Africa in the Bengali Imagination

Africa in the Bengali Imagination PDF Author: Mahruba T. Mowtushi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000802175
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
This book examines textual representations of Africa in the Indian imagination from 1928 to 1973. It critically analyses Bengali literature during this period, their imitation of colonial racial prejudices and how it allowed Bengalis to fashion their identity. It analyses the development of ‘Africa’ as an idea and historical reality through the writings of five Bengali writers including the Bengali novelist Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, the children’s author Hemendra Kumar Roy, the poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore, the playwright Ganesh Bagchi and the surrealist poet and founding editor of Transition magazine Rajat Neogy. The book shows how these writers engage with the idea of Africa and their influence in the construction of the Bengali cultural identity during the freedom struggle, the Partition of Bengal in 1947 and the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. The book offers readers a glimpse of the exotic imaginary locales of Africa while offering an in-depth look into the interconnected histories, cartographic routes and cultural exchange between India and Africa. A first of its kind, this book will be an excellent read for students and scholars of literature, comparative literature, history, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, South Asian studies, African studies and diaspora studies. .

Africa in the Bengali Imagination

Africa in the Bengali Imagination PDF Author: Mahruba T. Mowtushi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000802175
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
This book examines textual representations of Africa in the Indian imagination from 1928 to 1973. It critically analyses Bengali literature during this period, their imitation of colonial racial prejudices and how it allowed Bengalis to fashion their identity. It analyses the development of ‘Africa’ as an idea and historical reality through the writings of five Bengali writers including the Bengali novelist Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, the children’s author Hemendra Kumar Roy, the poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore, the playwright Ganesh Bagchi and the surrealist poet and founding editor of Transition magazine Rajat Neogy. The book shows how these writers engage with the idea of Africa and their influence in the construction of the Bengali cultural identity during the freedom struggle, the Partition of Bengal in 1947 and the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. The book offers readers a glimpse of the exotic imaginary locales of Africa while offering an in-depth look into the interconnected histories, cartographic routes and cultural exchange between India and Africa. A first of its kind, this book will be an excellent read for students and scholars of literature, comparative literature, history, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, South Asian studies, African studies and diaspora studies. .

Insurgent Imaginations

Insurgent Imaginations PDF Author: Auritro Majumder
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108802435
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
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.

Kafka's Monkey and Other Phantoms of Africa

Kafka's Monkey and Other Phantoms of Africa PDF Author: Seloua Luste Boulbina
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253041945
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
Even though many of France's former colonies became independent over fifty years ago, the concept of "colony" and who was affected by colonialism remain problematic in French culture today. Seloua Luste Boulbina, an Algerian-French philosopher and political theorist, shows how the colony's structures persist in the subjectivity, sexuality, and bodily experience of human beings who were once brought together through force. This text, which combines two works by Luste Boulbina, shows how France and its former colonies are haunted by power relations that are supposedly old history, but whose effects on knowledge, imagination, emotional habits, and public controversies have persisted vividly into the present. Luste Boulbina draws on the work of Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, and Édouard Glissant to build a challenging, original, and intercultural philosophy that responds to blind spots of inherited political and social culture. Kafka's Monkey and Other Phantoms of Africa offers unique insights into how issues of migration, religious and ethnic identity, and postcolonial history affect contemporary France and beyond.

Selected Essays

Selected Essays PDF Author: Kazi Nazrul Islam
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
ISBN: 9357083073
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976) is widely remembered as the fiery iconoclast who fought against the structures of oppression and orthodoxy. The iconic ‘rebel poet’ of Bengal, Nazrul continues to be loved for his songs and poetry. But what of his prose, his journalism, and his politics? Selected Essays reveals to us the extraordinary versatility of Nazrul as an essayist. Addressing subjects as diverse as social reform, politics, communal harmony, environmental concerns, education, aesthetics, ethics, and philosophy, this rich collection showcases Nazrul’s dynamic vision and unique use of language as an instrument of change. The essays chart his evolving consciousness as a thinker, writer and activist, offering vivid glimpses of the ethos of his times, his relationships with leading figures such as Tagore and Gandhi, and his active engagement with social, political and cultural processes. These new translations bring Nazrul’s powerful voice to life, all its vibrant immediacy.

Statelessness and Citizenship

Statelessness and Citizenship PDF Author: Victoria Redclift
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136220321
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
What does it mean to be a citizen? In depth research with a stateless population in Bangladesh has revealed that, despite liberal theory’s reductive vision, the limits of political community are not set in stone. The Urdu-speaking population in Bangladesh exemplify some of the key problems facing uprooted populations and their experience provides insights into the long term unintended consequences of major historical events. Set in a site of camp and non-camp based displacement, it illustrates the nuances of political identity and lived spaces of statelessness that Western political theory has too long hidden from view. Using Bangladesh as a case study, Statelessness and Citizenship: Camps and the creation of political space argues that the crude binary oppositions of statelessness and citizenship are no longer relevant. Access to and understandings of citizenship are not just jurally but socially, spatially and temporally produced. Unpicking Agamben’s distinction between ‘political beings’ and ‘bare life’, the book considers experiences of citizenship through the camp as a social form. The camps of Bangladesh do not function as bounded physical or conceptual spaces in which denationalized groups are altogether divorced from the polity. Instead, citizenship is claimed at the level of everyday life, as the moments in which formal status is transgressed. Moreover, once in possession of ‘formal status’ internal borders within the nation-state render ‘rights-bearing citizens’ effectively ‘stateless’, and the experience of ‘citizens’ is very often equally uneven. While ‘statelessness’ may function as a cold instrument of exclusion, certainly, it is neither fixed nor static; just as citizenship is neither as stable nor benign as the dichotomy would suggest. Using these insights, the book develops the concept of ‘political space’ – an analysis of the way history and space inform the identities and political subjectivity available to people. In doing so, it provides an analytic approach of relevance to wider problems of displacement, citizenship and ethnic relations. Shortlisted for this year’s BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize.

'Time-Out' in the Land of Apu

'Time-Out' in the Land of Apu PDF Author: Hia Sen
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 365802223X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
​ Within Childhood Research starkly different theoretical and empirical concerns characterize the global south-north divide. Hia Sen attempts to bridge the gap in Childhood Research which usually addresses childhoods differently according to their 'developing/developed', 'western/non-western' contexts, and finds its middle ground in the context of the urban middle classes in contemporary West Bengal. The author documents areas such as leisure practices and everyday lives of school children in India for three cohorts, where it is possible to have a comparative perspective of childhoods given the existing rich ethnographic and historical research on childhoods in other cultural contexts.

Transcultural Memory and Globalised Modernity in Contemporary Indo-English Novels

Transcultural Memory and Globalised Modernity in Contemporary Indo-English Novels PDF Author: Nadia Butt
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110367351
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
This book places transcultural memory in the South Asian cultural and literary context. Divided into two parts, the book first defines transcultural memory in the age of globalised modernity both as a theory and social practice. Then it examines contemporary Indo-English novels from India and Pakistan with the theoretical and methodological tool of transcultural memory to shed new light on the connection between memory and modernity, and memory and South Asian cultures in the wake of new social and political transformations on the Indian subcontinent. A special focus on commemorative tropes in the novels not only show the possibility of a dialogue with different versions of the past, but also how such a dialogue shapes processes of remembrance between and beyond borders. Hence, the books comes up with alternative ways of reading the Indo-English novels, divesting the concept of (trans)cultural memory from its Euro- centrism and claiming it as equally significant in comprehending the new configurations of memory and modernity in non-Western locations.

Africa in Stereo

Africa in Stereo PDF Author: Tsitsi Ella Jaji
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199936374
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Stereomodernism and amplifying the Black Atlantic -- Sight reading: early Black South African transcriptions of freedom -- Négritude musicology: poetry, performance and statecraft in Senegal -- What women want: selling hi-fi in consumer magazines and film -- 'Soul to soul': echo-locating histories of slavery and freedom from Ghana -- Pirate's choice: hacking into (post- )pan-African futures -- Epilogue: Singing songs.

The Mountain of the Moon

The Mountain of the Moon PDF Author: Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay
Publisher: Niyogi Books
ISBN: 9389136385
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 125

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Book Description
The mountain of the moon is a story about taking a chance dare which, with its wings of imagination, leads you to the silver lining after a storm. Shankar, an ordinary young boy from rural India, crosses many skies and seas to explore an altogether different world—africa. There, he joins a seasoned Portuguese Explorer, Diego alvarez on a daring mission. But is the destination worth the toil of the journey? Moreover, will Shankar get to the peak of his mountain of dreams? The Storyline, with a series of adventures, is a testimony to the eternal virtues of courage, curiosity and compassion. It gradually becomes a tantalizing tale of an unusual friendship that evolved in the spectacular but dangerous African forests and grasslands teeming with mysterious wildlife, people and their folklores. Experience this classic adventurous narrative in English that will lead you again to an era of picaro, when one dared to dream. This book has also been adapted into a popular Bengali movie.

Insurgent Imaginations

Insurgent Imaginations PDF Author: Auritro Majumder
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108477577
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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