The World in South Asian Literatures
Description
This seminar will explore how geographies beyond South Asia shaped the production, reception, and circulation of its literatures in the 19th and 20th centuries. Contrary to recent approaches that stress the globality of contemporary Anglophone writing, we will show how the world and its many composite spaces reflect a long trajectory of interaction with South Asian literatures across Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Tamil and, indeed, English. This seminar will explore how these and other South Asian literatures conceived certain regions of the world as significant horizons of literary practice. How did Cold War demarcations of the First, Second, and Third World shape mid-century Hindi and English writing? How did the complicated history of Indian migration to Africa shape the continent’s image in Gujarati and Bengali literature? And how did Urdu writers interpret Ottoman Turkey and Andalusia against their modern colonial context? Such questions reflect the variety of spaces and themes under consideration. The seminar will examine not only specific geographies but also the world as a meta-category in South Asian literary cultures. What place did the world as such occupy in genres such as the ghazal, memoir, novel, magazine, and travelogue? How did writers, characters, and works situate themselves in relation to this scale of belonging, especially as it became increasingly accessible and graspable via technologies such as the steamship, railway, plane, radio, and T.V.? Ultimately, at stake in these discussions will be an understanding of South Asian literatures and the world as mutually embedded rather than contingently related categories.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Vikrant Dadawala is an Assistant Professor of English at York University. His research has appeared in South Asia, the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Safundi, and in various edited volumes. Vikrant also writes occasional essays on history and literature for The Point. This paper is drawn from a new project on migration, modernism, and ātma vismritī.
Speaker Bio
Laetitia Zecchini is Senior researcher at the CNRS and directs the CNRS-UChicago International Research Lab in the Humanities. Her recent publications include the co-edited volumes The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form: Cold War, Decolonization and Third World Print Cultures (2022) and The Locations of (World) Literature (2025). She is completing a book on literary activism in India and coordinates the International Research Network on Postcolonial Print Cultures (2023-2027).
Speaker Bio
Nudrat Kamal is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously, she taught literature and writing in Karachi, Pakistan. Her research focuses on South Asian literatures in Urdu, Hindi and English, particularly in the intersections of literary history, history of science, and print culture studies. She is currently working on her dissertation, titled “Technologies of the Marvellous: Urdu and Hindi Science Fiction in South Asia (c.1880-1980).”
Papers
Speaker Bio
Shaiq Ali is a PhD Student at Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, Minneapolis, USA and an MA graduate from Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi, India. He is working on Urdu and Hindi literatures, Muslim print cultures and South Asian literature.
Speaker Bio
Gregory Goulding is Associate Professor in the Department of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His first book, Cold War Genres, was published by SUNY University Press in 2024. Articles have appeared in Comparative Literature, Modern Asian Studies, and the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. His work focuses broadly on the modern literary cultures of northern South Asia, and he is currently developing a project at the intersection of history, fiction, and travel writing.
Speaker Bio
Zain R. Mian is Assistant Professor of Urdu Language, Literature, and Performance at the University of Toronto. He is currently writing a monograph that examines the role of imaginative geographies in the development of Urdu literary culture. His work has been published in The Journal of World Literature and The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures.
Speaker Bio
Utkarsh Sharma is a PhD candidate at the School of Liberal Arts at the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur. His doctoral research is on the literary and formal history of the short story cycle in India.