STORIES THAT BIND Contradictory Indianness

Indenture, Creolization, and Literary Imaginary

ATREYEE PHUKAN

As Contradictory Indianness shows, a postcolonial Caribbean aesthetics that has from its inception privileged inclusivity, interraciality, and resistance against Old World colonial orders requires taking into account Indo-Caribbean writers and their reimagining of Indianness in the region. Whereas, for instance, forms of Indo-Caribbean cultural expression in music, cuisine, or religion are more readily accepted as creolizing (thus, Caribbeanizing) processes, an Indo-Caribbean literary imaginary has rarely been studied as such. Discussing the work of Ismith Khan, Harold Sonny Ladoo, Totaram Sanadhya, LalBihari Sharma, and Shani Mootoo, Contradictory Indianness maintains that the writers’ engagement with the regional and transnational poetics of the Caribbean underscores symbolic bridges between cultural worlds conventionally set apart—the Africanized and Indianized—and distinguishes between cultural worlds assumed to be the same—indenture and South Asian Indianness. This book privileges Indo-Caribbean ction as a creolizing literary imaginary to broaden its study beyond a narrow canon that has, inadvertently or not, enabled monolithic and unidimensional perceptions of Indian cultural identity and evolution in the Caribbean, and continued to impose a fragmentary and disconnected study of (post)indenture aesthetics within indenture’s own transnational cartography.

ATREYEE PHUKAN is an associate professor of English at the University of San Diego in California. She is the co-editor of South Asia and Its Others: Reading the Exotic, and co-editor of Home and the World: South Asia in Transition

Critical Caribbean Studies

Stories That Bind

Political Economy and Culture in New India

MADHAV I MURTY

Stories that Bind: Political Economy and Culture in New India examines the assertion of authoritarian nationalism and neoliberalism, both backed by the authority of the state, and argues that contemporary India should be understood as the intersection of the two. More importantly, the book reveals, through its focus on India and its complex media landscape that this intersection has a narrative form, which author, Madhavi Murty labels spectacular realism. The book shows that the intersection of neoliberalism with authoritarian nationalism is strengthened by the circulation of stories about “emergence,” “renewal,” “development,” and “mobility” of the nation and its people. It studies stories told through lm, journalism, and popular non- ction along with the stories narrated by political and corporate leaders to argue that Hindu nationalism and neoliberalism are conjoined in popular culture and that consent for this political economic project is crucially won in the domain of popular culture.

Moving between mediascapes to create an archive of popular culture, Murty advances our understanding of political economy through material that is often seen as inconsequential, namely the popular cultural story. These stories stoke our desires (e.g. for wealth), scaffold our instincts (e.g. for a strong leadership) and shape our values.

234 pp 6.125 x 9.25

978-1-9788-2875-9 paper $34.95S

978-1-9788-2876-6 cloth $120.00SU

May 2022

Political Science • Media Studies

South Asian Studies

MADHAVI MURTY is an assistant professor in the feminist studies department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.