Insurgent Imaginations
World Literature and the Periphery

This book illustrates how internationalist writers marginalized the West and placed the non-Western regions in a new center.

Auritro Majumder (Author)

9781108477574, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 22 October 2020

280 pages
16 x 23.5 x 2 cm, 0.52 kg

Insurgent Imaginations jolts commonplace ideas about the relevance and range of world literature. The book begins in the inter-war years and discovers an astonishing constellation of dialogues that Indian writers had with socialist counterparts in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. It also provides a rare and absorbing account of literary-cultural connections that have not received sufficient attention until now. Tagore's ideas about emancipation are considered alongside Mao Zedong's; M.N. Roy's communist ideals contextualized in his dialogue with Claude McKay and other Black internationalists; Mrinal Sen's arthouse films probed for their debts to Third Cinema and the Naxalite movement. Literary works by Aravind Adiga, Arundhati Roy, and Mahasweta Devi are read alongside those by Richard Wright, Tagore, Brecht, Lu Xun, and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain among others. In other words, Insurgent Imaginations reveals a kaleidoscope of global connections between vastly different national histories and aesthetic forms. It offers a brilliant theory about the making of world literature through a submerged internationalist vernacular between far-flung corners of the subaltern colonial world. In so doing, it forces us to see beyond the bland globalism of any world literature yoked exclusively to Anglo- or Euro-centric canons. Majumder's openly avowed Marxist commitments and very thorough and carefully nuanced arguments about the masked socialist imaginaries of world literary cultures will persuade and excite scholarly discussion. Insurgent Imaginations engages the hot topic of 'world literature' that has lately preoccupied the study of literature with such verve and newness as to compel us to rethink what truly counts as 'World Literature.' Mrinalini Chakravorty, Associate Professor of English, University of Virginia

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.

Dedication
Epigraph
Acknowledgements
Preface. About this book
1. Peripheral internationalisms
2. The memoir and anticolonial internationalism in M. N. Roy
3. The lumpen aesthetics of Mrinal Sen: cinema novo meets urban fiction
4. Black blood: fictions of the tribal in Mahasweta Devi and Arundhati Roy
5. The disappearing rural in new India: Aravind Adiga and the Indian Anglophone novel
6. Conclusion
7. Works cited.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH], Literary theory [DSA]