Counterpoints in Fractal Modernities

Identifying the colonial as an overarching systemic force that continues to shape our lives and worlds, this book thinks through decolonization as a striving towards dignity, security and equity across categories of identity, experience and knowledge.

This book explores the «postcolonial modern» across South Asian literatures and cultures, while demonstrating that postcoloniality is an ongoing lived experience and that modernity has always been a many-voiced historical reality. It contends that our realities and our sense of a location within them have always comprised an experiential manyness of time and space that cannot forcibly be reconciled into identities that are singularly imagined. Therefore, whether viewed historically or experientially, categories such as modernity, postcoloniality, nationhood, or gender cannot be understood singularly. The author reflects on such core tensions within representations and theorizations of postcoloniality. They contemplate possibilities for a lexicon that encompasses the vast polyvalences and precarities that constitute our being, thinking and pursuits of joy and dignity from locations within the «postcolonies», and through it the tangible labors of anticolonial thought and decolonization.

Autorentext

S. Satish Kumar holds a PhD from the University of Georgia, where they also held teaching positions in Comparative Literature and African American Studies. A comparatist by training, their work is situated across literary and cultural studies, history and philosophy. Presently, they are visiting faculty in the Department of English, Ashoka University.

Klappentext

This book explores the 'postcolonial modern' across South Asian literatures and cultures, while demonstrating that postcoloniality is an ongoing lived experience and that modernity has always been a many-voiced historical reality. It contends that our realities and our sense of a location within them have always comprised an experiential manyness of time and space that cannot forcibly be reconciled into identities that are singularly imagined. Therefore, whether viewed historically or experientially, categories such as modernity, postcoloniality, nationhood, or gender cannot be understood singularly. The author reflects on such core tensions within representations and theorizations of postcoloniality. They contemplate possibilities for a lexicon that encompasses the vast polyvalences and precarities that constitute our being, thinking and pursuits of joy and dignity from locations within the 'postcolonies', and through it the tangible labors of anticolonial thought and decolonization.

Inhalt
Contents: First Essay: Incommensurabilities: Rituals of Postcoloniality and Theatres of Modernity Second Essay: Continuities: A Poetics for Ineffability and an Ethics towards Alterity Third Essay: Historiographies: Questions of Modernity and Postcoloniality Fourth Essay: Counterpoints: Locating the Postcolonial Feminine Subject.