Vernacular English : reading the Anglophone in postcolonial India / Akshya Saxena.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Saxena, Akshya, 1986- author.

Series:

Translation/transnation.

Princeton scholarship online.

Translation/transnation

Princeton scholarship online

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English language--Social aspects--India.

English language.

Language policy--India--History--20th century.

Language policy.

Indic literature (English)--20th century--History and criticism.

Indic literature (English).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (233 pages)

Place of Publication:

Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2022]

Summary:

Against a groundswell of critiques of global English, 'Vernacular English' argues that literary studies are yet to confront the true political import of the English language in the world today. A comparative study of three centuries of English literature and media in India, this book tells the story of English in India as a tale not of imperial coercion, but of a people's language in a postcolonial democracy.

Contents:

Montage, or Meaning Deferred in Slumdog Millionaire

The Ordinariness of English in Gully Boy

Materiality of English in Hindi-Urdu Cinema

Coda. Radical Anglophony, or The Ethics of Attunement

Notes

Index

How Does a Dalit Character Sound? Reading Anand's Untouchable

Performing English in Adiga's The White Tiger

Fugitive Fictions

Chapter 4. Sound: The Mother's Voice and Anglophonic Soundscapes in Northeast India

Orality, or English as a Mother Tongue

"Indian Army Rape Us": Political Mothers and the Indian State

A Language of Protest: Mahasweta Devi and Arundhati Roy

Sonic English and the Aesthetics of Witness in Literature from Northeast India

Chapter 5. Sight: Cinematic English and the Pleasures of Not Reading

Seeing, Not Reading

India Demands English (Anxiously)

Satire, or The View from Below

Language Ex Machina: English as an Instrument

Chapter 2. Touch: Dalit Anglophone Writers and a Language Shared

The Dalit Writer and the English Language

Ambedkar, Phule, and the Goddess English of the Bloodless Revolution

Dalit Anglophone Poets

Hindi Dalit Writing and the Sensation of Touch

Reading English after Touch

Chapter 3. Text: A Desire Called English in Indian Anglophone Literature

Caste and Representation in Indian Anglophone Literature

Cover

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface. On the Grounds

Introduction. Vernacular English: Reading the Anglophone

Elsewhere, or The Problem of English

Vernacular Resolutions

The Promise of the Common: Historical Routes of English in India

The Anglophone, or To Read What Is Not Written

Chapter Descriptions, or Anglophone in Five Speech Acts

Chapter 1. Law: Democratic Objects in Postcolonial India, or India Demands English

A Language of Paper

Administrative Anxieties of the Postcolonial State

The Alliance between Hindi and English

Notes:

Also issued in print: 2022.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (viewed on October 13, 2022).

ISBN:

9780691223148

0691223149

OCLC:

1260173387