Indian Literature after Liberalization
Rahul Parson, Professor
South and Southeast Asian Studies
Applications for Fall 2024 are closed for this project.
The initiation of a liberalized economy and rise of right-wing nationalist politics has increased the precarity of vulnerable communities, minorities, women, and those seen as outsiders or immigrants. This project uses historical, archival, ethnographic, and literary critical approaches to vernacular cultures in order to make visible the new political and cultural coordinates of India after the destruction of the Babri Masjid, after the Cold War, and after Nehruvian economics. The historical context compels writers to reflect on the cultural consequences of globalization at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A generalized consumerist culture tends to flatten difference, which may both provide the repose and space to produce particularism in literature and inspire a cultural revolt against global homogenization. Locating these social and material processes within art and literature allows us to see the articulations of living processes that are much more widely experienced in the society (Williams 1977, 133), and in the case of minor literatures, this articulation may be the only glimpse at the life-worlds of communities with a scarcity of recorded narratives. Methodologically, the project takes literary evidence as a critical and affective historical archive; it acknowledges developments in World Literature and Post-Colonial studies that problematize and provincialize Eurocentric modes of literary recognition and assessment.
Role: The student will learn research skills such as reading through scholarly texts main arguments and literary texts for tropes and motifs related to the project, taking notes on such material, and researching bibliographic and textual databases on specific topics. The student will also be asked to read and comment on drafts of the project.
Qualifications: Freshmen are welcome, more advanced students in the humanities are preferred. Students with an interest in South Asian literature, art and film are encouraged to apply. Basic reading ability of Hindi, Urdu, or Bengali (or other South Asian languages) a plus but not required.
Hours: 3-5 hrs
Related website: http://sseas.berkeley.edu/people/rahul-parson/
Arts & Humanities Social Sciences