Chapter 12. The Changing Face of Translation in Indian Literature

A traditional brass lamp has several wicks jutting out to be lit. The more numerous the wicks, the brighter the light. The lamp is the same, the oil is the same but it is the wicks that determine the brightness of the light. The lights from the various wicks merge imperceptibly and produce a brightness which is the totality of many lights. Just as many wicks produce one light, India’s many languages produce one literature. K.M. George (1984, x) While K.M. George’s analogy between the brass la..

Culinary scapes: Contesting food, gender and nation in South Asia and its diaspora

“Culinary Scapes” analyzes culinary cultural production produced and consumed by South Asians in various “national” sites: India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Britain, Canada and the United States. It juxtaposes contemporary South Asian cultural production to identify the potentials as well as limitations of thinking through culinary practices to understand how South Asian subjects inhabit multiple identitarian locations made possible by particularized relationships to food and culinarity. This juxtaposition of texts reveals that food is implicated in vital ways in a number of cultural, political and economic debates that both produce and contest ideas about gendered national culinary identity. The dissertation uncouples the seamless link between “food” and “nation” in a range of South Asian contexts to argue that food and nation and gender are not naturally linked, but instead are rendered isomorphic within the popular imagination for politically motivated reasons. The first chapter offers a schematic overview of culinarity in different disciplinary locations. It ends with an exploration of the politics of food production in Ketan Mehta\u27s Mirch Masala (Spices ). Chapter II analyzes how the rhetoric of cookbooks, including those by Kala Primlani and Madhur Jaffrey, discipline middle class “housewives” in India and the United States into performing versions of Indianness, upholding the values of middle class Hindu India. Chapter III explores how queer desire—routed through culinarity—emerges against the backdrop of the classed and sexualized domestic sphere in Romesh Gunesekera\u27s Reef and Deepa Mehta\u27s Fire. Chapter IV examines how food is embedded in discourses about authenticity and citizenship within diasporic contexts, comparing Shani Mootoo\u27s “Out on Main Street” with Sara Suleri\u27s Meatless Days . Chapter V asks what it means to think “beyond the nation” analyzing the gendered, culinary television and cookbook performances of Padma Lakshmi and Raji Jallepalli as well as the writings of Geeta Kothari. It asks how fusion cuisine can be read against U.S. racial discourses of assimilation and otherness. The final chapter reflects on the politico-economic implications of thinking about food and nation in isomorphic terms by reading Nisha Ganatra\u27s Chutney Popcorn alongside debates over basmati rice patenting in South Asia

The Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture

In the past four decades the field of Asian American literary and cultural studies has grown enormously, expanding its areas of inquiry beyond the reflections on national identity and citizenship to encompass issues such as transnational and diasporic identities and communities; the workings of imperialism; the intersectionality of race, gender, and sexuality; and social justice/human rights in a global context. This project offers the largest and most comprehensive collection of scholarship on Asian American literature and culture to date. With original essays on everything from Asian American literary classics to experimental theater, from K-pop to online gaming, the Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture guides both established scholars and readers new to this study through the extensive landscape of Asian American writing and cultural production

Changing the Terms

This volume explores the theoretical foundations of postcolonial translation in settings as diverse as Malaysia, Ireland, India and South America. Changing the Terms examines stimulating links that are currently being forged between linguistics, literature and cultural theory. In doing so, the authors probe complex sequences of intercultural contact, fusion and breach. The impact that history and politics have had on the role of translation in the evolution of literary and cultural relations is investigated in fascinating detail