ABSTRACT

This volume looks at the implications of transcultural humanities in South Asia, which is becoming a crucial area of research within literary and cultural studies. The volume also explores various complex critical dimensions of transculturation, its indeterminate periodisation, its temporal and spatial nonlinearity, its territoriality and intersectionality.

Drawing on contributors from around the globe, the entries look at literature and poetics, theory and praxis, borders and nations, politics, Partition, gender and sexuality, the environment, representations in art and pedagogy and the transcultural classroom. Using key examples and case studies, the contributors look at current developments in transcultural and transnational standpoints and their possible educational outcomes. A broad and comprehensive collection, as it also speaks about the value of the humanities and the significance of South Asian contexts, Transcultural Humanities in South Asia will be of particular interest to those working on postcolonial studies, literary studies, Asian studies and more.

chapter |11 pages

Introduction

Transcultural humanities in South Asia: constrictions and connections

part I|68 pages

Theorising the transcultural humanities

chapter 1|13 pages

Humanities and hope

chapter 3|15 pages

Post-cultural crises and the pandemic

What humanities?

chapter 4|12 pages

Beyond pillars and ‘posts’

Transcultural humanities in South Asian literary studies

chapter 5|13 pages

The role of transcultural humanities in times of crisis

Nadeem Aslam, Karan Mahajan and Kashmir

part II|64 pages

Borderless zones

chapter 6|12 pages

Is there life in this author?

The living author and the business and importance of the humanities in South Asia

chapter 7|12 pages

Sri Lankan literature and territoriality

The politics of literary criticism 1

chapter 8|11 pages

[Trans]cultural contact zones – a comparative study of archetypes

Persian dastan and Greek epic traditions

chapter 9|14 pages

Zones of every being

Transcultural decolonisation and border thinking in contemporary India

chapter 10|13 pages

Languaging gesture/gesturing language

A case for rekhti poetry

part III|64 pages

Postcolonial inquisition and transcultural intersections

chapter 11|12 pages

Migration and the lesson of irony – on the political meaning of humanities

Saadat Hasan Manto and Søren Kierkegaard

chapter 12|13 pages

From post- to para-colonialism

(Trans)national and cultural intersections in post-1988 Pakistani anglophone fiction

chapter 13|12 pages

Bhutan, Western Arunachal Pradesh and modern state-making

Literary-[Trans]cultural mappings in Moi Akou Janam Lom and The Circle of Karma

chapter 14|13 pages

Migrant voices

An inquisition of the ‘other’ literature in Bangladesh

chapter 15|12 pages

Beyond identity politics

Transcultural and multiple allegiances in Parajuly's Land Where I Flee

part IV|65 pages

Homing transculturation

chapter 16|13 pages

Borders, belonging and diasporic aesthetics

Tracing a transcultural conceptualisation of home in South Asian Partition fiction

chapter 17|13 pages

The nation and its peripheries

Borderland narratives and theories of liminality

chapter 18|12 pages

The Long Partition 1

Reading some Partition writers transculturally

part V|63 pages

Expressions of transculturality

chapter 21|12 pages

Memory in theatre, theatre in memory

Experiencing the ‘self/selves’ in Swadeshi theatre (1905–1911)

chapter 22|12 pages

Locating the transcultural humanities in South Asian art

Frescoes in the Lahore Fort Seh-Dara

chapter 23|13 pages

Responses to 9/11

Caricatures and Pashto poetry from Pakistan

chapter 24|12 pages

70 years of freedom of speech and expression in Pakistan

An intracultural analysis of press/media in time and social processes

chapter 25|12 pages

Learning to be ‘glocal’

Reflections on transgressive theories and transcultural flows in a Pakistani ELT classroom and curriculum

part VI|64 pages

Transcultural transformations

chapter 26|13 pages

Aging, literature and the humanities

Transcultural perspectives on literary gerontology in South Asia

chapter 27|12 pages

A Hindu in Pakistan (2011) and A Mad Man's Diary (2014)

Distantiation, cultural transformation and redefinition of Pakistani minorities

chapter 29|13 pages

Dark moon, bright crescent

Tagore in China

chapter 30|12 pages

Transcultural dilemma in Tahmima Anam's The Good Muslim

An analysis of Bangladesh through the competing visions of Maya and Sohail

part VII|72 pages

Transcultural solidarities

chapter 32|14 pages

The outsourcing of pregnancy

Transnational surrogacy in contemporary South Asian literature

chapter 33|13 pages

Socioreligious dichotomies and Indian re-feminism

A transcultural construct of goddesses and women in Sidhwa's and Mehta's Water

chapter |4 pages

Afterword

Transculturalism, the way forward …