Dialogics of Cultural Encounters: Nations and Nationalities in Periods of Conflict

Edited by Sura P. Rath, K. Nirupa Rani and V.C. Sudheer
 
 

This book on new globalism offers revisionist readings of a post-postcolonial world where nations and nationalities engage in conversation even in periods of open or covert conflict. The essays collected in this volume take a post-Orientalist, post-nationalist, and post-historicist approach to a historically colonial issue: cultural encounters between nations and nationalities. Traditionally, the issue is framed as a conflict between the native forces of insurgency and the alien hegemonic power, the opposition grounded mainly on economic and political fields but stretching into collateral areas of subtle social and cultural sections as well. However, this dialectic model, often retrospective in its methodology, attributes values and significance to past events which at their moment of occurrence are products of material forces unrelated to the official historiography. The authors of these essays instead propose a contrasting dialogic model for rewritings these cultural encounters focusing on currents of private conversations going on below the radar screen of official discourse and public policy. Their focus is on the discourse of cultural reconstruction rather than on subaltern politics, on the language of cohesion rather than on exclusive alterity, on fellowship rather than on hegemony. At critical moments when parts of the world are ravaged by war and destruction, these essays argue, there is always an inevitable undercurrent building strength and preparing grounds for a “third space” new culture of globalism. The book celebrates the autonomy of this counter movement.

 
Sura P. Rath is Professor of English and Director of the William O. Douglas Honors College at Central Washington University (Ellensburg, USA). He has edited Flannery O’Connor: New Perspectives (University of Georgia Press, 1996, with Mary Ann Shaw), Sitakanta Mahapatra: The Mythographer of Time (2001), Theory and Praxis: Curriculum, Culture and English Studies (2003, with Kar and Baral); Reflections on Literature, Criticism and Theory (2004, with Baral and Rao) and U.R. Anantha Murthy’s Sanskara; A Critical Reader (2005, with Venkat Rao and Baral).

K. Nirupa Rani is Professor of English and Chair, Board of Studies at Andhra University, Visakhapatnam. She is the author of Partition Perspectives in Indo-English Novels (2004), and her research interests include women’s studies, postcolonial literatures, and African American literature. She is currently the Director of Women’s Studies, Andhra University. She has just completed a book-length study of Claude McKay.

V. C. Sudheer is Professor and Chair, Department of English, Andhra University, Visakhapatnam. He has specialized in such diverse areas as Victorian Poetry, Modern British Fiction and Colonial and Postcolonial Studies.

Contributors : Fred Dallmayr, Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, Kishori Nayak K., Bjorn Curley, Emily J.Moore, Kailash C.Baral, Mandakini Jha, Mohan ramanan, Hsuan L.Hsu, Ahmed Idrissi Alami, Martin Blumenthal-Barby, Richard Sperber and Zoe trod.
 
ISBN 81-85753-74-1           2006           272 pp           Rs. 550 (hb)