4 research outputs found
Interview with Indra Das
Indra Das is most well-recognized as the author of The Devourers (2015), a novel that won the Lambda Literary Award for straddling the genres of sci-fi, speculative, and fantasy fiction alongside LGBT themes. Dasâs short fiction is widely published is horror and sci-fi anthologies, as well as magazines like Tor.com, Strange Horizons, and Asimovâs Science Fiction. He spoke candidly with Alok Amatya over email about the current literary landscape, the work of writing transgressive genre fiction, and his own experiences as an upcoming global author
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Resource Conflict Literature: Reading Indigenous Struggles
This dissertation identifies âresource conflict literatureâ as a genre of global literature and media that addresses neo-colonial conflicts over oil, minerals and other natural resources. I focus on twentieth and twenty-first century texts set in âresource frontiers,â i.e. places where native peoples struggle against the grab of mineral-rich lands and other resources by large corporations. The chapters of my dissertation study native struggles in three unique areas of the world, namely, east-central India (South Asia), the Niger Delta of Nigeria (Western Africa), and northern Iraq (the Arabian Peninsula). I identity a literary device â the âitinerary of conflictâ â to refer to spatial accounts that mediate and convey the perspectives of indigenous minorities amidst embattled conditions of the resource frontier, such as armed violence, displacement, and environmental toxicity. For instance, Arundhati Royâs travel-essay âWalking with the Comradesâ (2010) engenders an itinerary of conflict through the authorâs account of a foot-journey across the Dandakaranya jungles of east-central India, alongside Naxalite indigenous rebels. Just as Royâs narrative is inflected by indigenous communities struggling against the expansion of iron-ore mining in their homelands, itineraries of conflict draw on indigenous acts of defiance, such as protest marches through contested lands and ritual pilgrimages to culturally significant sites. More broadly, itineraries of conflict are a spatial vocabulary common to resource conflict literatures from several parts of the world. I locate resource conflict literature as a genre, emerging within world literature and âglobal literature in English,â in which authors explore urgent contemporary issues regarding environmental justice and indigenous rights.</p