Insurgent Cultures

World Literatures and Violence from the Global South

Pavan Kumar Malreddy

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2024
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781009443821
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Moving beyond the normative frames of terrorism and counter-terrorism, this book shows how world literatures from the Global South can be used to examine the multiple modalities of violence that pervade contemporary world politics, such as communalism, factionalism, peasant wars, banditry, nationalist struggles, resource wars and acts of vengeance. The comparative approach of this book enables a theoretical realignment of insurgency from the mobilization of violence for grand, mythic, and ideological causes – as seen through the eyes of the state – to the violence for small causes, namely, the splintered violence conjured under conceptual rubrics such as divine violence, intimate violence, routine violence, everyday violence, inherited violence, and subterranean violence. Analyzing novels, autobiographies, journalistic accounts from key regions, such as Nigeria, Myanmar (Burma), India, and the Middle East, Insurgent Cultures provides a new understanding of the narratives of violence in the Global South. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title page
• Imprints page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Toward Post-Terrorism?
• Chapter 1 Precarious Riches: Oil, Insurgency, and Violence in Nigerian Literature
• Chapter 2 Intimate Violence: Rebels, Heroes, and Insurgent Sovereignties in Burmese Anglophone Literature
• Chapter 3 Violent Solidarities: Narrating the Maoist Insurgency in India
• Chapter 4 Violent Worlds: Vernacular Agency in Middle Eastern Literature
• Epilogue: The Moral Burden of the Insurgent
• Index