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Counterpoints in Fractal Modernities

Essays in Plural Postcolonialities

by S. Satish Kumar (Author)
©2025 Monographs X, 138 Pages

Summary

This book explores the «postcolonial modern» across South Asian literatures and cultures, while demonstrating that postcoloniality is an ongoing lived experience and that modernity has always been a many-voiced historical reality. It contends that our realities and our sense of a location within them have always comprised an experiential manyness of time and space that cannot forcibly be reconciled into identities that are singularly imagined. Therefore, whether viewed historically or experientially, categories such as modernity, postcoloniality, nationhood, or gender cannot be understood singularly. The author reflects on such core tensions within representations and theorizations of postcoloniality. They contemplate possibilities for a lexicon that encompasses the vast polyvalences and precarities that constitute our being, thinking and pursuits of joy and dignity from locations within the «postcolonies», and through it the tangible labors of anticolonial thought and decolonization.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the author
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Contents
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction
  • Chapter 1 First Essay: Incommensurabilities: Rituals of Postcoloniality and Theatres of Modernity
  • Chapter 2 Second Essay: Continuities: A Poetics for Ineffability and an Ethics towards Alterity
  • Chapter 3 Third Essay: Historiographies: Questions of Modernity and Postcoloniality
  • Chapter 4 Fourth Essay: Counterpoints: Locating the Postcolonial Feminine Subject
  • Afterword
  • Index

Acknowledgments

Friends and Masters

As Roland Barthes suggests, all writing is formatively, “a lover’s discourse.” We are often moved to put into writing the things we value the most. The search for a lexicon that endeavors in earnest to communicate such things is a practice of care and a labor of love. What we write, because such a quest for language can often be daunting, also reflects the care and love we receive that sustains us and makes writing possible. Hence, it is of utmost importance that one offers thanks. I know that while writing might happen in a place of solitude, it has never been a solitary activity. So, it is imperative that I thank everybody who has made the writing of this book possible.

I begin with the person this book is dedicated to. I was first officially introduced to Nabaneeta Dev Sen by a very dear teacher of mine, Ipshita Chanda, who I have had the honor of also calling a friend and a colleague. She has been a fierce ally and a very cherished mentor. I had just successfully defended my M.Phil. thesis in which I had written a chapter on Nabaneeta Dev Sen’s contributions to a practice of Comparative Literature in India. I had wanted to present her with a copy of my thesis, but I was too much in awe. When I first met her at Bhalobasha, her home in Kolkata, she had said that she thought of all of us who were students then in the Department of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University as her “grandstudents,” given that some of our teachers had been her students. She responded with such joy and warmth when I handed her a copy of my thesis. Quickly thumbing through the pages, she said, “I will read it properly later, but I have already made a note of all the places you’ve referenced my work.” I feel immensely grateful to be able to dedicate this book to her memory and legacy as a writer, thinker, a comparatist, and, most importantly, as an intellectual foremother.

I offer my gratitude also to all my teachers at the Department of Comparative Literature in Jadavpur University, who have been an integral part of my formation. Ipshita Chanda, who I’ve already mentioned, Swapan Majumdar, Pratap Bandyopadhyay, Shubha Chakraborty Dasgupta, Suchorita Chattopadhyay, Kavita Panjabi, Soma Mukherjee, Debashree Dattaray, Sayantan Dasgupta, Epsita Halder, and Kunal Chattopadhyay who directed my M.Phil. thesis on a historiography of Comparative Literature in India.

My deepest thanks to Dorothy Figueira who was my primary advisor during my doctoral studies at the University of Georgia. She has been my mentor, my champion, and my friend. Three of the four essays compiled in this volume would not have been possible without her very generous and astute guidance. Also, from the University of Georgia, I thank Carolyn Jones Medine for being my kindest and most compassionate interlocutor.

My time in the Department of English at Ashoka University as visiting faculty over the past two years has been immensely generative. I have been able to do some of my best work in the classroom and further explore the synergy between my teaching and scholarship. I have had the honor of working with exceptional colleagues, students, and friends here, and I am truly grateful for the space that they have held for me. I could not have asked for a better institutional home.

I have had the rare fortune of some beautiful and remarkable friendships. Bilal Hashmi has been a first reader for nearly everything I have written over the past decade. I shall be eternally grateful for his often-uncanny ability for gathering the shards of my thoughts and giving them back to me in the order that they belong. He truly is a friend of my mind. Akriti Rastogi, whose generous and diligent readings of my work over the past three years have pushed me to be a better writer. Also, a very special thanks to Priyadarshi Khastgir for the beautiful and thoughtful book cover. Furthermore, I have had the privilege of an extraordinary and incredibly supportive family who have given me more than they sometimes realize. My mother and my four aunts are all voracious readers and exceptionally dedicated educators. Everything I am and hope to become, I owe to them and my grandparents who had they been alive would have been so thrilled to see my name on a book cover.

Finally, I thank Indrani Dutta at Peter Lang, India. It is through our paths having crossed rather serendipitously at the Seagull Foundation for the Arts’ annual History for Peace conference in Kolkata last year that this book now exists.

Introduction

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

Details

Pages
X, 138
Publication Year
2025
ISBN (PDF)
9781803748443
ISBN (ePUB)
9781803748450
ISBN (Softcover)
9781803748436
DOI
10.3726/b22465
Language
English
Publication date
2025 (February)
Keywords
Comparative Literature Ethics Intercultural Studies Literary Histories Politics Postcolonial Studies South Asian Studies South-South Dialogues and World Literature
Published
Chennai, Berlin, Bruxelles, Lausanne, New York, Oxford, 2025. X, 138 pp.
Product Safety
Peter Lang Group AG

Biographical notes

S. Satish Kumar (Author)

S. Satish Kumar holds a PhD from the University of Georgia, where they also held teaching positions in Comparative Literature and African American Studies. A comparatist by training, their work is situated across literary and cultural studies, history and philosophy. Presently, they are visiting faculty in the Department of English, Ashoka University.

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Title: Counterpoints in Fractal Modernities