Cambridge Scholars Publishing New Postcolonial Dialectics: An Intercultural Comparison of Indian and Nigerian English Plays

This book closes a gap in postcolonial theory through its scrutiny of how four Indian and Nigerian English plays that are situated in national traditions reframed their own cultural terrain in international terms. It maps the trajectory that Indian and Nigerian dramatists, such as Rabindranath Tagore, Wole Soyinka and Badal Sircar, adopted as they moved from the specific to the bicultural to the global. The intercultural dialectic validated here provides a protean comparative scaffolding that evolves out of, and reflects, the interculturality of the literatures it is critiquing, allowing the book to be an entry point, practical guide, and reference for those interested in studying and comparing literatures from Asia and Africa written or translated into English. Its approach and dialectic can also be expanded for use in comparative literary studies on all intercultural encounters. Review “In her book, New Postcolonial Dialectics, Vengadasalam presents a study of the literature of Nigeria and India as instances of an involved, protracted, and complex interaction between the colonizer’s intentioned policies of systematic control and manipulation of the occupied country and its educated youth which, paradoxically, experiences closest interaction with western education and culture. […] Consistency within the analysis in all of the respective authors and their works allows the reader to perceive the commonalities of experience as they follow the condition of the nation’s post-colonial experience; the unique educational, cultural, political biography of the individual author; [and] the interpretive analysis of the individual work by each author that shows this background context yielding innovations in style, form, and content of each work. […] The unique contribution of this work is to show a clear connection between post-colonial national crises, the unique preparation of the writer who wields his pen for multi-pronged purposes, and clear connections to the genre innovations of form, content, rhetoric that are undertaken usually to defy the binaries that seem to separate the socio-cultural fabric of the nascent nation.”Arundhati SanyalWatchung Review, Volume 4, July 2021“Sarbani Vengadasalam’s New Postcolonial Dialectics: An Intercultural Comparison of Indian and Nigerian English Plays published in 2019, an extension of her PhD thesis, is a plethora of insights that involve critical comments on the conditions of pre-Independent and post-Independent India along with Nigeria, as depicted in the selected literary texts. The book offers a comprehensive account of flux experienced amidst the transitions from being to becoming and back to nothing. The book highlights the emerging need of a comparative dialectic through the lens of interculturalism. […] [T]he author’s extensive contribution in the field of postcolonial and comparative literature makes the book a valuable read.”Pronema BagchiReview, Muse India, 2019“Sarbani Sen Vengadasalam’s book proposes an original comparative exploration of selected plays of India’s Rabindranath Tagore, and Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka through the lens of “intercultural dialectic.” Both Tagore in 1913, and Soyinka in 1986 won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The author contends in the Preface that there is “an urgent need for intercultural dialectic” in analyzing their dramas. The author’s strong analysis of Tagore is historically grounded in excavating Tagore’s lectures abroad and his involvement with unfair colonial laws at home. […] Overall a useful book in its comparative scope of linking Indian and Nigerian playwrights. […] The text includes a useful Appendix with Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources.”Ketu H. KatrakUniversity of California, Irvine“Sarbani Sen Vengadasalam’s New Postcolonial Dialects: An Intercultural Comparison of Indian and Nigerian English Plays is an engaging chronicle of the British rule in India and Nigeria. Whilst few other historians