Southern Postcolonialisms: The Global South and the 'New' Literary Representations

"Southern Postcolonialisms" is an anthology of critical essays on new literary representations from the Global South that seeks to re-invent/re-orient the ideological, disciplinary, aesthetic, and pedagogical thrust of Postcolonial Studies in accordance with the new and shifting politico-economic realities/transactions between the North and the South, as well as within the Global South, in an era of globalization. Since the emergence of Postcolonial Theory in the 1980s, the shape of the world has changed dramatically. Old Cold War boundaries have shifted in the wake of the collapse of communism, Globalization, on an unprecedented scale, has dramatically changed the meaning of time and space. The rise of the US as a new imperial power has profound implications for the world order. In the South, new emerging markets have challenged the older division of industrial 'first world' and non-industrial 'third world'.In most parts of the world, the academy is struggling to keep up with these developments. One result has been a major transnational turn in the humanities and social sciences. Terms like 'world history', 'globalization', 'glocalization' and 'transnationalism' now dominate academic agendas worldwide. These changing circumstances raise far-reaching questions. What does the new emerging world order mean for established models of postcolonial theory? Is postcolonialism as a field of study being overtaken by models of globalization and transnationalism? What implications do the new configurations in the South have for postcolonial theory? This volume, drawn from a major literary conference at Delhi University, provides a set of perspectives on these questions. With a majority of contributions by scholars from the South, these research articles have a dual focus - they revisit older debates on postcolonial theory, while suggesting new perspectives and directions.

Sumanyu Satpathy, currently Professor at the Department of English, University of Delhi, has taught at colleges and universities in India’s Eastern and North Eastern states such as Orissa, Mizoram and Meghalaya. He was Distinguished Fellow at the John Osborne Centre, Institute for Advanced Study, University of La Trobe, 2007 and a British Council Visitor, 1988. His publications include Re-viewing Reviewing: The Reception of Modernist Poetry in the Times Literary Supplement (1902-1932) (1995) and a critical edition of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (2002). He has also contributed notes and essays on Yeats, Eliot and Pound in journals such as Notes & Queries, Papers in Language and Literature, English Language Notes, and Ariel. He has co-edited The Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of Indian Nonsense (2007); and Signifying the Self: Women and Literature (2004). He also translates from Oriya, Bangla and Hindi into English.