Beyond national literatures: Empire and Amitav Ghosh

Scholarship on the writer Amitav Ghosh has addressed issues of nationalism, postcolonial identity, ecocriticism, testimony, subalternity, and historiography. But the idea of Ghosh as an Asian American author with a particular relationship to the United States and its national mythologies, has barely been considered. In this essay, I explore this neglected aspect of Ghosh’s œuvre by looking at the idea of America in his writing and by situating his work within what I term "the Bengali American grain". Reading his work alongside that of other Bengali American writers and arguing that it is more ambitious thematically and more anti-imperialistic, I probe Ghosh’s problematic relationship with the United States, asking how his hemispheric writing continues to extend and even alter the terrain often associated with Asian American literature

South Asian Atlantic Literature, 1970-2010

The first major interpretation of recent South Asian diasporic writing in specifically transatlantic terms. The book is organised around four key themes: home and nation; travel and return; racial mixing; and food and eating. Ruth Maxey offers readings of canonical and less well-known South Asian American and British Asian writers and texts and of key cinematic works. She explores the formal and thematic tendencies of the works, relating them to gender politics, the marketplace, and issues of literary value and historical change. The book engages with established debates, while intervening in new ways in transatlantic studies, postcolonial literary studies and Asian American cultural studies

“Children are Given us to Discourage Our Better Instincts”: The Paradoxical Treatment of Children in Saki’s Short Fiction

Les enfants jouent un rôle important dans les nouvelles de Saki (Hector Hugh Munro) ; cependant, bien qu’ils enrichissent son œuvre, l’auteur leur réserve un traitement paradoxal : s’ils sont souvent préférés aux adultes ils sont aussi souvent méprisés – Saki, dirait-on, s’en soucie peu. Cette attitude incite le lecteur à revoir les principes d’une hiérarchie sociale qui, de manière arbitraire, déclare la supériorité des adultes par rapport aux enfants. Il s’agit cependant d’une position foncièrement problématique. Parce que si Saki proteste contre la cruauté des adultes envers les enfants, il semble aussi l’applaudir.La critique conventionnelle place traditionnellement Saki dans la lignée de Rudyard Kipling, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll et Oscar Wilde, quoique sa position dans le monde des lettres serait « unique ». Sa misogyne, son homosexualité, son obsession pour les animaux, son goût pour la farce et d’autres lieux communs concernant son écriture ont également été relevés. En revanche, il n’existe aucune étude spécifiquement consacrée à la façon dont Saki traite les enfants et l’enfance, alors que, selon ses biographes son enfance malheureuse constitue une source majeure d’inspiration pour ses nouvelles.L’objectif du présent article est de répondre à ce manque. Pour ce faire, dans un premier temps la représentation des adultes par rapport aux enfants et la conduite des premiers envers ces derniers est étudiée dans nombre de ses nouvelles. Dans un deuxième temps la représentation de l’univers secret des enfants et la complicité entre ceux-ci et les animaux sont considérées. Après une étude des moyens littéraires qu’engagent ces représentations pour leur mise en oeuvre, l’article se penche enfin sur l’ambiguïté qui gouverne ces représentations. Ainsi se dégage l’hypothèse selon laquelle les enfants de Saki s’animent dans son œuvre pour que les meilleurs sentiments du lecteur se maintiennent somnolents

National stories and narrative voice in the fiction of Joshua Ferris

In his début novel, Then We Came to the End (2007), Joshua Ferris narrates his story of a pre-9/11 Chicago advertising agency in the first-person plural. Such narrative experimentation recurs across his fiction and is often linked to national concerns. This essay analyzes narrative voice, personal pro- nouns, and the state of the nation, investigating a writer whose work has received much popular attention but little academic interest to date

Animals In The Writing Of Bharati Mukherjee

James Kim has argued that "despite long noting the links between animalisation and racialisation, critical animal studies have yet to consider their relationship to Asian American studies." Relating to this wider scholarly gap, studies of the South Asian American writer Bharati Mukherjee (1940–2017) have yet to examine the importance of fauna within her œuvre. Tracing specific animal metaphors—from avian to marine mammalian and reptilian to canine—this essay confronts that critical silence via close textual analysis and the use of critical animal studies as a theoretical lens. It compares Mukherjee’s recurrent, often intertextual and interreferential use of such tropes and interrogates the cultural and gendered associations of animals evoked by her fiction and essays. Her literary portrayal of non-human creatures is largely anthropocentric and zoomorphic: a rich, polysemic device to reflect human experience. Writing Indian animal imagery into American literature, Mukherjee's neglected creaturely motifs signify the power of dreams, the fall of the Mughal Empire in India, human communities as endangered species, and predator versus prey within a Darwinian logic of survival. A shorthand for both India and the United States, animal metaphors expose a brutal world of danger, inequality and corruption

"Mother-weights" and lost fathers: parents in South Asian American literature

That parent-child relationships should play a significant role within South Asian American literature is perhaps no surprise, since this is crucial material for any writer. But the particular forms they so often take – a dysfunctional mother-daughter dynamic, leading to the search for maternal surrogates; and the figure of the prematurely deceased father – are more perplexing. Why do families adhere to these patterns in so many South Asian American texts and what does that tell us about this œuvre? More precisely, why are mothers subjected to a harsher critique than fathers and what purpose does this critique serve? How might we interpret the trope of the untimely paternal death? In this article I will seek to answer these questions – arguably key to an understanding of this growing body of writing – by considering works produced between the 1990s and the early twenty-first century by a range of South Asian American writers

Surface composition and structure of Co\u3csub\u3e3\u3c/sub\u3eO\u3csub\u3e4\u3c/sub\u3e(110) and the effect of impurity segregation

The Co3O4 (110) single crystal surface has been characterized by low energy electron diffraction (LEED), Auger electron spectroscopy, and x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). LEED analysis of the clean Co3O4 (110) spinel surface shows a well-ordered pattern with sharp diffraction features. The XPS spectra are consistent with stoichiometric Co3O4 as determined by the concentration ratio of oxygen to cobalt (CO /CCo) and spectral peak shape. In particular, the cobalt 2p XPS spectra are characteristic of the spinel structure with Co3+ occupying octahedral sites and Co2+ in tetrahedral sites within the lattice. During prolonged heating at 630 K, bulk impurities of K, Ca, Na, and Cu segregated to the surface. Sodium desorbed from the surface as NaOH at 825 K, potassium and calcium were only removed by sputtering since no desorption from the surface was detected for temperatures up to 1000 K. Copper also disappeared upon heating above 700 K, most likely by desorbing although the possibility of diffusion back into the bulk could not be eliminated. The appearance of copper impurities correlated with Co3O4 (110) surface reduction to CoO, and the surface could not be fully reoxidized even upon extended oxygen annealing as long as the copper impurity remained on the surface. Upon removal of the Cu from the near-surface region, the surface was easily reoxidized to Co3O4 by O2

The South Asian Atlantic : Home, Nation and Identity in British Asian and South Asian American Writing From 1970-2004

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

South Asian Atlantic Literature, 1970-2010

The first major interpretation of recent South Asian diasporic writing in specifically transatlantic terms. The book is organised around four key themes: home and nation; travel and return; racial mixing; and food and eating. Ruth Maxey offers readings of canonical and less well-known South Asian American and British Asian writers and texts and of key cinematic works. She explores the formal and thematic tendencies of the works, relating them to gender politics, the marketplace, and issues of literary value and historical change. The book engages with established debates, while intervening in new ways in transatlantic studies, postcolonial literary studies and Asian American cultural studies