Arun Mukherjee

Arun Prabha Mukherjee

This work charts the author's intellectual journey during the last ten years as an academic teaching Postcolonial literature in a Canadian university. The essays critique the dominant models of Postcolonial theory that emerge from metropolitan centres and ignore the specifics of time and place. Arun Mukherjee tests these theories by applying them to her classroom experience of teaching authors such as Mulk Raj Anand, Dionne Brand, Anita Desai, Claire Harris, Bessie Head, Sky Lee, and many others.

My Living

Postcolonialism

In these closely argued essays, taking examples from writing and film, Arun Prabha Mukherjee considers the place of the third world person - both as artistic creator and as a subject of artistic eneavour - in the West. Works of non-mainstream, immigrant artists, she urges, shoul be understood on their own terms. In particular, established Western aethetics, especially the idea of the Universal and its applications, even within the domains of the postcolonial and feminist criticism, are demonstrated as instances of domination and disregard third world experiences and particularities. On the other hand, key canonical texts in the West, blind to these details of the third world lives they portray, are shown to be distortional and even offensive. This important work includes detailed and original considerations of the works of David Lean, Michael Ondaatje, MG Vassanji, Earle Birney, Rohinton Mistry, Neil Bissoondath, Dionne Brand, and numerous others.

Readings from a Hyphenated Space

Oppositional Aesthetics

Omprakash Valmiki

Omprakash Valmiki describes his life as an untouchable, or Dalit, in the newly independent India of the 1950s. "Joothan" refers to scraps of food left on a plate, destined for the garbage or animals. India's untouchables have been forced to accept and eat joothan for centuries, and the word encapsulates the pain, humiliation, and poverty of a community forced to live at the bottom of India's social pyramid. Although untouchability was abolished in 1949, Dalits continued to face discrimination, economic deprivation, violence, and ridicule. Valmiki shares his heroic struggle to survive a preordained life of perpetual physical and mental persecution and his transformation into a speaking subject under the influence of the great Dalit political leader, B. R. Ambedkar. A document of the long-silenced and long-denied sufferings of the Dalits, Joothan is a major contribution to the archives of Dalit history and a manifesto for the revolutionary transformation of society and human consciousness.

Arun Prabha Mukherjee

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