Insurgent Cultures
World Literatures and Violence from the Global South

Shows how World Literatures from the Global South can be used to examine the modalities of violence that pervade contemporary politics.

Pavan Kumar Malreddy (Author)

9781009443838, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 November 2024

252 pages
23.5 x 16 x 2 cm, 0.518 kg

'The breadth of the corpus Insurgent Cultures covers is dizzying, yet Malreddy's reading is so careful and nuanced that it makes the book a rare achievement. As a novelist the book helped me better understand and articulate the space of my writing and other writers occupy. The book is also an excellent counter-archive to the imperil and state archives of vertical power and their exclusionary mechanisms. The critic is a host, and Malreddy is a quite generous host who curates and creates space for writers from the Middle East to East Asia. Insurgent Cultures is a house of wisdom worthy of many readers as guests.' Sinan Antoon, New York University

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.

Introduction: towards post-terrorism?
1. Precarious riches: oil, insurgency, and violence in nigerian literature
2. Intimate violence: rebels, heroes, and insurgent sovereignties in burmese anglophone literature
3. Violent solidarities: narrating the maoist insurgency in India
4. Violent worlds: vernacular agency in middle eastern literature
Epilogue: the moral burden of the insurgent.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]