8 research outputs found
Auto/Biographer, Historian, Griot: Measures of Realism and the Writing of History in Helon Habilaâs Measuring Time
Metropolitan Civility Bloomsbury and the Power of the Modern Colonial State: Leonard Woolfâs âPearls and Swineâ
ââTelling Brutal Thingsââ: Colonialism, Bloomsbury and the Crisis of Narration in Leonard Woolfâs ââA Tale Told by Moonlightââ
Late Capitalism, Urbanisation, and Cultures of Economic âSurvivalismâ in the BBC's Welcome to Lagos
Reading Precarity, Disability and Narrative Agency in Helon Habilaâs Waiting for an Angel
Fashioning readers: canon, criticism and pedagogy in the emergence of modern Oriya literature
Through a brief history of a widely published canon debate in nineteenth century Orissa, this article describes how anxieties about the quality of âtraditionalâ Oriya literature served as a site for imagining a cohesive Oriya public who would become the consumers and beneficiaries of a new, modernized Oriya-language canon. A public controversy about the status of Oriya literature was initiated in the 1890s with the publication of a serialized critique of the works of Upendra Bhanja, a very popular pre-colonial Oriya poet. The critic argued that Bhanjaâs writing was not true poetry, that it did not speak to the contemporary era, and that it featured embarrassingly detailed discussions of obscene material. By unpacking the terms of this criticism and Oriya responses to it, I reveal how at the heart of these discussions were concerns about community building that presupposed a new kind of readership of literature in the Oriya language. Ultimately, this article offers a longer, regional history to the emerging concern of post-colonial scholarship with relationships between publication histories, readerships, and broader ideas of community â local, Indian, and global