Papers by Pallavi Rastogi
Journal of Intercultural Studies, 2013
(alk. paper) 1. South african fiction (english)-21st century-history and criticism. 2. South afri... more (alk. paper) 1. South african fiction (english)-21st century-history and criticism. 2. South african fiction (english)-20th century-history and criticism. 3. South african fiction (english)-east indian authors-history and criticism. 4. east indians-Foreign countries-intellectual life. 5. east indian diaspora in literature. 6. identity (Psychology) in literature. 7. Group identity in literature. i. Title.
South Asian review, Dec 15, 2022
Journal of Postcolonial Writing
Zadie Smith's latest collection of non-fiction, Intimations (2020), walks her readers through... more Zadie Smith's latest collection of non-fiction, Intimations (2020), walks her readers through the burning blaze of the pandemic with what this article calls "cooling down". Embracing both aesthetics and affect, the concept of cooling down is not new to Smith's oeuvre. Indeed, its signature characteristics that include a calm authorial voice, controlled pace of prose, a self-aware narrator, and an insistence on reflection appear in all of Smith's work, including novels such as White Teeth (2000) and Swing Time (2017) and non-fiction, such as Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (2010) and Feel Free (2019). This article examines narrative structure, affective appeal, and political commentary as the three cooling-down registers deployed in the "pandemic" essays of Intimations. Reading against the organizational grain of the collection, the article is organized by discussing them out of sequence to emphasize an alternative juxtaposition that renders Smith's intervention through form, affect, and/or politics most accessible.
The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing, 2020
Safundi, 2019
Postcolonial nations have often failed to live up to their promise of independence, the ennui and... more Postcolonial nations have often failed to live up to their promise of independence, the ennui and disenchantment of self-governance replacing the energy and optimism of revolution. How does literature from newly-independent nations register these negative emotions, especially without flailing in pessimism and defeat? Present Imperfect: Contemporary South African Writing, an original, erudite, and impressive book, answers this question through a study of South African fiction published after 1994. On 27 April 1994, South Africa extended democratic franchise to all its citizens, holding its first election as a free nation. A pivotal moment in the South African political and cultural imagination, 1994 heralded the end of apartheid and the arrival of universal freedom. Supposedly. In Present Imperfect, Andrew van der Vlies expertly shows how South African writing after apartheid reflects and refracts not only the critical change in political dispensation but also the push-and-pull of hope and despair markingstill markingthe post-apartheid nation. Van der Vlies's collocation of authors includes the literary mainstream, such as J.M. Coetzee, Ivan Vladislavić, and Zoë Wicomb, but also expansively incorporates first-time novelists, such as Songeziwe Mahlangu and Masande Ntshanga, writers unexamined in critical discourse so far. The book's innovation resides not just in its focus on new literature though. Present Imperfect engages with fiction written in Afrikaans, meditating on the place of non-Anglophone fiction in an English-dominated world and on the role of translation in literary production and reception. Importantly, Present Imperfect demonstrates how literary affectthe representation of feelings that are good, bad, and uglymirrors the imperfect present of its title as well as opens cracks, apertures, and even windows of hope for the future. Present Imperfect begins with an invocation of Nadine Gordimer's last novel, No Time Like the Present (2012). Focusing on Gordimer's critique of the "present imperfect" in South Africa, Van der Vlies dexterously establishes the book's governing themes in the introduction: "time, no-time, and now-time" (6). What happens when individuals and national collectives are trapped in a present that has not fulfilled the promise of the revolutionary past? How do they wait for history, or for revolutionary time, to unspool itself into the future they fought for? Queer figures, loose ends, awkward feelings, all the unruly edges of what cannot be confined to linear chronology, or what Van der Vlies calls imperfect time, constitute the heart and soul of this book. Present Imperfect also formally replicates its thematic preoccupation with non-linear time. Cleverly encapsulating the book's central tropes in its narrative structure, Van der Vlies introduces an idea only to state that he will return to it later; and return he does but often indirectly and obliquely. In any other book with the prose and argument less controlled, this projection of return may lead to choppy writing and rough transitions. Present Imperfect, however, is so well-crafted that the author's shuttling back and forth between ideas elegantly mirrors its conceptual architecture as well as the temporal features of the novels studied here. A book about "bad feelings" risks abandoning hope for all ye who enter here, replicating in readers the negative emotions it examines. Yet, Van der Vlies teaches usin the best
South Asian Review, 2018
August is the cruelest month. In both the country of my birth and my adopted homeland. As I wrote... more August is the cruelest month. In both the country of my birth and my adopted homeland. As I wrote this Guest Editor’s Column for the special issue of South Asian Review on “Precarity, Resistance, a...
The Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature (1945–2010)
Prose Studies, 2014
The horrors of the 2004 Tsunami are inherently structured as a literary narrative combining drama... more The horrors of the 2004 Tsunami are inherently structured as a literary narrative combining drama, suspense, high tragedy, and intense human suffering. The nonfiction writing about the effects of the Tsunami in Sri Lanka studied in this essay ranges from a memoir by a Sri Lankan woman to a self-published journal by a British man and investigative reportage by an American journalist. While not immune from colonialist assumptions, Tsunami Writing offers social commentary and the hope of healing while extending warnings for the future.
Research in African Literatures, 2008
Page 1. Citizen Other: Islamic Indianness and the Implosion of Racial Harmony in Postapartheid So... more Page 1. Citizen Other: Islamic Indianness and the Implosion of Racial Harmony in Postapartheid South Africa PALLAVI RASTOGI Louisiana State University ABSTRACT This essay explores the implosion of racial and religious harmony in the ...
Prose Studies, 2006
... Additionally, Chetan Karnani has an entire chapter on Passage in his book Nirad C. Chaudhuri ... more ... Additionally, Chetan Karnani has an entire chapter on Passage in his book Nirad C. Chaudhuri . ... underpinnings of the travelogue also reveal themselves in an incident in Pendhurst Place, where the elaborately decorated friezes remind Chaudhuri of the Diwan-i-Am in the Red ...
The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2009
This essay examines the contours of Chinese identity in the Indian subcontinent through three Sin... more This essay examines the contours of Chinese identity in the Indian subcontinent through three Sino-South Asian texts: “Travels Afar” (2001) by Chinese-Pakistani writer Maria Tham, “In Search of Lin Jia Zhuang” (2001) by Chinese-Sri Lankan writer Milan L. Lin-Rodrigo and The Palm Leaf Fan and Other Stories (2006) by Chinese-Indian writer Kwai-Yun Li. The shared configurations of the two autobiographical essays and the short story collection — all three are triangulated narratives involving ancestral origin in China, birth and adolescence in South Asia and eventual migration to North America — highlight a forgotten circuit of diasporic movement: one that does not simply follow an East-West pattern of migration, but also inhabits a middle place in the Indian subcontinent. In placing these three works next to each other, I sketch the thematic preoccupations of the twice-migrant Sino-South Asian diaspora, particularly focusing on where we can situate writing and writers that are Chinese ...
Before Windrush: Recovering an Asian and Black Literary Heritage within Britain is an important i... more Before Windrush: Recovering an Asian and Black Literary Heritage within Britain is an important intervention in the growing field of Black British literary studies. Composed of essays on non-white writers living in, or writing about, Britain in the period before the post-WW II wave of immigration, the anthology testifies to the existence of a British nation that has been multiracial and multicultural for centuries. Through an analysis of well-known figures such as Mary Prince, Mary Seacole, C. L. R. James, and Mulk Raj Anand as well as forgotten writers such as Helena Wells, Lucy Peacock, Olive Christian Malvery, Bhagvat Singh Jee, T. B. Pandian, and Lao She among others, the essays in Before Windrush shed light on an understudied aspect of Britain: its racial and ethnic complexity during the colonial period. The authors discussed here, whose work originates in and borrows from Romantic, Victorian, and Modernist conventions, challenge the implicit whiteness of English writing by showing the literary legacy of the Asian and black presence in Britain. Before Windrush places this hidden literary history of Asian and black literature within the social and cultural contexts of its British production.https://cornerstone.lib.mnsu.edu/university-archives-msu-authors/1285/thumbnail.jp
Asian American Literature: Discourses & …, 2010
Research in African Literatures, 2015
Jamaica Kincaid’s botanical travelogue Among Flowers (Antigua, 2005) and Biyi Bandele’s novel The... more Jamaica Kincaid’s botanical travelogue Among Flowers (Antigua, 2005) and Biyi Bandele’s novel The King’s Rifle (Nigeria, 2007) depict parts of the world—Burma and Nepal—familiarized through their shared encounter with British colonialism. Yet, these countries are also radically different from Antigua and Nigeria not just because of geographic location, but also because of the myriad factors that make up the diversity of the human condition, including class, race, and ethnic difference. This essay examines how an Afro-Caribbean and an African writer from two former British colonies depict other non-white British colonies and the people who inhabit these places. It, therefore, diverges from the numerous studies done on white Europeans traveling in the non-European world or of the colonized encountering other colonized people in diasporic spaces. Representation is key here, especially how the ex-colonized depicts what I call Another Other.
... The Indian community is outraged: not because of the Yogi's arraignment, but because of ... more ... The Indian community is outraged: not because of the Yogi's arraignment, but because of theYogi's penchant for white (rather than black) women: "I ... recalls his days in the Islamic Institute (8). In "The Betrayal," possibly Essop's most politically fraught story, Dr. Kamal, who heads ...
Research in African Literatures, 2011
... a rich and varied repertoire of strategies for living transnationally and transgress-ingmulti... more ... a rich and varied repertoire of strategies for living transnationally and transgress-ingmulticulturalism” (232 ... is a reflection on this early interaction between Europe-ans, africans, and asian Muslims in the ... to come back to the question that the text poses to the reader: is it possible ...
Research in African Literatures, 2011
... a rich and varied repertoire of strategies for living transnationally and transgress-ingmulti... more ... a rich and varied repertoire of strategies for living transnationally and transgress-ingmulticulturalism” (232 ... is a reflection on this early interaction between Europe-ans, africans, and asian Muslims in the ... to come back to the question that the text poses to the reader: is it possible ...
Research in African Literatures, 2011
... a rich and varied repertoire of strategies for living transnationally and transgress-ingmulti... more ... a rich and varied repertoire of strategies for living transnationally and transgress-ingmulticulturalism” (232 ... is a reflection on this early interaction between Europe-ans, africans, and asian Muslims in the ... to come back to the question that the text poses to the reader: is it possible ...
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Papers by Pallavi Rastogi