ABSTRACT
The conference, which had begun with a promise, a commitment towards furthering the quintessential dimensionality of the 1980 Edward Said’s discourse of the ‘centre margin paradigm,’ deliberated on the concept of the one and the other; talked about the opening up of literary spaces and narratives, a disbanding of boundaries, toppling of hierarchies and a dismantling of categories. A contemplation of the global/local dimension in relation to Indian Popular Commercial Fiction, first in terms of processes of publication and circulation (the means of production) and second in terms of the broad characteristics and reception of such fiction (product and consumption) in the words of Suman Gupta offers a certain kind of resistance to the subservient alignment to academia as the ‘centre’. As the second decade of the 21st century comes to a close under the shadow of a global pandemic, this anthology assesses the rhizomatic trajectories that the realm of the Indian Popular Commercial Fiction with all its stakeholders.
