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)

9781108725743, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 25 September 2025

242 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.398 kg

'Auritro Majumder's Insurgent Imaginations offers a fresh and provocative reworking of the concept of world literature … If 'world literature' is all too often understood through a liberal discourse of post-national globalisation, then this book provides a strikingly different approach - by suggesting that the nation, far from being dead, is instead the grounds from which, paradoxically, a radical, internationalist vision and aesthetics emerge.' Shakti Jaising, New Formations

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]