ABSTRACT
Postcolonial Urban Outcasts: City Margins in South Asian Literature is an edited collection of literary criticism that, as an anthology, examines the position and role of South Asian Cities’ discontents. It is an attempt to investigate how South Asian literature and literature about South Asia attend to urban margins, whether we dene those margins spatially, psychologically, sexually, or sociopolitically. For this reason, Postcolonial Urban Outcasts brings together chapters that emphasize myriad critical approachesgeospatial, urban-theoretical, diasporic, and subaltern, to name a few. These diverse chapters are nonetheless united in their critical empathy for urban outcasts, which is to say in losing the “city eyes” that narrator Saleem Sinai in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children says allows our blindness to urban hardships (92), and because they are implicitly underpinned by the same questions: why are cities an important category for South Asia, where discussions of the nation and of nationalism have been assumed to be the dominant organizational logic? And, what are the consequences of literary representations and investigations into urban outcasts in South Asia?
