Overview

This book investigates the millennial history of the Indian subcontinent. Through the various methods adopted, the objects and moments examined, it questions various linguistic, literary and artistic appropriations of the past, to address the conflicting comprehensions of the present and also the figuring/imagining of a possible future. The volume engages with this general cultural condition, in relation both to the subcontinent's current ""synchronic"" reality and to certain aspects of the culture's underlying diachronic determinations. It also reveals how the multiple heritages are negotiated through the subcontinent's long-term sedimentational history. It scrutinizes both conservative interpretations of heritage and a possibly incremental enrichment, and the additional possibility of a mode of appropriation open to a dialectic of creative destruction, in which the patrimonial imperative is challenged, leaving room for processes of renewal and rejuvenation.The collection is organized around four major topics: Orientalism, addressed by way of the Tamil Epic Manimekalai, through the evocation of the Hastings Circle and views on a possible Hindu-Muslim unity sketched out by Sayyid Ahmed Khan; modernism in Indian and Burmese texts written in English; pictorial art, through a consideration of the work of British Asian and Indian film directors; and, finally, the current state of a body of critical thinking on gender.

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9781443898874

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Cornelius Crowley is Professor of British Studies at the University of Paris Nanterre, France, where he has been the Director of the Centre for Research into the Anglophone World. His most recent research has focused on the question of British Euroscepticism in relation to the current state of a British ""Anglosphere"" post-imperial geopolitics.Geetha Ganapathy-Doré is a research-accredited Associate Professor of English at the Faculty of Law, Political and Social Sciences at the University of Paris 13, France. She is the author of The Postcolonial Indian Novel in English (2011) and has edited and co-edited several books, including Images of Decolonization (2013), and she also serves on the board of Atlantis, the Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies, Her recent research involves India-EU relations, human rights issues, sustainable development and postcolonial cinema.Professor Emeritus Michel Naumann, from Cergy-Pontoise University, France, is a specialist in African literature and history of ideas in India. He has worked in France and Africa and published works on the history of the Commonwealth, the philosopher M.N. Roy, British political life and decolonization, and African literature.

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