Description:

A LECTURE BY ULKA ANJARIA
Associate Professor of English, Brandeis University

Internationally-celebrated Indian English novels of the 1980s and 1990s, from Midnight’s Children to The God of Small Things, represented the present as continually haunted by the specters of the past. More recent writers and cultural producers are rethinking this by experimenting with a new aesthetics of the contemporary. Yet, this is not a self-evident project. What is the Indian contemporary and what does it mean to represent it? How do we talk about the present without lamenting India’s decline from its cosmopolitan and secular ideals on one hand, or celebrating its emergence as a new global superpower on the other? Where, between these two dominant narratives, is there the possibility for understanding the present as a heterogeneous space on its own terms?

 This event is co-sponsored with the Asian Studies Program.