English

The Hindu character is almost incomprehensible to us . . . The more I know the less I understand. With the Mohammedans it is different. When after the nightmare of Gokul Ashtami, I stood on the minaret of the Taj in Agra, and heard the evening call to prayer ...

... his periodic taunts directed at the Progressive movement, have not prevented recent scholars of Urdu literature, such as Priyamvada Gopal, from ... essay/story titled 'Sa'adat Hasan Manto.' Also in this category are Manto's genre-defying 'open letters,” including 'Pandit Manto's First ...

An updated and expanded version of an essay I first posted as a blog post in 2009. I now engage more directly with Bhabha himself, without getting too bogged down in the theory. This essay is intended as a teaching tool for postcolonial literature classes.

Entry from the Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies, 2016. Overview of the advent of postcolonial studies as an interdisciplinary field, with reference to Postcoloniality within Literary Studies, History, Cultural Anthropology, and Religion Studies. Contrasts to other interdisciplinary terms describing formerly colonized societies: "Third World Studies," "Commonwealth Literature," and so on. Essay contains allusions to the Subaltern Studies movement in history and the growing self-reflexivity in Cultural Anthropology after Edward Said's "Orientalism."

The Indian novel has been a vibrant and energetic expressive space in the 21st century. While the grand postcolonial gestures characteristic of the late-20th-century Indian novel have been in evidence in new novels by established authors such as Vikram Chandra, Amitav Ghosh, and Salman Rushdie, a slate of new authors has emerged in this period as well, charting a range of new novelistic modes. Some of these authors are Kiran Desai, Aravind Adiga, Githa Hariharan, Samina Ali, Karan Mahajan, and Amitava Kumar. In general, there has been a move away from ambitious literary fiction in the form of the " huge, baggy monster " that led to the publication of several monumental postcolonial novels in the 1980s and 1990s; increasingly the most dynamic and influential Indian writing uses new novelistic forms and literary styles tied to the changing landscape of India's current contemporary social and political problems. The newer generation of authors has also eschewed the aspiration to represent the entirety of life in modern India, and instead aimed to explore much more limited regional and cultural narrative frameworks. If a novel like Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981) took its protagonist all over the Indian subcontinent and indexed a large number of important historical controversies in the interest of broad representation, Padma Viswnanathan's The Toss of a Lemon (2008) limits itself to a focus on a single Tamil Brahmin family's orientation to issues of caste and gender, and remains effectively local to Tamil Nadu. There is no central agenda or defining idiom of this emerging literary culture, but three major groupings can be identified that encapsulate the major themes and preoccupations of 21st-century Indian fiction: " New Urban Realism, " " Gender and Secular History, " and " Globalizing India, Reinscribing the Past. "

Members of Rudyard Kipling’s nuclear family lived in India for
approximately thirty years (roughly 1870–1900), and all four
Kiplings (Rudyard, Lockwood Kipling, Alice MacDonald Kipling,
and Alice Fleming) published writing based on that experience.
As postcolonial readers of Rudyard Kipling’s work in particular
have often pointed out, their representation of life in the British
Raj was highly ideological and often quite limited. For that reason, my digital thematic collection, "The Kiplings and India: A
Collection of Writings from British India," balances the presentation of digital editions of texts by the Kiplings themselves with
writing by contemporary Indian reformers and activists like
Pandita Ramabai, Rukhmabai, Behramji Malabari, and Dadabhai
Naoroji. The project is being built in the Scalar platform, and
Scalar’s visualization and path frameworks help users learn about
a series of thematic debates in British Indian life: the famines,
women’s rights under civil law (especially marriage law and the
rights of widows), and the advent of the Indian nationalist movement. Here I will explore texts focusing on one particular thematic
thread, the differential representation of late nineteenth-century
Indian famines in writings by the Kiplings as well as Pandita
Ramabai, Naoroji, and others

“Women of the Early Harlem Renaissance: African American Women
Writers, 1900–1922,” aims to digitize and annotate a limited array of
primary texts, mainly poetry, and present these materials as a digital
archive in the Scalar platform. The project aligns with what Kim
Gallon has referred to as a “technology of recovery,” which is one
of the core principles bridging African American literary studies
and the digital humanities. The project uses Scalar’s visualization
and tagging structures to explore stylistic, thematic, and social
relationships among a small group of writers, as well as to explore
the conversations these writers were having with established
writers and editors. Several key themes have begun to emerge as
the project has developed. The first of these is the confrontation
with American racism, which impacted African American
communities intensely in the 1910s; and these poets document
the emergence of racial violence and the response to that violence.
Second, these poets show how the role of African American
motherhood was evolving in the early years of the twentieth century, in part because of the stresses of raising children in a
racist society. Third, the black Church became strongly connected
to the movement for social justice at this time; and several, if not
most, of the writers in this archive explored Christian themes in
their anti-racist writing.

(An attempt to explore the Yeats/Tagore relationship through Spivak.) This chapter argues that Yeats's "Preface" to the 1912 translation of Tagore's Gitanjali is an expression of both Yeats's universalist aesthetics and the fraught nature of their relationship. Gayatri Spivak's own long preface to Jacques Derrida's "Of Grammatology" theorizes the fraught relationship between Preface and Text. Yeats's use of his Preface to define Tagore as an Author in his own image worked for both writers while their conceptions of authorship aligned, but the rhetorical positioning created a structural impossibility: one cannot claim to be a universalist Author and depend on the Authority of another writer to assert that on one's behalf. The chapter then reads Tagore's growing divergence from Yeats' conception of a universal Poet as a form of postcolonial textual resistance to the shaping effects of the Euro-modernist Preface.

If you walked into Manhattan's pub called "The Vault at Pfaff's" at Bleeker and Broadway before it closed last year, you encountered well-heeled young professionals on internet dates drinking $16 cocktails named "Ada Clare" and "Leaves of Grass"; however, had you strolled into Pfaff's saloon a century and a half ago, you might have encountered New York's first "Queen of Bohemia," Ada Clare herself, along with Walt Whitman and other luminaries, drinking beer and bantering about the latest gossip and buzz about town. Long before the KGB Bar, Studio 54, Andy Warhol's Factory, the White Horse and Cedar Taverns, and the Algonquin Round Table, New York's most significant counter-cultural writers and artists formed what appears to be the city's first European-style salon in a beer hall named after its founder and owner, Charles Pfaff. Both Leaves of Grass and Pfaff's beer cellar first appeared in 1855, though it took Whitman a few years to discover the venue that would become a regular haunt for him during the late 1850s and early 1860s. There, he drank (though apparently never to excess), caroused, flirted, exchanged witticisms, and apparently composed lines for at least one poem, an unfinished portrayal of his fellow patrons entitled "The Two Vaults." Whitman's involvement with the bohemians at Pfaff's has long been known to his reading public, but the scholarly record addressing the subject was notably scant until Christine Stansell explored the topic in a groundbreaking study published in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review in 1993. Since then, interest has steadily increased, culminating in two major publications in 2014: Justin Martin's Rebel Souls: Walt Whitman and America's First Bohemians, an accessible, book-length study aimed at a popular audience, and the subject of this review-Whitman among the Bohemians, a collection of twelve scholarly essays edited by Joanna Levin and Edward Whitley. This impressive volume documents an important period in the lives of well-known figures such as Whitman, Clare, Saturday Press publisher Henry Clapp Jr., and controversial stage performer Adah Isaacs Menken, as well as lesser-known Bohemians such as Fitz-James O'Brien, Edward G. P. Wilkins, Ned Mullen, and Elihu Vedder. Many of the articles in the first half of this volume focus on contemporary periodicals important to these and other Pfaffians, especially the short-lived but influential Saturday Press and the original Vanity Fair, which together referred to Whitman dozens of times in reviews, articles, and satirical pieces, including a fascinating comic poem with an accompanying caricature of Whitman that adorns this volume's cover. The poem, entitled "Counter-Jumps. A Poemettina.-After Walt Whitman," receives insightful treatment from Robert J. Scholnick and separately from Ruth Bohan, whose in-depth analysis shows how the patrons at Pfaff's almost certainly discussed Whitman's new "Calamus" poems in light of their sexual significance. While Scholnick focuses on the many references to Whitman in Vanity Fair, where Whitman was mentioned at least 22 times between 1860 and 1863, often in an affectionately satirical light, Bohan focuses mainly

The Compatible Database Initiative requests Level I Digital Start-Up support to convene a two-day conference and several tele-conferenced planning meetings to foster interoperable person-centric data standards for network analysis and visualization. Numerous humanities scholars are engaged in building relational databases for historical and cultural research. Such network mapping and visualization projects include The Crowded Page, Phylo, Yaddo Archive Project, and Explore Thomas Cole. But these topical projects have developed separately with unique database structures. The field-wide problem is that diverse data structures lack interoperability: data collected for one project is incompatible with data from another. This initiative will spur a conversation among these projects' architects and leading figures in database architecture and data visualization. Our goal is to create the first open source data design standards for interoperability in database mapping and visualization.

A discussion on whether the application of Section 309 of the Immigration and Nationality Act as applied to adopted children and the acquisition of citizenship through an adopted parent, violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America.