Contradictory Indianness : indenture, creolization, and literary imaginary / Atreyee Phukan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Phukan, Atreyee, author.

Contributor:

Indo-Caribbean Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Singh Family Fund.

Series:

Critical Caribbean studies

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Caribbean fiction (English)--East Indian authors--History and criticism.

Caribbean fiction (English).

Caribbean fiction (English)--20th century--History and criticism.

East Indian diaspora in literature.

East Indians in literature.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Literary criticism.

Physical Description:

vii, 231 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2022]

Summary:

"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 fiction 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"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: 1. Indenture Passage and Poetics in Totaram Sanadhya and LalBihari Sharma

2. Repatriation and the "Indian Problem" in Ismith Khan's The Jumbie Bird (i960)

3. The Trope of the Rice Field in Harold Sonny Ladoo's No Pain Like This Body (1972)

4. (En)Gendering Indenture in Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night (1992).

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Singh Family Fund.

ISBN:

9781978829107

1978829108

9781978829114

1978829116

OCLC:

1268983483

Publisher Number:

99991984963