Insurgent Imaginations

World Literature and the Periphery

Auritro Majumder

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781108477574
• eBook ISBN: 9781108800419
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book argues that contemporary world literature is defined by peripheral internationalism. Over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a range of aesthetic forms beyond the metropolitan West - fiction, memoir, cinema, theater - came to resist cultural nationalism and promote the struggles of subaltern groups. Peripheral internationalism pitted intellectuals and writers not only against the ex-imperial West, but also against their burgeoning national elites. In a sense, these writers marginalized the West and placed the non-Western peripheries in a new center. Through a grounded yet sweeping survey of Bengali, English, and other texts, the book connects India to the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, Latin America, and the United States. Chapters focus on Rabindranath Tagore, M. N. Roy, Mrinal Sen, Mahasweta Devi, Arundhati Roy, and Aravind Adiga. Unlike the Anglo-American emphasis on a post-national globalization, Insurgent Imaginations argues for humanism and revolutionary internationalism as the determinate bases of world literature.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Peripheral Internationalisms
• Chapter 2 The Memoir and Anticolonial Internationalism in M.N. Roy
• Chapter 3 The Lumpen Aesthetics of Mrinal Sen: Cinema Novo Meets Urban Fiction
• Chapter 4 Black Blood: Fictions of the Tribal in Mahasweta Devi and Arundhati Roy
• Chapter 5 The Disappearing Rural in New India: Aravind Adiga and the Indian Anglophone Novel
• Chapter 6 Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index