Discussion group on Neil Lazarus’s The Postcolonial Unconscious – Pallavi Rastogi, Louisiana State University ● Cibo Matto: Open session lunch

SESSION : :-: PM

A Wilde Pakistani Literatures in the World Chair: Amritjit Singh, Ohio University

● Waseem Anwar, Forman Christian College, Lahore. “Pakistani English Literatures in the World: Center-Margin Dialectic and Alternative Epistemologies in Shahid Nadim’s Plays.” SALA Conference Schedule/25

In his essay “Another Way in the World” (PMLA, :, -), Simon Gikandi explores the possibilities of situating literature in the world “outside the centripetal pull of globalization” but amid shifting positions and “alternative epistemologies.” He ends up declaring: “…to think about literature in the world is … to rethink the assumed nature of centers and margins.” Picking on shifting positions and centers and margins, but engaging consecutively with the global spatiotemporal expansions attained through South Asian literatures, I trace connections that Shahid Nadeem’s “alternative theatre,” his Ajoka-fame translated/trans-created plays establish between what Shaista Sonnu Sirajuddin describes: “distinctly indigenous” but “outside and beyond the geographical and stereotypical confines of Third World experience” (“Introduction” Selected Plays, ix and xii). Nadeem experiments with Brecht, Beckett, Fo, Pirandello and many others for articulating a center-margin dialectic. Rooted in the Pakistani socio-politico-cultural scenarios, his plays open spaces (street, subversion, subaltern). Nadeem’s plays also encounter with what Spivak analogizes as “totalitarian” or “forced … knowledge,” the so-called “global capital triumphant,” that Stanislavski and Schechner label as “Globalization’s throughline,” Afzal-Khan phrases as “power-hungry imperialist forces,” Wa Thiongo interprets as “a wholeness … under economics, politics, and the environment,” or Walter Mignolo articulates as the “(Post)Subaltern Rationality.” Whatever, Nadeem’s plays resist the centripetal pulls of globalization to initiate an epistemologically rich theatre lexicon that underpins violent excesses and stereotypes of our times. Plays like Bari, Bullah, and Burqavaganza offer a geopolitical assortment of theatrical devices, but his Dara in particular compares well with Girish Karnad’s The Dreams of Tipu Sultan or Tuglaq for foregrounding the liberating role of South Asian myth, history and culture, making them an integral part of literature in the world.

● Zakia Resshid Ehsen, Riphah International University, Pakistan “Falling Through the Cracks:

Neoliberalism and Power Constructs in Nadeem Aslam’s novel A Blind Man’s Garden.”

Since the onset of th Century, Neoliberalism and its concepts have emerged as a debatable ideology in the field of socioeconomics and politics. Subsequently, neoliberal ideologies have silently lent their major share in the growing demands of globalization and territorial expansion of nations. As a matter of fact, many Contemporary International Relation theorists advocate that international differences among countries mostly germinate from implicit and unarticulated neoliberal policies that are meant to prioritize a state’s national interests and gain geopolitical and power over other states. Instances where nations use direct military actions such as administrating proxy wars, violence and territorial annexation, suggest underlying nexus of neoliberal ideologies operate behind such geopolitical operations. The paper tends to explore how powerful states for their own national interests politically use war/proxy wars to assert their hegemony over the less powerful states. The present research observes how the greatest strength of neoliberalism’s inconsistent ideologies and pragmatic abilities silently couch the policies behind executing war and violence in the South Asian countries. The qualitative criticism of Nadeem Aslam’s novel The Blind Man’s Garden () observes how the neoliberal hegemonic discourse of inducing war expose the general masses of Afghanistan, Peshawar, and Pakistan into a precarious state of social insecurity, displacement, geographical dis-empowerment, violence and uncertainty. The novel is set in the following years of / terrorist attack and therefore, registers the consequences of war and terror faced by the indigenous people in response to the clashes against the Jihadis, Talibans and the American militant forces. Hence, the study offers a dimension to observe Anglophone Pakistani literary texts that could help trace how neoliberal global military ideologies manipulate and create fissures in the domestic geopolitical-economical structures.

● Sushil Sivaram, Rutgers University. “(Re)Staging the Postcolonial in the World: The Jaipur Literature Festival and the Pakistani Novel.”

I research public literature festivals as (pre)emergent institutions in India that shape the regions literary field through debate, celebration and consecration. There are more than festivals every year. While other festivals offer audiences the art object, literature festivals offer “by-products” like interviews, discussions and public participation. I call this dialogic, polemical and performative form talk-culture. The festivals serve economic, political and cultural functions. That is why such events are fertile venues to observe “the social conditions of the production and reception of a work of art,” and self-reflexively participate in the illusio of the field (Bourdieu SALA Conference Schedule/26

xix). As a site of struggle, the festivals emerge as a space to manage and scope the multilingual and multi-regional South Asian literary field and in turn produce a parallel and intersecting field of discourse to professional criticism.

In this talk, I examine contents, attitudes and politics of one event: the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) in India. I argue that JLF institutes the Pakistani novel and literature through talk-culture. In the process of congealing a category like the Pakistani novel, two movements occur simultaneously. First, the event manifests what Graham Huggan among others call “postcoloniality,” particularly the importing of the “alterity industry” to South Asia. Pakistani literary production is re-produced as the “other” by the festival, reinforcing a national, linguistic and religious cleavage. Second, the festival cannot control “this regime of cultural value” because of its form. The discourse produced in and about the festival repeatedly provide evidence of a co-constituted South Asian literary history placed against a regionally competitive model. A contested narrative emerges that values these writers and their works between a particular vision of South Asian literary history and an Americanized Middle Eastern geopolitics.

● Masood Raja, University of North Texas. “National Expectations, Metropolitan Market and Pakistani Writing in English.”

This paper builds on my previous work on this subject and attempts to articulate a mode of reading and writing about Pakistani Anglophone writing with an understanding of two poles of representation and reception within the nation and abroad. In other words, one could argue that while Pakistani writers use the Pakistani raw materials to compose their fiction, they inhabit a peculiar transnational habitus and their Pakistani readers, on the other hand, read the same works with the predetermined expectations of their own particular habitus. This leads one to account for the most important conundrum: What constitutes these two competing habitus and what is at stake if we do not account for the authorial and reader expectations governed and constructed by these two overlapping but distinct habitus? To explain my point better, I will use the concept of habitus as theorized by Pierre Bourdieu in reading the works of Pakistani writers published in the special issue of Granta on Pakistan, with a specific focus on one story.

B Churchill Genre Innovations Chair: Cynthia Leenerts, East Stroudsburg University

● Hans-Georg Erney, Georgia Southern University. “Stung by a Charso-Bee: Daljit Nagra’s Transnational Ramayana Retelling.”

As A. K. Ramanujan wrote in his seminal (and, to some, provocative) essay “Three Hundred Ramayanas,” no Indian or South Asian ever reads the great Sanskrit epics “for the first time. The stories are there, ‘always already.’” In spite of—possibly because of—this pervasive narrative literacy, recent years have seen a remarkable proliferation of ever more retranslations, retellings, and refashionings of the Ramayana. This paper will discuss the 2013 version by the British poet Daljit Nagra, in which he retells the epic in his characteristically exuberant verbally acrobatic and typographically innovative style. Drawing on Jahan Ramazani’s concept of transnational poetry, I argue that Nagra not only offers an internationally accessible Ramayana for the twenty- first century but also manages to avoid a bland cosmopolitanism by employing translinguistic wordplay worthy of General Napier’s notorious (and apparently apocryphal) Peccavi. Transcending the inherently comic potential of macaronic poetry, he manages to combine a postcolonial writer’s pathos about loss and recovery with a welcome emphasis on its previously underexamined social and ecological dimensions. As a hybrid text that combines multiple versions of the epic from different parts of the subcontinent and Asia, Nagra’s Ramayana is simultaneously the work of a poet who is richly familiar with (and fully at ease in) the tradition of English poetry and a magnum opus of the Indian (particularly Punjabi) diaspora. SALA Conference Schedule/27

● Hella Bloom-Cohen, St. Catherine’s University. “The Case of Victoria and Abdul: Archival Creative Nonfiction and the Violent Romance of Highbrow Cinema.”

Bruce Gilley’s article “The Case for Colonialism,” published last year in Third World Quarterly, was universally condemned in the Academy for lauding the "benefits" of Western colonialism. Gilley’s offense was so obvious as to be banal; but Oscar-bait cinema, which markets to similarly classed audiences, peddles Gilley’s claims via visual narrative. Despite Gilley’s complaints that his mode of research is unfairly off-limits, his methodology is the organizing principle of Hollywood mythmaking on foreign soil. Rather than keep with the rising tide of critical awareness toward harmful race and class formations as legacies of colonialism (enabled largely by social networking), the trend to romanticize these formations has only surged in middle-to-highbrow literature and cinema. For instance, narratives of white women’s personal growth by way of indigenes or colonial subjects abound. We might hand-wave films and their novel precedents such as Eat, Pray, Love for being unscholarly, but what happens when "educational" cinema is the quickest to peddle colonialist romance, as in the film Victoria and Abdul, based on the Shrabani Basu's biography Victoria & Abdul: The True Story of the Queen's Closest Confidant? I examine Basu’s historical chronicle, exploring to what extent it traces responsibly the role of the personal/particular on the waning days of Victoria’s imperialist policy, or, to what extent it merely confirms English historian Lawrence James’ apology in PBS’s “Empire” special: “as for the people who became [Victoria’s] subjects during her reign, I sometimes think they could have had worse fates.” Does Basu’s text lay the groundwork for the offenses of the film? My paper entails a textual studies analysis of the biopic and biography variants to interrogate the thin line between the postcolonial sentimental and sentimentalist colonialist revision.

● Anwesha Maity, University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Technoscience and the Global South: Postcolonial Science Fiction (SF) from Bangladesh.”

I will focus on two SF novels by postcolonial Bangladeshi author Md. Zafar Iqbal, who has been an indefatigable contributor to the genre since his The Joys and Sorrows of Copotron, . Here, I argue that SF components, far from being mere window-dressing or allegory, actually foreground North-South interrelationships where technoscience performs an essential ethical and cultural critical function, reshaping genre conventions in the process. I will analyze: a) how does SF as a (marginalized) literary genre of the Global South adapt/ borrow/reshape generic tropes/motifs (here, robots and other artificial intelligences [AI]) from Global North SF and b) how does the Global North reap neocolonial benefits (in human bodies and labour) within representational modalities of Global South SF?

A large group of Iqbal’s SF is set in distinctly futuristic and/or dystopian worlds replete with robots, androids and AI’s, and his worldbuilding is certainly reminiscent of Isaac Asimov’s. But where Asimov’s robots are characterized “in purely positivistic terms that admit of no dialectical complexity”, Iqbal posits alternative, sometimes peculiarly South-Asian, approaches to how robot bodies are used and perceived (Freedman , ).

A smaller group of Iqbal’s SF novels are set in worlds largely verisimilar to our own (ie. not futuristic) where current socio-political-technoscientific North-South relationships are represented in all their postcolonial disarray. Here, we find US-operated laboratories conducting illegal and unethical human experiments on impoverished Bangladeshis. While bhadralok elitism remains in the dismantling of these nefarious and completely science-fictional institutions, the point of real-world reference (sweatshops) remains unambiguous. Thus, Iqbal does not hesitate to borrow generic tropes and motifs, and neither does he hesitate to criticize neocolonial exploitation, forcing us, finally, to confront the uncanny and discomfiting equivalence of robots and humans.

● Titas De Sarkar, University of Chicago. “The Lives of the Lowly—Postcolonial Youth and the Problem of Genre.”

Theories around postcolonialism has taken up life-writings in the context of global South, liberating it from Eurocentric visions of writing autobiographies. What has gone missing is the question of youth identity in such writings. The paper takes up the founding figure of the Hungry Generation of poets in Calcutta in the s – SALA Conference Schedule/28

Malay Roychoudhury – and talks about his ‘autobiography’ ‘Chhotoloker Yuvabela’ (‘The Youth of the Lowly’, ) to bring youth cultural studies, postcolonialism, and the conundrum of genre into a conversation with each other.

The paper illustrates the unique postcolonial situation that a section of the youth found themselves in Calcutta, due to which a simplistic understanding of their life-writing through straightforward genre categorization becomes impossible. Roychoudhury’s text is an instance of how the individual ‘I’ of an autobiography meets the larger representative scope of a ‘testimonio’, whereby it cannot be contained by either of those concepts. Literary influences from Chaucer to Baudelaire intermingles with Roychowdhury’s own youth lived in the unenviable neighborhood of Bihar which produces an identity that is informed by world literature, a sense of marginalization as a Bengali in Bihar and later as an outsider in Bengal, and as a youth burdened with a family name but struggling with stark economic backwardness. ‘Chhotoloker Yuvabela’ moves from intimate narcissism, wild sexual fantasies, and caste-based discrimination which constitutes its uniqueness on one hand to an aspiration as a text to become a memoir in the conventional sense, on the other. Consequently, it is as much a hybrid as it is liminal in its form and scope.

The paper thus heterogenises and complicates notions of linear cycles of livelihood and identity formation. As an instance of writing, it is an intervention in the existing categorisation of life-writings from around the world.

SESSION : :-: PM

A Wilde The Subaltern in Context Chair: Aniruddha Mukhopadhyay, Texas A&M University-Kingsville

● Fouzia Rehman Khan, Sardar Bahadur Khan Women’s University. “Can the Subalterns Sketch? A Critical Semiotic Analysis of the Novel Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir.”

This paper, under conceptual framework formulated upon Gayatri Spivak’s theory of Can the Subaltern Speak?, explores the potential permeability of visual resources as a form of discourse through which subalterns found opportunity to counter media hegemony and make their voices heard. In order to analyze the selected graphic novel Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir () the present qualitative study applies Grunter Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen’s model of visual design () that connects the representational meaning to the interactive one. The analyst reflected upon how the interplay of visuals images and words together displayed the theme of Kashmir’s subjugation as well as how this genre has proved supportive to author to counter the said hegemony. Hence, the study found consent, political domination and media control as the broad elements that can be seen in the novel and also the study concludes that counter hegemony is possible through such literary genres, as the novel’s narrator has communicated those aspects of hegemonic situation in Kashmir to a large audience through literary discourse of graphic novel genre that are chiefly absent from mainstream media’s treatments of the Kashmir’s conflict.

● Anjali Singh & Rajiv Ranjan Dwivedi. Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University. “Studying Postcolonialism in Dalit Narrative: A Critical Take on Sushila Takbhoura’s Autobiography Shikenje Ka Dard.”

The missing voice of a subaltern has been duly addressed in the works of the postcolonial feminist writers such as Gayatri Spivak and Trinh T. Minh-ha. The term Post-colonial feminism refers to the literary works that resist the universalization of feminist issues seen and perceived only from the ‘Euro-American feminists’ point of view and ignore the differences of race, ethnicity, regional diversity, etc. through which a woman experiences her gender biases. When Spivak questioned the place of subaltern in the ‘Third world’ in one of her most read essays “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, the Dalit feminist writer Sharmila Rege added the caste question to it. Rege referred SALA Conference Schedule/29

to the ‘savarnization of womenhood and masculinization of Dalit hood’ that obliterated the presence of Dalit women from the national struggle. In the light of the above argument, this paper endeavors to engage with the autobiographical account of a Dalit writer Dr. Sushila Takbhure and engage with the ways adopted by the Hindu society in keeping her perpetually subjugated. Her literary work reinstates that a woman’s oppression and her experiences need to be studied in context of her historical, social, cultural background. and understand what it means to be born as Dalit, poor and a woman in the third world. The life’s journey of the selected writer has been aptly summed up by Trinh T. Minh-ha. Minh-ha writes, “She has been warned of the risk she incurs by letting words run off the rails, time and again tempted by the desire to gear herself to the accepted norm. But where has obedience led her?”

● Aniruddha Mukhopadhyay, Texas A&M University-Kingsville. “Disconcerting Dalit Masculinity in Daya Pawar’s Baluta.”

Charu Gupta, in her article published in The Indian Economic and Social History Review () argues for increased attention to Dalit masculinities in Dalit studies. Focusing primarily on the colonial period, Gupta discusses the ambiguous and often contradictory representations of Dalit masculinity by colonial authorities and in upper caste Hindu literature, and the similarly ambiguous, multivalent attempts to reclaim masculinity in Dalit writings. Smita Patil (), reading the intersections of sexuality, gender and caste in Dalit writing, briefly looks at the representation of Dalit sexuality in Daya Pawar’s Baluta, arguing that patriarchy both outside and inside the Dalit community colludes to relegate Dalit women to the lowest rungs of the sexual division of labor. Building on this previous scholarship, I look at how Daya Pawar’s Baluta negotiates Dalit masculinity. Pawar’s autobiography was the first Dalit memoir to be published in Marathi in . While it served to shake up middle-class sensibilities in Marathi literature, the autobiography only became available to a larger Indian audience in translation in . Given the contestation over Dalit masculinity between Dalit representations and colonial and upper-caste Hindu representations, I analyze Pawar’s deployment of Dalit masculinity in Baluta--a text generally recognized as inaugurating the genre of Dalit autobiographies, which today has an ever-growing global readership--to historically situate gender in the Dalit literary struggle for human rights. Negotiating caste in Pawar’s writing is also about negotiating gender—more specifically, his masculinity, and Dalit masculinity, connected to the Mahar community’s caste identity. In my paper, I look at how Pawar addresses and disconcerts this masculinity as he struggles to rearticulate his identity in a deliberately ambiguous process tied to class and color consciousness.

B Cibo Matto The Global Salman Rushdie Chair: Moumin Quazi, Tarleton State University

● Ana Cristina Mendes, University of Lisbon. “Globetrotting Shakespeare: The King Lear Intertext in Preti Taneja’s We That are Young and Salman Rushdie’s The Golden House.”

Adaptation frequently uses new contexts to reimagine and shine light on its intertexts. This paper focuses on the King Lear intertext in Preti Taneja’s We That are Young and Salman Rushdie’s The Golden House, both published in . While Taneja’s novel has been received as a reworking of Shakespeare’s play in its relocation to contemporary India, Rushdie’s latest novel lends itself to a similar reading. The two novels deal with billionaire profligacy and historical blindness, both are biting critiques of contemporary ‘new India’ (even if Rushdie’s plot is also set, for the most part, in the contemporary US, detailing the social micro-dynamics that led to the election of a man referred to as ‘the Joker’ after an era of optimism and hope starred by Obama). Both the seasoned novelist Rushdie (The Golden House is his fourteenth novel) and the debut novelist Taneja (currently working in the department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, and previously a research fellow in global Shakespeare at Queen Mary, University of London) are clearly aware of the implications of the geographical ‘where’ in the adaptation of the Shakespearean canon, with all the attendant intercultural hybridities and new contexts that the adaptation produces. In its analysis of the use of the King Lear intertext in SALA Conference Schedule/30

Rushdie and Taneja’s novels, this paper draws on Jacques Rancière’s () defence of an ‘emancipated spectator’. The reworking of King Lear in these novels will be examined alongside Rancière’s call for a radical rethinking of the passivity of the spectator of theatre, thought of as being ‘separated from the capacity to know and the capacity to act’ (: ).

● Romy Rajan, University of Florida. “Neoliberalism and the Return of Religion in Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh.”

My paper looks at literary representations of the seemingly contradictory (re)emergence of religious organizations with electoral ambitions during neoliberalism’s ascendancy in the aftermath of the implementation of Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) in India. The development of such fluidity between modern and traditional institutions is not peculiar to India but a function of SAPs across the global south. Charles Piot’s reading of the rise of Pentecostalism in Togo and James Howard Smith’s examination of the resurgence of witchcraft in Kenya and Tanzania are just two examples of the many studies that explore the connection between late capitalism and religious fundamentalism. To look at how the Indian literary imagination coped with this phenomenon, I look at Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh as a novel written in a structurally adjusted economy. Published just four years after liberalization, the novel cannot anticipate its conclusion, and the narrative removes the representatives of religion and capital through explosions that occur throughout Bombay where the novel is set. Rushdie then displaces the narrative to the promise of an early modern utopia, Moorish Spain by setting the protagonist on a journey to find his ‘roots’. Rushdie recognizes the futility of this move in his description of modern day Andalusia, a city claimed by a capitalist tourism industry that has depleted it of its cultural history. In making this move, the novel also gestures towards the impossibility of escape in a globalized world, where a re-energized post-Cold War capitalism has established total control. I argue that the novel recognizes this totality and its separate elements at a crucial point in Indian history when an open market had begun to make its presence felt on the everyday life of people, while gesturing towards its own inability to map the same.

● Pennie Ticen, Virginia Military Institute. “Updating the Interregnum: Salman Rushdie’s ‘Anti- Chutnification’ in The Golden House.”

Early in The Postcolonial Unconscious, Neal Lazarus critiques the “woefully restricted and attenuated corpus of works” focused on by scholars in the field. He selects Salman Rushdie for particular censure: “I am tempted to overstate the case…and declare that there is in a strict sense only one author in the postcolonial literary canon….Salman Rushdie…” (). In a career that spans more than four decades, from Grimus in to The Golden House in , Rushdie’s rise and then institutionalization on the global literary landscape has, to some degree, paralleled that of post-colonial literature/theory as well as South Asian Studies. Although I agree with Lazarus’s critique of the “catechistic” nature of much of the themes and interpretations connected to postcolonial literature, I argue that Rushdie’s most recent work has called some of these verities into question. Lazarus’s injunction that “…we recognize the limits of the trope mobilized so suggestively and wittily by Rushdie in Midnight’s Children, of narrativisation as ‘chutnification’…” () is actually displayed in the characters of Nero Golden and his three sons in The Golden House. Thirty-six years after Midnight’s Children’s publication, Rushdie revisits his own trope by depicting a New York City landscape where chutnification doesn’t work, where the flavors—of immigration, reinvention, national mythology, political and historical confrontation—don’t leak into but rather repel each other. As transplants from the Mumbai/Bombay terror attacks to the post-/post- Obama election, the Golden family stand as a macabre twenty-first century revision of Gramsci’s post-WWII description of the interregnum: now the old insist on surviving and overlapping the birth of the new. Rushdie’s trope of “anti-chutnification” reminds us that South Asian literatures can actively fracture canons and catechisms.

C Churchill Community and Belonging Chair: Prathim-Maya Dora-Laskey, Alma College

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● Prathim-Maya Dora-Laskey, Alma College. “More than Kin(d): Building Community and Solidarity in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.”

Arundhati Roy’s heavily-anticipated, recent novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness () is populated with individual feminist narratives (Anjum, Tilo, Gyuh Kyom) that intertwine with the messy sprawl of India’s contemporary historicity (the Kashmir crisis, pro-Hindu pogroms, tribal suppressions). Amidst these intersections of individual gendered precarity and national history in the Global South, Roy constructs impromptu alternative communities of kinship that embody South-South interactions and interpretations. This re-reading and reordering of the state's apparatus and oversights in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness allows it to function as a cosmopolitan manifesto that problematizes the state's proscription of identity in ways that other citizen-activists in the Global South may be able to identify and undertake.

Donna Harraway’s expansion of kinship in “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene” (), wherein she famously advocates we “make kin not babies” is crucial to this framework. This paper will use Harraway to explore Roy’s radical constructions of kindness and kinship on two levels: community and solidarity. The community approach gratifies readers through aspirational events of kindness and kinship- building (as when Tilo and Anjum who are socially marginalized because of their gender non-conformity individually parent orphaned infants). The solidarity approach enables readers to identify interstitial repetitions in local histories that may be applied on a global level to experience communal (glocal?) empathy. Cumulatively, Roy’s feminist demystification of the heteropatriarchy and tradition(al family) offers up reflexive game plans for national and international activism without borders.

● Ruma Sinha, Syracuse University. “Living Among the Dead: The Graveyard as Site of Affiliation and Antagonism in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.”

The graveyard has traditionally been associated with death, decay, and degeneration. Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness resuscitates and redefines it as a utopic space for rebellion and regeneration for the living. The novel presents this space as a site of affiliation and camaraderie where the protagonists Anjum, Saddam Hussain, and Tilo, among others hope to find a permanent abode at the “Jannat Guest House and Funeral Services” erected over the graves of the dead. Their rebellion against the social and political order of the “real world” or “Duniya” as they call it is expressed in terms of a self-imposed renunciation of this world and relocation to a life among the dead. This spatial reconfiguration is tied to the notion of freedom from the constraints of gender, caste, religion, sexuality, skin color, and the dictates of proper behavior expected from them. However, these reluctant subjects of the “Duniya” define their subaltern position in opposition to it often resenting the power of its diktat so that their choice can also be inferred as banishment. In this paper, I argue that the graveyard, which begins as a space of affinity and association for the people who are ostracized by the “Duniya” simultaneously becomes a space of antipathy and alienation in an attempt to contain the antagonism between the people living in the graveyard and the “Duniya.”

:-: PM Cibo Matto: Graduate Student Caucus

:-: PM Wilde: CONFERENCE KEYNOTE & AWARDS CEREMONY ● John Stratton Hawley, Barnard College, Columbia University. “Verbal Icon, Iconic Word: Surdas Between Poem and Painting”

:-: PM: CONFERENCE BANQUET (TICKETS REQUIRED) Venue: Gaylord Restaurant, E Walton St, Chicago, IL

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SPECIAL THANKS TO SANTA CLARA UNIVERSITY AND COLUMBIA COLLEGE CHICAGO FOR THEIR SUPPORT OF THE SALA CONFERENCE.