South Asian Fiction: Contemporary Transformations

Raghubir Singh, Boy at Bus Stop, New Delhi, 1982
© Succession Raghubir Singh 2011

Research seminar organised in collaboration with the Institute of English Studies at the University of London. November 2011-April 2012. Venue: Senate House.

South Asian fiction in English has become a strong presence in contemporary literature and now represents some of the most original and globally-marketable fiction being written today. Since it started to gain international recognition in the early 1980s, South Asian literature has also been co-opted, sometimes unwillingly, as a particular critical concern of postcolonial studies. Yet in the past two decades the political and economic contexts of South Asian Anglophone fiction, its material circulation and its inter/national audiences have changed dramatically, often in ways that challenge established critical and theoretical assumptions about the genre. The proposed seminar series seeks to address the transformed contexts and concerns of recent South Asian fiction exploring, in the process, the importance of these writings to our sense of the contemporaneity of world literatures in English.

The seminar series, which will run from November 2011 to April 2012, will enable established critics of South Asian literature to locate and reflect on new concerns and developments in the field, and their implications for postcolonial reading practices. These include the effects of Indian liberalisation and economic growth post-1991 on the cultural geographies of the region; globalisation and changes in South Asian diaspora cultures; the representation of political tensions in South Asia after 9/11; new subaltern narratives; environmental and biotechnological issues; changing terrains of the popular; and transforming narrative and linguistic developments.

Seminar Schedule

Seminars are on Wednesdays from 17.30 -19.00
Venue map for Senate House

November 16th
Senate House Room 264
Suman Gupta (Open University)
‘Youth Culture and Contemporary Popular Fiction in India’

December 7th
Senate House Room 265
Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee (University of Warwick)
‘Violence and Militancy as Infrastructural Conditions in Contemporary South Asian literature’

December 14th
Senate House Room 264
Pooja Sinha (Open University)
‘We Write Like This Only’ – Popular Culture and Indian Chick Lit

January 25th
Senate House Room 264
Florian Stadtler (Open University)
‘An “Epico-Mythico-Tragico-Comico-Super-Sexy-High-Masala-Art”: Hindi cinema and the contemporary Indian novel in English’

February 8th
Senate House Room 264
Amina Yaqin (SOAS, University of London)
‘The poetics and politics of Imagining Pakistan in recent diasporic fiction’

February 22nd
Senate House Room 265
Claire Chambers (Leeds Metropolitan University)
‘Yusuf, Hajj, Ummah: A Comparative Approach to Pakistani Fiction in English’

March 7th
Senate House Room 264
Neelam Srivastava (Newcastle University)
‘Minority Literature and the South Asian Short Story’

March 21st
Senate House Room 264
Minoli Salgado (University of Sussex)
(title to be finalised) ‘In Terror: Trespass and the Writer as Witness-Traveler’

If you would like further information, please contact Alex Tickell (Director of Open University’s Postcolonial Literatures Research Group).