Download or read book Secularism and the Crisis of Minority Identity in Postcolonial Literature written by Roger McNamara and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-06-06 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Secularism and the Crisis of Minority Identity in Postcolonial Literature examines how writers from religious and ethnic minority communities (Anglo-Indians, Burghers, Dalits, Muslims, and Parsis) in India and Sri Lanka engage secularism through novels, short stories, and autobiographies. Given the rise of Hindu nationalism in India and Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka, it would seem obvious that minorities would rally around secularism (the separation of church and state). However, this bookargues that the relationship between minorities and secularism is extremely ambivalent. On the one hand, it shows how writers belonging to oppressed communities can deploy secularism as a mode of critique (secular criticism) to challenge the ideologies of dominant groups—the nation, upper-castes, and religious hierarchies. On the other hand, it examines how these writers reveal that other aspects of secularism (secularization and secular time) are responsible for creating essentialized identities that have not only exacerbated relationships between majorities and minorities and between minority groups, but have also created tension within minority groups themselves. Turing to aesthetics and religious faith, these writers attempt to undermine secular social and cultural structures that are responsible for this crisis of minority identity.
Download or read book Enlightenment in the Colony written by Aamir R. Mufti and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-10 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enlightenment in the Colony opens up the history of the "Jewish question" for the first time to a broader discussion--one of the social exclusion of religious and cultural minorities in modern times, and in particular the crisis of Muslim identity in modern India. Aamir Mufti identifies the Hindu-Muslim conflict in India as a colonial variation of what he calls "the exemplary crisis of minority"--Jewishness in Europe. He shows how the emergence of this conflict in the late nineteenth century represented an early instance of the reinscription of the "Jewish question" in a non-Western society undergoing modernization under colonial rule. In so doing, he charts one particular route by which this European phenomenon linked to nation-states takes on a global significance. Mufti examines the literary dimensions of this crisis of identity through close readings of canonical texts of modern Western--mostly British-literature, as well as major works of modern Indian literature in Urdu and English. He argues that the one characteristic shared by all emerging national cultures since the nineteenth century is the minoritization of some social and cultural fragment of the population, and that national belonging and minority separatism go hand in hand with modernization. Enlightenment in the Colony calls for the adoption of secular, minority, and exilic perspectives in criticism and intellectual life as a means to critique the very forms of marginalization that give rise to the uniquely powerful minority voice in world literatures.
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Postsecularity written by Justin Beaumont and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-26 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Postsecularity offers an internationally significant and comprehensive interdisciplinary collection which provides a series of critical reviews of the current state of the art and future trends in philosophical, theoretical, and conceptual terms. The volume likewise presents a range of empirical knowledges and engagements with postsecularity. A critical yet sympathetic dialogue across disciplinary divides in an international context ensures that the volume covers a wide and interrelated intellectual and geographical scope. The editor’s introduction with Klaus Eder offers a robust foundation for the volume, setting out the central aims and objectives, the rationale for the contributions, and an outline of the structure. Thorny issues of normativity and empirical challenges are highlighted for the reader. The handbook comprises four interrelated sections. Part I: Philosophical meditations discusses postsecularity from philosophical standpoints, and Part II: Theological perspectives presents contributions from a variety of theological viewpoints. Part III: Theory, space, social relations contains pieces from geography, planning, sociology, and religious studies that delve into theoretically informed empirical implications of postsecularity. Part IV: Political and social engagement offers chapters that emphasize the political and social implications of the debate. In the Afterword, Eduardo Mendieta joins the editor to reflect on the notion of reflexive secularization across the volume as a whole, alluding to new lines of inquiry. The handbook is an invaluable guide for graduate and advanced undergraduate teaching, and a key reference for students and scholars of human geography, sociology, political science, applied philosophy, urban and public theology, planning, and urban studies.
Download or read book The Crisis of Secularism in India written by Anuradha Dingwaney Needham and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-18 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this timely, nuanced collection, twenty leading cultural theorists assess the contradictory ideals, policies, and practices of secularism in India.
Download or read book The Crisis of Secularism in India written by Anuradha Dingwaney Needham and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-18 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While secularism has been integral to India’s democracy for more than fifty years, its uses and limits are now being debated anew. Signs of a crisis in the relations between state, society, and religion include the violence directed against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 and the precarious situation of India’s minority religious groups more generally; the existence of personal laws that vary by religious community; the affiliation of political parties with fundamentalist religious organizations; and the rallying of a significant proportion of the diasporic Hindu community behind a resurgent nationalist Hinduism. There is a broad consensus that a crisis of secularism exists, but whether the state can resolve conflicts and ease tensions or is itself part of the problem is a matter of vigorous political and intellectual debate. In this timely, nuanced collection, twenty leading Indian cultural theorists assess the contradictory ideals, policies, and practices of secularism in India. Scholars of history, anthropology, religion, politics, law, philosophy, and media studies take on a broad range of concerns. Some consider the history of secularism in India; others explore theoretical issues such as the relationship between secularism and democracy or the shortcomings of the categories “majority” and “minority.” Contributors examine how the debates about secularism play out in schools, the media, and the popular cinema. And they address two of the most politically charged sites of crisis: personal law and the right to practice and encourage religious conversion. Together the essays inject insightful analysis into the fraught controversy about the shortcomings and uncertain future of secularism in the world today. Contributors. Flavia Agnes, Upendra Baxi, Shyam Benegal, Akeel Bilgrami, Partha Chatterjee, V. Geetha, Sunil Khilnani, Nivedita Menon, Ashis Nandy, Anuradha Dingwaney Needham, Gyanendra Pandey, Gyan Prakash, Arvind Rajagopal, Paula Richman, Sumit Sarkar, Dwaipayan Sen, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Shabnum Tejani, Romila Thapar, Ravi S. Vasudevan, Gauri Viswanathan
Download or read book Goodness and the Literary Imagination written by Toni Morrison and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What exactly is goodness? Where is it found in the literary imagination? Toni Morrison, one of American letters’ greatest voices, pondered these perplexing questions in her celebrated Ingersoll Lecture, delivered at Harvard University in 2012 and published now for the first time in book form. Perhaps because it is overshadowed by the more easily defined evil, goodness often escapes our attention. Recalling many literary examples, from Ahab to Coetzee’s Michael K, Morrison seeks the essence of goodness and ponders its significant place in her writing. She considers the concept in relation to unforgettable characters from her own works of fiction and arrives at conclusions that are both eloquent and edifying. In a lively interview conducted for this book, Morrison further elaborates on her lecture’s ideas, discussing goodness not only in literature but in society and history—particularly black history, which has responded to centuries of brutality with profound creativity. Morrison’s essay is followed by a series of responses by scholars in the fields of religion, ethics, history, and literature to her thoughts on goodness and evil, mercy and love, racism and self-destruction, language and liberation, together with close examination of literary and theoretical expressions from her works. Each of these contributions, written by a scholar of religion, considers the legacy of slavery and how it continues to shape our memories, our complicities, our outcries, our lives, our communities, our literature, and our faith. In addition, the contributors engage the religious orientation in Morrison’s novels so that readers who encounter her many memorable characters such as Sula, Beloved, or Frank Money will learn and appreciate how Morrison’s notions of goodness and mercy also reflect her understanding of the sacred and the human spirit.
Download or read book The Insurrection of Little Selves written by Aditya Nigam and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2006 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The book takes a closer look at the phenomenon of the 'opportunism' of minority cultures - in the Indian context, the Dalit and the Muslim - and suggests that this might be the consequence of nationalism itself, especially of postcolonial nationalisms. For it is nationalism, in fact, which produces the minority problem in the first place."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Experiments with Truth written by Hedley Twidle and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last decades, South Africa has seen an outpouring of life writing and narrative non-fiction. Authors like Panashe Chigumadzi, Jacob Dlamini, Mark Gevisser, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Antjie Krog, Sisonke Msimang, Njabulo Ndebele, Jonny Steinberg and Ivan Vladislavic; have produced a compelling and often controversial body of work, exploring the country's ongoing political and social transition with great ambition, texture and risk. Experiments with Truth is the first book-length account of non-fiction in South African literature. It reads the country's transition as refracted through an array of documentary modes that are simultaneously refashioned and blurred into each other: long-form analytic journalism and reportage; experiments in oral history, microhistory and archival reconstruction; life-writing, memoir and the essay. It traces the strange and ethically complex process by which real people, places and events are shuffled, patterned and plotted in long-form prose narrative. While holding in mind the imperatives of testimony and witness so important to the struggle for liberation and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the case studies here are increasingly drawn to a post-TRC aesthetic: works that engage with difficult, inappropriate or unusable elements of the past, and the unfinished project of social reconstruction in South Africa. The author examines non-fictions that are speculative, formally innovative and sometimes experimental, rather than informational or narrowly journalistic; that explore difficult subjects like collaboration, complicity, confession - and have embedded within them their own reflections on the problems of narrating within a scene of unresolved difference. In this way, southern African materials are placed in a global context, and in dialogue with other important non-fictional traditions that have emerged at moments of social rupture and transition. -- Page 2 of cover.
Download or read book Secular Power Europe and Islam written by Sarah Wolff and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reconsidering the European Union's secular identity
Download or read book Postcolonial Satire written by Amy L. Friedman and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-10-16 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Postcolonial Satire: Indian Fiction and the Reimagining of Menippean Satire positions postcolonial South Asian satiric fiction in both the cutting-edge territory of political resistance writing and the ancient tradition of Menippean satire. Postcolonial Satire aims to disrupt the relationship between postcolonial literature and magic realism, by discussing the work of writers such as G. V. Desani, Aubrey Menen, Salman Rushdie, and Irwin Allan Sealy as one movement into the entirely subversive realm of satire. Indian fiction, and the fiction of other colonized cultures, can be re-construed through the lens of satire as openly critical of a broad spectrum of political and cultural issues. Employing the strengths of postcolonial theory and criticism, Postcolonial Satire expands upon the postcolonial works of these authors by analyzing them as satire, rather than magical realism with satirical elements.
Download or read book Multiculturalism and Religious Identity written by Sonia Sikka and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2014-06-01 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How, and to what extent, can religion be included within commitments to multiculturalism? Multiculturalism and Religious Identity addresses this question by examining the political recognition and management of religious identity in Canada and India. In multicultural policy, practice, and literature, religion has until recently not been included within broader discussions of multiculturalism, perhaps due to worries of potential for conflict with secularism. This collection undertakes a contemporary analysis of how the Canadian and Indian states each approach religious diversity through social and political policies, as well as how religion and secularism meet both philosophically and politically in contested public space. Although Canada and India have differing political and religious histories - leading to different articulations of multiculturalism, religious diversity, and secularism - both countries share a commitment to ensuring fair treatment for the different religious communities they include. Combining broader theoretical and normative reflections with close case studies, Multiculturalism and Religious Identity leads the way to addressing these timely issues in the Canadian and Indian contexts.
Download or read book Dialogue on Partition written by Syrrina Ahsan Ali Haque and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-03-04 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dialogue on Partition explores dialogic possibilities in Indo-Pak English novels on partition of India in 1947 and expounds upon the potential of art and literature to offer dialogue. The book locates the inherent individualities of voices of narrators, characters and writers of these novels, as promulgators of dialogue in the face of the contentious event of partition and post-partition conflict. The book shows how the authors of these novels objectify their religious stance and present a regional affiliation attributed to a shared existence in the subcontinent, while locating and dissecting shared symbols, regional fraternity, sufi and mystic eclecticism and diversity of heteroglot and polyphonic voices in the chronotopal space and time of partition. The objective of the book is to critique the role of Indo-Pak novels in propagating dialogue, thereby proposing ways of reducing fissures implanted in the psycho-social terrain of the inhabitants of the region by offering junctures within the literary domain. Thus, the book expounds upon how these novels may be perceived as tools of integration between sects, races and nations at large. It can aid in opening borders to shared art and literature which inherently engenders response and dialogue leading to possibilities of coalition and integration.
Download or read book Postcolonial minorities in Britain and France written by Shailja Sharma and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-26 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book compares the postcolonial populations of Britain and France, examining the ways in which they are redefining citizenship. Bearing in mind the different histories and political systems of each country, it considers questions of national identity, values, the place of religion, secularism and public spaces - all integral to determining what makes a country a true nation. Recent security threats have made the debate around minorities and assimilation all the more pressing, and this book delves deep into the issues of feminism, Islam and group identities. It will be of interest to students and scholars of race, religion and migration studies.
Download or read book Religion Secularism and the Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf written by Kristina K. Groover and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-12-13 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religion, Secularism, and the Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf offers an expansive interdisciplinary study of spirituality in Virginia Woolf's writing, drawing on theology, psychology, geography, history, gender and sexuality studies, and other critical fields. The essays in this collection interrogate conventional approaches to the spiritual, and to Woolf’s work, while contributing to a larger critical reappraisal of modernism, religion, and secularism. While Woolf’s atheism and her sharp criticism of religion have become critical commonplaces, her sometimes withering critique of religion conflicts with what might well be called a religious sensibility in her work. The essays collected here take up a challenge posed by Woolf herself: how to understand her persistent use of religious language, her representation of deeply mysterious human experiences, and her recurrent questions about life's meaning in light of her disparaging attitude toward religion. These essays argue that Woolf's writing reframes and reclaims the spiritual in alternate forms; she strives to find new language for those numinous experiences that remain after the death of God has been pronounced.
Download or read book Diasporic Inquiries into South Asian Women s Narratives written by Shilpa Daithota Bhat and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-02-28 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The South Asian women’s diaspora engages in spatio-temporal interactions and power differentials in a variety of narratives, articulating agency, multiplicities of belonging and culturally integrative practices, highlighting homing paradigms. The sense of alienness in a new homeland, rather in worldwide home places, triggers rethinking of diasporic conceptions and epistemes of individual and group histories, personal and collective experiences. Some of the questions that this anthology seeks to consider are: How do women from the South Asian diaspora represent cultural negotiations and alienness of the adopted homeland in various narratives? What are the themes/issues they select to portray their perceptions of foreignness? How do culture, history and politics intervene in their portrayal of lived experiences? How do they locate themselves in the matrix of foreignness and diaspora? The contributors to this anthology examine narratives depicting South Asian women, their complexly positioned voices, gesturing at the proliferating challenges and reflecting the grim realities of a globalized world.
Download or read book Global Migrancy and Diasporic Memory in the Work of Salman Rushdie written by Stephen J. Bell and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the intersection of postcolonial and postmodern thought in the works of Salman Rushdie, particularly his regular emphasis on the way that memory functions to construct identity for characters and nation-states.
Download or read book Sacred Games written by Vikram Chandra and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2011-03-03 with total page 1203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An enormously satisfying, exciting and enriching book, Vikram Chandra's novel draws the reader deep into the lives of detective Sartaj Singh and Ganesh Gaitonde, the most wanted gangster in India. Sartaj, the only Sikh inspector in the whole of Mumbai, is used to being identified by his turban, beard and the sharp cut of his trousers. But 'the silky Sikh' is now past forty, his marriage is over and his career prospects are on the slide. When Sartaj gets an anonymous tip off as to the secret hideout of the legendary boss of the G-company, he's determined that he'll be the one to collect the prize. This is a sprawling, epic novel of friendships and betrayals, of terrible violence, of an astonishing modern city and its underworld. Drawing on the best of Victorian fiction, mystery novels, Bollywood movies and Vikram Chandra's years of first hand research on the streets of Mumbai, this novel reads like a potboiling page-turner but resonates with the intelligence and emotional depth of the best of literature.
