Contagion Narratives

The Society, Culture and Ecology of the Global South

R. Sreejith Varma, Ajanta Sircar, R. Sreejith Varma, Ajanta Sircar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781032258676
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000811049
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume is a collection of ten essays that direct their gaze to the unfolding of contagions in the non-classical contexts of Asia and Africa. Or, to borrow from the title of one of Partha Chatterjee's books, they are reflections on the pandemic in most of the world. Featuring many scholars (of the humanities and social sciences) in the Global South, these chapters take as their intellectual focus the political-social as well as the ethical challenges posed by the contagions in the "East." Through analyses of literary narratives/films/video games, this Contagion Narratives traces the manufactured narratives of victimization by majority-communities and the lethal divides consequently being drawn between a reconstituted "authentic majority" and the more vulnerable minority 'other' in these societies. The essays in this collection are animated by imaginations of liveable alternatives on a planet on the brink. This volume traces lineages to Buchi Emecheta and Rabindranath Tagore rather than Albert Camus, to Satyajit Ray and the indie traditions rather than Hollywood, and to Buddhism rather than Christianity, to track the historic journeys of "modernity." Using an eclectic set of analytical tools and strategies of textual criticism, this volume argues that ideas of "democracy," even while they carry echoes of other societies, are markedly different as they travel from Gaddafi's Libya to Wuhan under lockdown to colonial Bengal.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Environmental Humanities, Medical Humanities and Pandemic Futures
• 2 Re-Seeing Animal Research Ethics in Light of COVID-19
• 3 Remembering That Which Is Yet to Pass
• 4 COVID-19, Migrant Crisis and Social Contagion of Good Life: A Case Study from Indian Sundarbans
• 5 Cognition of Contagion: A Study of Video Games
• 6 The Postcolonial Afterlife in South Africa: AIDS, Xenophobia and Healing in Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow
• 7 Pathologizing Otherness: Theorizing Parallelisms between COVID-19 Restrictions and Strands of Otherness in Contemporary African Novels
• 8 Rabindranath Tagore’s Chaturanga and the Calcutta Plague: Medicine, Modernity and Culture
• 9 Narrativizing Disease and Famine on Screen: A Contemporary Reading of Satyajit Ray’s Enemy of the People and Distant Thunder
• 10 Agricultural Insecurity, Contagion and Rural Adivasi Women: A Consideration of Mahasweta Devi’s “Douloti the Bountiful”
• Index