317 research outputs found
Beyond Cultural Aphasia.
No full textA Conversation between Rossella Ciocca and the scholar and cultural activist G. N. Devy, author of the People's Linguistic Survey of India, about nomadic communities and their endangered languages and cultures
Letteratura e studi culturali. Una conversazione con Rossella Ciocca di Serena Guarracino
No full textL'autore risponde a una serie di domande sugli Studi Culturali nell'università italiana
“Plurality, Identity, Democracy, Globalization…. A conversation with Sunil Khilnani” in Indiascapes. Images and words from globalized India
No full textRossella Ciocca interviews Sunil Khilnani author of the much appraised The Idea of India: one of the best non-fictional introductions to the complexities of politics in contemporary India. The strengths and weaknesses of present-day uneven modernity are discussed around a few strategic topics. First of all plurality, which in its linguistic, cultural, religious, ethnic variety has been vindicated since Independence as a foundational value, is seen as the quintessential resource for achosen practice of syncretism but also in danger of becoming the very source of fragmentation and implosion in a country increasingly maimed by fundamentalism and fanaticism. Democracy is then interrogated between the comfortable perspective of the firmly established and normally operating mechanisms of democratic routine, on the one hand, and the flawsof a still dramatically unjust system of distribution of rights and opportunities, on the other. Identity politics is in turn analysed both in its positive action of mobilizing society around the problem of social upgrading and in its unwelcome side effects of increasing practices of rigid and restricted classification fomenting division and violent sectarianism. In the end Indian growing cultural appeal upon the globalized scene is questioned in its complex relationship with the country’s quest for a role of protagonist in political as well as economic affairs upon a new multilateral international stage
Imaginative kin-making: deconstructing the family, writing entanglements, From the European South a transdisciplinary journal of postcolonial humanities, n. 16 (2025)
No full textFrom Nation to World: Bombay/Mumbai Fictions and the Urban Public Sphere
No full textIn this essay, attention is focused on the very centre of the neo-liberal metropolitan scene. Seen as a city which is transforming its post-independence Nehruvian character into that of a global late-capitalist conurbation, Mumbai is caught in the transition from secular to post-secular policy, while its customary cosmopolitanism appears threatened on the one hand by the phenomenon of rabid parochialism and on the other by both extreme, and/or rather subtle, forms of social violence. Since in the metropolitan compartments of media, entertainment, news, and fiction, English, as a pan-Indian, globalized language, intersperses the bhashas with unrestrained frequency, playing the leading role in the appropriation of globally inflected cultural models, the outcome is a metropolitan landscape in which Anglophone literature itself is imbricated in an ongoing process of conversation with the other agencies at work in the contemporary urban public sphere
Letteratura e Studi Culturali
No full textLetteratura e Studi Culturali
Una conversazione con Rossella Ciocca
di Serena Guarracin
La tragicommedia di Animal: picaro contemporaneo
No full textNel romanzo di Indra Sinha Animal’s People (2007), il narratore è un novello picaro, giovane orfano vittima di una catastrofe ambientale ispirata ai celebri eventi di Bhopal (India) del 1984, quando migliaia di vittime morirono per l’esplosione di una cisterna di fitofarmaci di un’azienda consociata della multinazionale americana Union Carbide Corporation. Tra le centinaia di migliaia di persone sopravvissute ma condannate a subire gli effetti di lungo periodo dell’intossicazione fisica e ambientale, c’è il protagonista che ha subito una deformazione della spina dorsale per cui è costretto a camminare a quattro zampe e a vivere per strada arrangiandosi come può. Nel romanzo, la retorica antisentimentale di Animal, con la sua voce grottesca e sardonica, apparentemente dissimula, ma nella sostanza evidenzia e denuncia, il dispiegarsi tragico della cosiddetta “Slow Violence” (Rob Nixon) che continua a colpire nel tempo, lontano dai riflettori mediatici. Stilisticamente, attraverso una strategia retorica che fa del distanziamento un’arma di ribellione morale, non solo i principi cardini della globalizzazione neoliberista ma persino il fondamento antropocentrico della modernità vengono radicalmente sottoposti a interrogazione
Indian Literature and the World. Multilingualism, Translation and the Public Sphere
No full textIndian Literature and the World is a collection of critical essays featuring up-to-date scholarship on the most vibrant yet under-studied aspects of Indian writing today. Multilingualism, current debates on postcolonial versus world literature, the impact of translation on an “Indian” literary canon, and Indian authors’ engagement with the public sphere all shape the orientation of our volume. The essays cover political activism and the North-East Tribal novel; the role of work in the contemporary Indian fictional imaginary; history as felt and reconceived by the acclaimed Hindi author Krishna Sobti; Bombay fictions; the Dalit autobiography in translation and its problematic international success; development, ecocriticism and activist literature; casteism and access to literacy in the South; gender and diaspora as dominant themes in writing from and about the subcontinent. Troubling Eurocentric genre distinctions and the split between citizen and subject, we wish to approach Indian literature from the perspective of its constant interactions between private and public narratives, thereby proposing a method of reading Indian texts that goes beyond their habitual postcolonial identifications as “national allegories”
Millennium’s Children. New trends in South-Asian Postmillennial Anglophone Literature
No full textThe South-Asian literary scene, after the breakthrough of the Indian postcolonial novel, is now in its complex entirety a space of extremely lively and variegated narrative production. After the groundbreaking sweep of the 80s and 90s with Rushdie, Roy, Seth, Mistry to set the model, in the third millennium a vast train of authors continue to experiment with a multifarious variety of trends, genres, forms and voices. A new generation of writers chart out a vibrant and energetic literary landscape in which the novelistic and other modes, such as the graphic novel, the autobiography or the diary, question changing notions of authorship and interrogate the role of English in creating reading communities across regional borders. Wishing to contribute to a reflection on the expressive possibilities of narrative prose in English in the 21st century, the editors invited contributors to explore new literary beginnings, foreground subjects, styles and genres, examine the devices preferred by the children of the new Millennium, those heirs of Rushdie’s 1981 novel required to adapt to a particularly challenging contemporary scene. One specific goal was indeed to try to delineate new literary strategies in dealing with a socio-cultural landscape particularly complicated by globalisation. The contributions deal quite obviously with a variety of different issues but have offered also the possibility to infer some lines of possible convergence and organising notions. Thus the articles have been grouped under three headed sections conceived as pertinent to themes roughly regarding: 1) the emerging of a South Asian geo-literary dimension; 2) the updating of diaspora literature; 3) the specific renovation and expansion of the Indian contemporary literary scene
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