Debjani Ganguly

Ned Curthoys

This collection is an enterprise of discovery and critical inquiry into the legacy of one of late modernity's greatest public intellectuals, Edward Said. Noted contributors, including Bill Ashcroft, John Docker, Lisa Lowe, Hsu-ming Teo and Patrick Wolfe, address an array of intellectual, political and cultural issues in their engagement with Said's oeuvre. Exciting new scholarship highlights the ways in which humanities in the twenty-first century can engage with Said's legacy, which includes his imbrications of culture and imperialism, his cosmopolitan critique of the idea of 'clash of civilisations', and his belief that the intellectual needs to maintain 'intellectual performances' on many fronts. The individual chapters achieve a sense of balance between the two poles of Said's persona: the brilliant and intimidating literary and music critic who invested deeply in an inclusive and democratic vision of humanism and the outspoken public intellectual who kept alive the truth of Palestine and the dangers of a settler colonial ethos.

The Legacy of a Public Intellectual

Edward Said

John Docker

This book presents a rethinking of the world legacy of Mahatma Gandhi in this era of unspeakable global violence. Through interdisciplinary research, key Gandhian concepts are revisited by tracing their genealogies in multiple histories of world contact and by foregrounding their relevance to contemporary struggles to regain the ‘humane’ in the midst of global conflict. The relevance of Gandhian notions of ahimsa and satyagraha is assessed in the context of contemporary events, when religious fundamentalisms of various kinds are competing with the arrogance and unilateralism of imperial capital to reduce the world to a state of international lawlessness. Covering a wide and comprehensive range of topics such as Gandhi’s vegetarianism and medical practice, his successes and failures as a litigator in South Africa, his experiments with communal living and his concepts of non-violence and satyagraha. The book combines historical, philosophical, and textual readings of different aspects of the leader’s life and works. Rethinking Gandhi in a New World Order will be of interest to students and academics interested in peace and conflict studies, South Asian history, world history, postcolonial studies, and studies on Gandhi.

Global Perspectives

Rethinking Gandhi and Nonviolent Relationality

World Literature is a vital part of twentieth-first century critical and comparative literary studies. As a field that engages seriously with function of literary studies in our global era, the study of World literature requires new approaches. The Cambridge History of World Literature is founded on the assumption that World Literature is not all literatures of the world nor a canonical set of globally successful literary works. It highlights scholarship on literary works that focus on the logics of circulation drawn from multiple literary cultures and technologies of the textual. While not rejecting the nation as a site of analysis, these volumes will offer insights into new cartographies – the hemispheric, the oceanic, the transregional, the archipelagic, the multilingual local – that better reflect the multi-scalar and spatially dispersed nature of literary production. It will interrogate existing historical, methodological and cartographic boundaries, and showcase humanistic and literary endeavors in the face of world scale environmental and humanitarian catastrophes.

The Cambridge History of World Literature

One prevalent socio-cultural structure that is peculiar to South Asia is caste, which is broadly understood in socio-anthropological terms as an institution of ranked, hereditary and occupational groups. This book discusses the enigmatic persistence of caste in the lives of South Asians as they step into the twenty-first century. It investigates the limits of sociological and secular historical analysis of the caste system in South Asia and argues for ways of describing life-forms generated by caste on the subcontinent that supplement the accounts of caste in the social sciences. By focusing on the literary, oral, visual and spiritual practices of one particular group of ex-untouchables in western India called ‘Mahars’, the author suggests that one can understand caste not as an essence that is responsible for South Asia’s backwardness, but as a constellation of variegated practices that are in a constant state of flux and cannot be completely encapsulated within a narrative of nation-building, modernization and development.

Debjani Ganguly

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