Focus India : Postcolonial Narratives of the Nation

Contents: Acknowledgements. Introduction. I. The nation at home: 1. New perceptions of nationalist politics: reconsidering motherhood/Rumina Sethi. 2. Changing perceptions of the nation in Indian English literature/Shyamala A. Narayan. 3. Imaging homelands: narratives of postcolonial migration in Bengal/Jayita Sengupta. 4. Failure of agency, or the agency of failure: postcolonial modernity in Anantha Murthy\'s "A Horse for the Sun"/Karni Pal Bhati. 5. Ontological issues in Samskara and The Last Brahmin: a critique/D. Himalayanath. 6. Will the meek inherit? Nation and sub-nations in the novels of Maitreyi Pushpa/Vibha S. Chauhan. 7. Nation narrated in An Epic Unwritten/C.L.L. Jayaprada. 8. Imagining India in English: Arundhati Roy\'s The God of Small Things/Murari Prasad. 9. Trapped in modernity: Neo-Colonial constructions of India in Salman Rushdie\'s Midnight\'s Children and The Moor\'s Last Sigh/Someshwar Sati. II. The nation abroad: 10. Branding the nation: exporting literature as cultural capital/Sandra Ponzanesi. 11. Nostalgia, duty and desire: home in Indian Diaspora Literature/Geetanjali Singh Chandra. 12. Indias abroad: the Diaspora writes back/Rajendra Chetty. 13. \'Cultural Translation\' of Bharata Natyam into \'Contemporary Indian Dance\': Second-generation South Asian Americans and cultural politics in Diasporic locations/Ketu H. Katrak. 14. Lost in translation: Deepa Mehta\'s Earth/Donna Coates. 15. The reverse Bildungsroman as globalization device: the case of The Mistress of Spices/Feroza Jussawalla. 16. Salman Rushdie\'s novels: dissolving the familiar cultural boundaries/Amrit Biswas. Contributors.

"This volume, a selection of the essays presented at the Thirteenth Triennial Conference of ACLALS held in Hyderabad in 2004, examines some of the defining aspects of Indian Culture and its literary manifestations. The emancipatory appeal of belonging to a nation in this era of globalization, the varied discourses on the history and social dynamics of India and their impact on Indian people, the Diasporic literature of the writers of Indian Diaspora, and the complex mindsets of postcolonial and neocolonial subjectivities are some of the many issues interrogated in this study." (jacket)