Cambridge University Press Insurgent Imaginations: World Literature and the Periphery

This book argues that contemporary world literature is defined by peripheral internationalism. Over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a range of aesthetic forms beyond the metropolitan West - fiction, memoir, cinema, theater - came to resist cultural nationalism and promote the struggles of subaltern groups. Peripheral internationalism pitted intellectuals and writers not only against the ex-imperial West, but also against their burgeoning national elites. In a sense, these writers marginalized the West and placed the non-Western peripheries in a new center. Through a grounded yet sweeping survey of Bengali, English, and other texts, the book connects India to the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, Latin America, and the United States. Chapters focus on Rabindranath Tagore, M. N. Roy, Mrinal Sen, Mahasweta Devi, Arundhati Roy, and Aravind Adiga. Unlike the Anglo-American emphasis on a post-national globalization, Insurgent Imaginations argues for humanism and revolutionary internationalism as the determinate bases of world literature. Review 'In place of a World Literature that venerates 'a small canon of texts divorced from context,' Insurgent Imaginations stages the powerful theater of 'peripheral internationalism.' With South Asia as focus, it travels through the literary, filmic, theoretical, and non-literary texts of the 'periphery,' to re-evaluate the past by way of a rich historical narrative as well as careful close readings. For this reader, the discussion of Mahasweta Devi was particularly enjoyable.' Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, author of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason'An ebullient, richly documented and entirely new story: how 'World Literature' was the very banner under which third-world rebels and visionaries reimagined the world as a kind of humanist international. An important book, and one based on materials that are almost completely unknown.' Professor Timothy Brennan, Samuel Russell Chair in the Humanities, University of Minnesota'Insurgent Imaginations is a bracing response to anodyne notions of 'World Literature' whose inevitable center is Anglo-America. Instead, Majumder develops a powerful theory of 'peripheral internationalism,' by showing how twentieth-century Bangla/Bengali literature developed in conversation with literary, cultural, and political movements across the world (the 'West' was not ignored, but not granted special privilege). The writers and artists who populate Majumder's peripheral internationalism derived their creative energies from anticolonial movements, and their art rejected imperialist hierarchies of knowledge. They also went on to develop powerful critiques of the national elites who took power after independence. Theirs is an internationalism insurgent in its sympathies and practices, and devoted to emancipatory change, in Bengal, in India, across the world. These are the values that motivate Majumder's deeply humanist scholarship and activist cultural commitments too, and make Insurgent Imaginations an important intervention into cultural debates today.' Suvir Kaul, A.M. Rosenthal Professor of English, University of PennsylvaniaInsurgent Imaginations jolts commonplace ideas about the relevance and range of world literature. The book begins in the inter-war years and discovers an astonishing constellation of dialogues that Indian writers had with socialist counterparts in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. It also provides a rare and absorbing account of literary-cultural connections that have not received sufficient attention until now. Tagore's ideas about emancipation are considered alongside Mao Zedong's; M.N. Roy's communist ideals contextualized in his dialogue with Claude McKay and other Black internationalists; Mrinal Sen's arthouse films probed for their debts to Third Cinema and the Naxalite movement. Literary works by Aravind Adiga, Arundhati Roy, and Mahasweta Devi are read alongside those by Richard Wright, Tagore, Brecht, Lu