Papers by Pablo Mukherjee
Journal of Postcolonial Writing
Modern Language Quarterly, 2020
In this essay the Warwick Research Collective (WReC) addresses the question of “what is and isn’t... more In this essay the Warwick Research Collective (WReC) addresses the question of “what is and isn’t changing” in literary studies by reflecting on the material conditions that structure its disciplinary workscape. The essay notes that the pressures of a specifically academic form of capitalism, responding to and flourishing in a period of institutional crisis, tend to replicate top-down, marketized models of academic entrepreneurship in the ways we read. Departing from more widely favored models of “collaboration” and “interdisciplinarity” as solutions to this problem, the essay reflects instead on the history and potential of the collective as a form of self-organized, nonhierarchical knowledge production. It argues that the interlinked crises of how to read in world-literary terms, and on what scale, unavoidably index more general crises of the humanities and of academic labor when considered against the backdrop of an unstable neoliberal hegemony, particularly that of the mass auto...
British Art Studies, 2020
Choice Reviews Online, 2004
Introduction: Crime, Paradox, Fiction, Theory 1. The 'Criminal' Colony Before New Police ... more Introduction: Crime, Paradox, Fiction, Theory 1. The 'Criminal' Colony Before New Police 2. Demanding Reform: From Fielding to Peel 3. Resisting the New Police 4. New Policing, India, and Thuggee 5. Representing the Mutiny 6. Shifting Images of the Criminal Conclusion Bibliography Index
Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2012
The specificities of the African metropolis, or “Afropolis”, have been recently debated by a numb... more The specificities of the African metropolis, or “Afropolis”, have been recently debated by a number of influential theorists of globalization and urban growth. This article registers these debates, but suggests that instead of a model of flows, fractures and hybridization, African metropoles reveal globalization as a process of radically uneven accumulation, excess and dispossession. Taking Johannesburg as a paradigmatic “Afropolis”, it suggests that such a process of simultaneous and excessive accumulation and dispossession demands the invention of correspondingly radical representative strategies that are capable of exceeding accepted cultural norms and idioms. The work of Ivan Vladislavić seems to be just such a cultural articulation of the forms of uneven development.
Critical Survey, 2009
A temática deste artigo se insere entre as novas questões geradas pela virtualidade, sobretudo pe... more A temática deste artigo se insere entre as novas questões geradas pela virtualidade, sobretudo pela crescente migração dos processos comunicacionais e educacionais para a Internet e seu poder de formação de novos espaços institucionais e de novas subjetividades sociais. Seu objetivo central consistiu em conhecer e analisar representações de empreendimentos econômicos solidários de Belo Horizonte (MG) sobre a Internet. Dada a natureza do objeto, foi necessário se beneficiar das abordagens metodológicas quantitativa e qualitativa. O instrumento de coleta de dados utilizado nesse estudo foi o questionário. Concluiu-se, a partir da amostra estudada, que foi intencional e cobriu doze empreendimentos econômicos solidários, que estes demonstram ter representações positivas à inclusão digital, mas não isentas de preocupações e dúvidas sobre o poder e a penetrabilidade dessa tecnologia na sociedade.
The Yearbook of English Studies, 2011
Modern Language Review, 2005
... it seemingly constructed. In what follows we shall survey samples of British accounts of hunt... more ... it seemingly constructed. In what follows we shall survey samples of British accounts of hunting in India, the territory that arguably played the most decisive role in British imperial experience. Mackenzie conclusively shows how ...
How did the Victorians think about disasters such as famines and epidemic diseases? What was the ... more How did the Victorians think about disasters such as famines and epidemic diseases? What was the relationship between such cataclysmic events and literary forms, styles and genres? In what way was thinking about disasters also crucial to practices of governance? Does the legacy of such Victorian thinking still shape our contemporary responses to 'natural' disasters? This book seeks to answer such questions by looking at a wide range of administrative, medical, historical, journalistic and literary texts written about Britain's key imperial possession in the 19th-century – south Asia. In doing so, it expands our ideas about Victorian literature, just as it reshapes our definitions of 'natural' disasters themselves.
Covering a wide range of media and geographical regions, The Bloomsbury Introduction to Postcolon... more Covering a wide range of media and geographical regions, The Bloomsbury Introduction to Postcolonial Studies is the most comprehensive and up-to-date guide to contemporary postcolonial literary studies available. With chapters written by leading scholars in the field, The Bloomsbury Introduction to Postcolonial Studies includes: ·Introductions to key contemporary topics, from ecocriticism, diaspora studies and gender and sexuality to the impact of digital humanities on postcolonial studies ·Guides to a wide range of genres, from literature, theatre and poetry to life-writing, graphic novels, film and games ·Case study readings of texts for a wide range of postcolonial regions, from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America to African American and Black British writing With guides to further reading throughout and a full glossary of key critical terms, this is an essential guide for all students of contemporary postcolonial studies.
Preface Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Introduction by Michael Rossington and Anne Whiteh... more Preface Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Introduction by Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead Part I: Beginnings 1 Classical and Early Modern Ideas of Memory, ed. by Jennifer Richards Introduction by Jennifer Richards 1.1 Plato: from Theaetetus and Phaedrus 1.2 Aristotle: De Memoria et Reminiscentia 1.3 Cicero: from De oratore (On the Ideal Orator) 1.4 [Cicero]: from Ad Herennium 1.5 Mary J. Carruthers: from <i.The Book of Memory: A Study in Medieval Culture 1.6 Frances A. Yates: from The Art of Memory 2 Enlightenment and Romantic Memory, ed. by Michael Rossington Introduction by Michael Rossington 2.1 John Locke: from An Essay Concerning Human Understanding 2.2 David Hume: from A Treatise of Human Nature 2.3 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: from Philosophy of Mind, Being Part Three of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences 3 Memory and Late Modernity, ed. by Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead Introduction by Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead 3.1 Karl Marx: Th...
"Postcolonial Environments examines the relationship between contemporary environmental cris... more "Postcolonial Environments examines the relationship between contemporary environmental crises and culture by offering a series of provocative readings of key Indian novels in English, making an original and important contribution to the emerging theories of 'green postcolonialism'"--Provided by publisher.
Climate change is an enormous and increasingly urgent issue. This important book highlights how h... more Climate change is an enormous and increasingly urgent issue. This important book highlights how humanities disciplines can mobilize the creative and critical power of students, teachers, and communities to confront climate change. The book is divided into four clear sections to help readers integrate climate change into the classes and topics they are already teaching as well as engage with interdisciplinary methods and techniques. Teaching Climate Change in the Humanities constitutes a map and toolkit for anyone who wishes to draw upon the strengths of literary and cultural studies to teach valuable lessons that engage with climate change.
... to grasp historical being in its external historical determination, there where it is most hi... more ... to grasp historical being in its external historical determination, there where it is most historical, as itself natural being, or to grasp nature, there where it apparently resides most profoundly within itself, as historical being. Theodor W. Adorno The 'new world order' proclaimed by George Bush 1 more than a decade and a half ago presents us with the deadly spectacle of current and future wars --Afghanistan, the Balkans and Iraq yesterday and today; Iran, Latin America and perhaps China tomorrow. It is also a spectacle where the 'environmental' is increasingly embedded into the social, political and military dimensions of conflict. That 'Palestine' names a series of historic struggles for specific rights over land, water and housing is taken to be common knowledge. (1) That 'Iraq' is a short-hand for pre-emptive US attempts to secure energy resources and therefore a position of strength in future bargains for power against rival bidders like China is the stuff of broad-sheet editorials. That the march to the Gulf wars was accompanied by rhetorical drumbeats about Iraq's alleged capacities of degrading the environment of the Gulf area with its chemical/ biological weapons merely confirms this entwining. (2) There is nothing startling anymore about Andrew Ross's suggestion that Gulf War 1 was the first explicitly ecological war of our times. (3) The various current and predicted water/minerals/narcotics 'wars' in Africa, Asia, and Latin America seem to be gloomy confirmations of his jeremiad. These analyses and debates about the 'new world order' are further quickened by routine pronouncements about 'global warming' and its possible impact on access to resources, human migration and habitats. The only surprising thing about this conceptual importance accorded to 'environment' seems to be its relative novelty. Surely, any field purporting to theorise the global conditions of colonialism/imperialism, decolonisation and neo-colonialism (let us agree to call it 'postcolonial studies') cannot but consider the complex interplay of 'environmental' categories such as water, land, energy, habitat, migration, with political or cultural categories such as state, society, conflict, literature, theatre, visual arts. Equally, any field purporting to attach interpretative importance to 'environment' (let us call it eco/environmental studies) must be able to trace the social, historical and material co-ordinates of categories such as forests, rivers, bio-regions and species. The fact that the traffic between postcolonial and eco studies can be chronologically framed within the 'new world order' calls for some periodisation of the two fields. If we take the number of impressively thick readers or anthologies as an indicator, both 'eco/green' and post-colonial studies are in ruddy institutional health. If these collections can also be seen as chronological markers of a field's maturing, postcolonial and eco studies seem to have developed and entrenched themselves in northern academes around roughly the same historical moment. Four leading eco/green readers appeared between the mid-nineties and 2003--Glotfelty and Fromm's in 1996, Laurence Coupe's in 2000, Adamson, Evans and Stein's in 2002, and Branch and Slovic's in 2003. (4) Among the truly dizzying numbers of introductions, readers and anthologies of postcolonial criticism and theory are those edited by Mongia (1996), Gandhi (1998), Brydon (2000), Chrisman and Parry (2000), Schwarz and Roy (2000), Young (2001 and 2003), Goldberg and Quayson (2002), Lazarus (2004) and Desai (2005). (5) The contents of these volumes seem to suggest that while institutionally, these fields were formed in the mid-to-late 1980, their constitutive theories and reflective practices were fleshed out largely from the early 1970s onwards. (6) To be more specific, although both postcolonial and eco studies claim an intellectual inheritance of at least two centuries and counting (to Romanticism and various eighteenth- and nineteenth-century anti-colonial struggles), their contemporary lives may be dated roughly from Earth Day in 1970 to the second invasion and occupation of Iraq 2004-05. …
In Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (2015) the Warwick R... more In Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (2015) the Warwick Research Collective argues that the onset of ‘world-literature’, the literature of the modern world-system, coincides with the ‘worlding’ of capital as that system’s guiding principle. We date this to the global extension of capitalist relations via European colonialism from the late C18 on: If we follow Wallerstein and others in speaking of the instantiation of capitalism as a world-system around 1500, it nevertheless seems clear that it is only in the ‘long’ nineteenth century, and then as the direct result of British and European colonialism, that we can speak both of the capitalisation of the world and of the full worlding of capital. World-literature … would then presumably be understood as a development of the past 200 years, though its formal conditions of possibility would have begun to be established some three centuries earlier. (15) In periodising world-literature this way, we ...
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Papers by Pablo Mukherjee