English

Piedmont Virginia Community College Associate of Science in Nursing 2009 (magna cum laude) University of Virginia MA, Ph.D. (English Language, Literature and Pedagogy) 1983 Yale University BA (magna cum laude; Honores in Litteris Britannicis) 1973

This essay is an attempt to formulate ways of writing a revisionary ethnography of a religious conversion movement among a community of ex-untouchable castes, called Mahars in India, from the point of view of recent theoretical developments in the field of postcolonial studies. It can be read as a dialogue with that strand of postcolonial theory called 'radical' by Simon During, 1 that seeks alternative ways of conceptualising modernity based on non-Western traditions and life-worlds, without being nativist or reductive in any way. The essay constitutes part of a larger project on representations of caste that I am engaged in at the moment and that situates itself as a critique of the prevalent social scientific and activist ethnographic readings of caste that invest deeply in a vision of secular modernity. The social sciences, especially in the context of South Asia, have broadly conceptualised caste as a relic of pre-modern times and as something that is responsible for retarding India's progress towards 'full' modernity. Thus, in the mid-1990s, a political economist in India could write, 'Despite sweeping changes in economic policy the caste system is unlikely to wither away and … at least in the short term, is likely to slow down the pace of economic reforms'. 2 In my project I argue that caste is not so much an essence responsible for South Asia's backwardness, as a constellation of variegated social practices that are in a constant state of flux and that cannot be completely contained within a narrative of nation-building, modernisation and development. The need to challenge the conceptual legislation of the social sciences over caste studies lies in the fact that the caste Hindu and dalit habitus generate complex heterotemporal 3 modalities of living. The secular, rationalist orientation of the social sciences cannot begin to contain all such modalities.

'The novel achieved its devastating success as an upstart,' wrote Marthe Robert in The Origins of the Novel (1980). She was reflecting on an oft-expressed anxiety about the novel's prodigious and promiscuous adaptation of whatever came in its way and the threat of anamorphism that has hovered over this genre in modern literary studies. Robert's breathless inventory of its many suspect attributes is worth quoting at length: Graduating from a discredited sub-category to an almost unprecedented Power, it now reigns more or less supreme over the world of literature which it influences aesthetically and which has now become economically dependent on its welfare. With the freedom of a conqueror who knows no law other than that of his unlimited expansion, the novel has abolished every literary caste and traditional form and appropriates all modes of expression…. And while it squanders an age-old literary heritage it is simultaneously intent on monopolizing ever wider provinces of human experience of which it frequently claims an intimate knowledge…. Revolutionary and middle-class, democratic by choice, but with a marked tendency for totalitarian over-rulings of obstacles and frontiers, free to the point of arbitrariness or total anarchy…[yet it is also] strangely parasitic; for the novel is naturally compelled to subsist both on the written word and on the material world whose reality its purports to "reproduce." i

On the eve of the 2003 Iraq War, Henry Perowne, the neurosurgeon protagonist of Ian McEwan's novel, Saturday, ponders the pervading sense of anxiety and vulnerability across the world, a feeling aggravated by an incessant exposure to images of violent global flashpoints:

Myriad iterations of Debord's society of the spectacle circulated in a frenzy as the visual horror of September 11 unraveled on screens around the world. Another auteur/theatrical personage who was variously invoked as the world witnessed falling figures from the towers was Anton Artaud, the celebrated exponent of the Theatre of Cruelty. This chapter explores the ramifications for the world novel of the aesthetic excess of these visual and performative interpretations that variously came into play during this unprecedented act of terrorist warfare. How, I ask, does the contemporary novel constellate twenty-first century warfare as sensorium, performance and spectacle? What narrative and tropological strategies does it marshal? I begin with an exploration of the aesthetic and ethical conundrum that the performative model of the theatre of cruelty poses in accounting for the WTC terrorist attack, and then explicate in some detail the ways in which the novel addresses this conundrum. The tense interplay between performance as trope and performance as terror will be central to my explication. Theatres of Cruelty Art Spiegelman's iconic graphic novel, In the Shadow of No Towers, begins with a preface entitled 'The Sky is Falling', where he vividly describes the prolonged temporality of the end-of-the-world kind of terror he experienced on seeing the burning towers. A 'Slow motion diary,' he calls it. Tempered by his reflections on the radical transformation of America and the world, and his desire to make sense not just of the immediate horror of the event but its long-term ramifications, the preface is a snapshot of a novelistic imagination at work. It promises a careful calibration of the event, points of view, plots, characters, tropes and images-in other words, a mode of aesthetic meditation that is simultaneously sensitive to the incomprehensible horror of the event and distant from the visual noise of the spectacle. The object of his meditation is an image that haunted him for years after the tragedy. This was, as he

If the 1980s saw 'postcolonialism'acquire theoretical and pedagogical prominence in literary studies, the new century has heralded 'globalism'as the state-of-the-art literary paradigm. In 2001, the Modern Language Association devoted a special issue of its journal, PMLA, to ...

Originally denoting a genre of popular films produced in Bombay (Mumbai) and made in Hindi, Bollywood today circulates globally as an aesthetic and cultural marker of Indianness. As a cultural idea and product that has spun off from its base in film making to create an array of new culture industries across the globe-food, fashion, music, performance and dance fitness schools to name only a few-Bollywood today is one of India's most successful exports to the world. Where Australian public culture is concerned, Bollywood is a recent entrant. This is very much part of the globalization of this phenomenon since the 1990s, linked by cultural historians to the growing visibility of the Indian diaspora in the West. Bollywood has been called variously 'the world's second cinema' (after Hollywood) or the 'new cool in international cinema'. Bombay films now regularly use Australian locations for their shooting. These films are used by Federal and State government departments of film, education and tourism to promote Australia within India and the Indian diaspora. Latest blockbusters are routinely released in cinemas across Melbourne, Sydney, Perth and Brisbane. Bollywood dance and music classes proliferate, even in the quiet, leafy environs of Canberra. Iconography from Bollywood appears in food and fashion outlets. In 2006, the closing ceremony of the Commonwealth games in Melbourne featured an extravagant dance number by one of Bollywood's star heroines, Aishwariya Roy-giving a foretaste of what Delhi/India will offer when the Commonwealth Games are held there in 2010. When the former Prime Minister, John Howard visited India in 2006, he spent most of his sixhour halt in Mumbai at a Bollywood film studio-the famous Yash Raj Films precinct. Recently Lachlan Murdoch invested millions in a talent search and management company, Percept Talent Management, associated with the Bollywood industry. The time, then, is indeed opportune for exhibitions and displays of Bollywood culture in Australia. One such exhibition was held at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney in 2007 from 6 June to 11 November. Called Cinema India: The Art of Bollywood, it primarily featured Bollywood poster-art from the 1930s to the present. The material was loaned to Australia by Victoria and Albert Museum and the original exhibition was curated in London by Divia Patel. The Powerhouse curators, Rebecca Bower and Christine Sumner, added other dimensions to the exhibition-costumes, photographic displays, music, and film sequences-especially highlighting Bollywood's link with Australia. Posters from films shot on location in Australia or with plots based in Australia-Salaam Namaste, Chak De India, Heyy Baby, Dil Chahta Hai-were prominently displayed along with costumes worn by Melbourne actress, Tania Zaetta and Preity Zinta in Salaam Namaste. The exhibition also had a section that was surprising even for Bolly-EXHIBITION REVIEWS