Room Number: TRS 2-164
Join the Meeting: https://ryerson.zoom.us/j/95608831683?pwd=cXBNVUpGanV1eXFjOUdCUXlPdHpjUT09
Chair: Chandrima Chakraborty (McMaster U)
Speakers:
Aidan Bracebridge (Durham U), “Common knowledge?: Hegemony, rupture, and the Western academy in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire”
Arshad Said Khan (U Alberta), “Muslim Graveyards and Post-Apocalyptic Delhi: Constructing Radical Hijra Commons in Contemporary Indian Writings”
Saba Pirzadeh (Lahore U of Management Science), “(Post)colonial capitalism and ecological rupture in Kamala Markandaya’s novels”
Paper Summaries:
Aidan Bracebridge (Durham U), “Common knowledge?: Hegemony, rupture, and the Western academy in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire”
Focusing on Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006) and Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017), my paper explores the literary treatment of Western universities’ roles in both producing and disrupting the commonization of hegemonic, neocolonial epistemologies, and the disparate manifestations of these institutions’ influence across South Asian, British, and North American contexts.
Arshad Said Khan (U Alberta), “Muslim Graveyards and Post-Apocalyptic Delhi: Constructing Radical Hijra Commons in Contemporary Indian Writings”
This paper examines literary representations of Hijra commons in contemporary India. Hijras are a South Asia specific subaltern transfeminine group. This paper explores how hijra commons as discussed in certain literary works speak back from the margins, and construct alternative political frameworks to dissent against Hindu nationalism, besides forging solidarities.
Saba Pirzadeh (Lahore U of Management Science), “(Post)colonial capitalism and ecological rupture in Kamala Markandaya’s novels”
Investigating the rupture of the ecological commons from a literary lens, this paper analyzes Kamala Markandaya’s novels Nectar in a Sieve (1954) and The Coffer Dams (1969) to establish the ways that (post)colonial capitalism appropriates terra and aquatic commons in India for wealth accumulation.