In December of 2012 in Delhi, India a woman was gang raped, tortured, and inflicted with such bodily violence that she died as a result of the injuries. The case caused massive public protests in Delhi and throughout the Indian subcontinent. These large scale public mobilizations lead to attempts to change national laws pertaining to sexual violence. One year after this case, The Supreme Court of India made the contentious decision to uphold Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. Section 377, instituted by British colonizers dates back to 1860 and criminalizes sexual activities deemed to be “unnatural,” namely queer sex and queer people. In December of 2013, massive protests also occurred throughout India regarding this decision. Both these cases received worldwide media attention and lead to public demonstrations and debates regarding sexual politics throughout Asia and globally. There was a resilient refrain heard at many of the political protests that took place: A ̄za ̄di ̄. A ̄za ̄di is loosely translated into freedom. Drawing on interviews done in the Indian subcontinent, this book suggests that while colonial violence haunts postcolonial sexualities, anti-colonial resistance also remains, echoing in the streets like the chorus of an old song ~ A ̄za ̄di ̄.

"In December of 2012 in Delhi, India a woman was gang raped, tortured, and inflicted with such bodily violence that she died as a result of the injuries. Her male companion was also severely beaten during the assault. The case caused massive public protests in Delhi and throughout the Indian subcontinent. These large scale public mobilizations lead to attempts to change national laws pertaining to sexual violence. One year after this case, The Supreme Court of India made the contentious decision to uphold Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. Section 377, instituted by British colonizers dates back to 1860 and criminalizes sexual activities deemed to be "unnatural," namely same sex desire and queer people. In December of 2013, massive protests also occurred throughout India regarding this decision. Both these cases received worldwide media attention and lead to public demonstrations and debates regarding sexual politics throughout Asia and globally. There was a resilient refrain heard at many of the political protests that took place: Āzādī. Āzādī is loosely translated into freedom. Drawing on interviews done in the Indian subcontinent, this book suggests that while colonial violence haunts postcolonial sexualities, anti-colonial resistance also remains, echoing in the streets like the chorus of an old song Āzādī."--

The conventional lineage of World Literature starts with Goethe and moves through Marx, Said, Moretti, and Damrosch, among others. What if there is another way to trace the lineage, starting with Simone de Beauvoir and moving through Hannah Arendt, Assia Djebar, Octavia Butler, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, and Gayatri Spivak? What ideas and issues get left out of the current foundations that have institutionalized World Literature, and what can be added, challenged, or changed with this tweaking of the referential terminology? Feminism as World Literature redefines the thematic and theoretical contents of World Literature in feminist terms as well as rethinking feminist terms, analyses, frameworks, and concepts in a World Literature context. Other ideas built into World Literature and its criticism are viewed here by feminist framings, including the environment, technology, immigration, translation, work, race, governance, image, sound, religion, affect, violence, media, future, and history. The authors recognize genres, strategies, and themes of World Literature that demonstrate feminism as integral to the world-making gestures of literary form and production. In other words, this volume looks to readings and modes of reading that expose how the historical worldliness of texts allows for feminist interventions that might not sit clearly or comfortably on the surfaces.

Despite the high profile media reporting on sexual violence in the DRC, and the widely publicized responses of the international community, there is still very little real analysis of the real situation of women in the country. This book provides such detailed analysis of gender relations in the DRC, and goes beyond the usual explanations of sexual violence as a product of conflict, to examine the complex and socially constructed gender norms and roles which underlie incidences of violence. The book benefits from a comprehensive account of men’s and women’s roles in conflict, violence, peace building and reconstruction, and evaluates the impacts of national and international political responses.

The Routledge Handbook of Critical Kashmir Studies presents emerging critical knowledge frameworks and perspectives that foreground situated histories and resistance practices to challenge colonial and postcolonial forms of governance and state building. It politicizes discourses of nationalism, patriotism, democracy, and liberalism, and it questions how these dominant globalist imaginaries and discourses serve institutionalized power, create hegemony, and normalize domination. In doing so, the handbook situates Critical Kashmir Studies scholarship within global scholarly conversations on nationalism, sovereignty, indigenous movements, human rights, and international law. The handbook is organized into the following five parts: Territories, Homelands, Borders Militarism, Humanism, Occupation Memories, Futures, Imaginations Religion, History, Politics Armed Conflict, Global War, Transnational Solidarities A comprehensive reference work documenting and consolidating the growing Critical Kashmir Studies scholarship, this handbook will be of interest to scholars of anthropology, political science, cultural studies, legal and sociolegal studies, sociology, history, critical Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, and feminist studies.

The plethora of commentary from highly respected voices in a broad cross-section of academic disciplines, which V. S. Naipaul's death on 11 August 2018 elicited, ranged so widely, both cognitively and emotionally, that if a student of literature, unfamiliar with the Naipaulian era, read it all, they would have failed to make sense of the divergences. Allegations included that he 'was a cruel man', 'a scarred man', 'the darkest dungeons of colonialism incarnate: self-punishing, self-loathing, world-loathing, full of nastiness and fury', 'a ventriloquist for the nastiest cliches European colonialism had devised to rule the world with arrogance and confidence' and so on. On the other hand, writers referred to Naipaul as a 'brilliant writer's writer', one 'who holds a mirror of imagination unto society to capture a certain view of reality' and one who 'has turned the genre of the travelogue into an art form'. Debates aside, many of us appreciate the value of Naipaul's writing to the deepest possible comprehension of the imperial impulse and the myriad reasons it manifested as colonialism. The First Naipaul World Epics is the first in a series of critical collections that aim to demonstrate this value. At the same time, the series seeks to help the new student through the quagmire of divergent opinions his personality and writing have generated.

Looking at a wide selection of Pakistani novels in English, this book explores how literary texts imaginatively probe the past, convey the present, and project a future in terms that facilitate a sense of collective belonging. The novels discussed cover a range of historical movements and developments, including pre-20th century Islamic history, the 1947 partition, the 1971 Pakistani war, the Zia years, and post-9/11 Pakistan, as well as pervasive themes, including ethnonationalist tensions, the zamindari system, and conspiracy thinking. The book offers a range of representations of how and whether collective belonging takes shape, and illustrates how the Pakistani novel in English, often overshadowed by the proliferation of the Indian novel in English, complements Pakistani multi-lingual literary imaginaries by presenting alternatives to standard versions of history and by highlighting the issues English-language literary production bring to the fore in a broader Pakistani context. It goes on to look at the literary devices and themes used to portray idea, nation and state as a foundation for collective belonging. The book illustrates the distinct contributions the Pakistani novel in English makes to the larger fields of postcolonial and South Asian literary and cultural studies.

Partition occurring simultaneously with British decolonization of the Indian subcontinent led to the formation of independent India and Pakistan. While the political and communal aspects of the Partition have received some attention, its enormous personal and psychological costs have been mostly glossed over, particularly when it comes to the splitting of Bengal. The memory of this historical ordeal has been preserved in literary archives, and these archives are still being excavated. This book examines neglected narratives of the Partition of India in 1947 to study the traces left by this foundational trauma on the national- and regional-cultural imaginaries in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. To arrive at a more complex understanding of how Partition experiences of violence, migration, and displacement shaped postcolonial societies and subjectivities in South Asia, the author analyses, through novels and short stories, multiple cartographies of disorientation and anxiety in the post-Partition period. The book illuminates how contingencies of political geography cut across personal and collective histories, and how these intersections are variously marked and mediated by literature. Examining works composed in Bengali and other South Asian languages, this book seeks to broaden and complicate existing conceptions of what constitutes the Partition literary archive. A valuable addition to the growing field of Partition studies, this book will be of interest to scholars of South Asian history, gender studies, and literature.

This is the first reference guide to the political, cultural and economic histories that form the subject-matter of postcolonial literatures written in English.The focus of the Companion is principally on the histories of postcolonial literatures in the Anglophone world - Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, South-east Asia, Australia and New Zealand, the Pacific, the Caribbean and Canada. There are also long entries discussing the literatures and histories of those further areas that have also claimed the title 'postcolonial', notably Britain, East Asia, Ireland, Latin America and the United States. The Companion contains:*220 entries written by 150 acknowledged scholars of postcolonial history and literature;*covers major events, ideas, movements, and figures in postcolonial histories*long regional survey essays on historiography and women's histories. Each entry provides a summary of the historical event or topic and bibliographies of postcolonial literary works and histories. Extensive cross-references and indexes enable readers to locate particular literary texts in their relevant historical contexts, as well as to discover related literary texts and histories in other regions with ease.