Bloomsbury Academic Freedom Inc.: Gendered Capitalism in New Indian Literature and Culture: Other Freedoms

Product Description This book explores how the contraction of what it means to be human and free happens in South Asia, and how it is registered by the contemporary bildungsroman, as well as paying attention to the genre's current transformation under neoliberalism. The bildungsroman, in uniquely being concerned with the cultivation of the self, is an apt vehicle to explore neoliberalism’s projects of gendered subject formation. As such, the South Asian bildungsroman illuminates how the global spread of capitalism exacerbates existing inequalities based on traditional femininities and masculinities while creating new hierarchies. This book argues that South Asian Anglophone novels as diverse as Thrity Umrigar's The Space Between Us (2006), Chetan Bhagat's One Night in a Call Center (2005), Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013), and Arvind Adiga's The White Tiger (2008) flesh out how notions like 'supply and demand,' 'free trade' and 'market driven value' are experienced, embodied, and challenged by those who occupy the bottom of the socio-economic ladder, as well as how they are experienced by women differently than by men. The result is that the universal voice of the bildungsroman is figured instead as a particularized gendered one. About the Author Mukti Lakhi Mangharam is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, USA