Series in Indic
Books in Indic
Contemporary English-Language Indian Children's Literature
Concurrent with increasing scholarly attention toward national children’s literatures, Contemporary English-language Indian Children’s Literature explores an emerging body of work that has thus far garnered little serious critical attention. Superle critically examines the ways Indian children’s writers have represented childhood in relation to the Indian nation, Indian cultural identity, and Indian girlhood. From a framework of postcolonial and feminist theories, children’s novels published between 1988 and 2008 in India are compared with those from the United Kingdom and North America from the same period, considering the differing ideologies and the current textual constructions of childhood at play in each. Broadly, Superle contends that over the past twenty years an aspirational view of childhood has developed in this literature—a view that positions children as powerful participants in the project of enabling positive social transformation. Her main argument, formed after recognizing several overarching thematic and structural patterns in more than one hundred texts, is that the novels comprise an aspirational literature with a transformative agenda: they imagine apparently empowered child characters who perform in diverse ways in the process of successfully creating and shaping the ideal Indian nation, their own well-adjusted bicultural identities in the diaspora, and/or their own empowered girlhoods. Michelle Superle is a Professor in the department of Communications at Okanagan College. She has taught children’s literature, composition, and creative writing courses at various Canadian universities and has published articles in Papers and IRCL .
The Fiction of Nationality in an Era of Transnationalism
The book focuses on the representation of South Asian life in works by four Anglophone writers: V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, and Anita Desai. Concentrating on the intertwined topics of nationalism, transnationalism, and fundamentalism, the book addresses the dislocation associated with these phenomena, offering a critical dialogue between these works and contemporary history, using history to interrogate fiction and fiction to think through historical issues. Despite all their differences, the works of these authors delineate the asymmetrical relations of colonialism and the aftermath of this phenomenon as it is manifested across the globe. The binary structures created by the colonial encounter undergo a process of dialectical interplay in which each culture makes incursions into the other. This dialogic interplay becomes the basis for strategies that enable transnational and postcolonial writers to reimagine themselves and their world. The book shows, for instance, how Naipaul articulates a sensibility created by multilayered identities and the remapping of old imperial landscapes, in the process suggesting a new dynamic of power relations in which politics and selfhood, empire and psychology, prove to be profoundly interrelated; how Rushdie encourages a nationalist self-imagining and a rewriting of history that incorporate profound cultural, religious, and linguistic differences into our sense of identity; how Ghosh is critical of the putative cultural and religious necessity to forge a unified nationalist identity, arguing that no single theory sufficiently frames the multiple inheritances of present diasporic subjectivities; and how Desai seeks to imagine a responsible form of artistic, social, and political agency. Although transnationalism, then, can have positive effects, which have been celebrated in terms such as hybridity, the book suggests why this sort of term, too, cannot be a stopping-place for our thinking about a world radically transformed by postcolonial struggles.