Browse Hierarchy ESH7054: Imagining South Asia and its Diaspora

This module explores the role literary texts play in imagining South Asia and its diasporic cultures and communities. We will examine a range of South Asian novels, as well as poetry and short stories, to ask how they shed light on and complicate our understanding of some of the defining themes of the 20th and 21st centuries, including nationhood, partition, inter-ethnic conflict, disaster, migration, cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, globalisation and terror. Moving across Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Britain and the US, and from the mid-20th century to the present day, we will explore how race, class, religion and gender shape South Asian cultures and identities, and interrogate the paratextual material surrounding contemporary South Asian literary production (festivals, prizes, reviews) to consider how this shapes our understanding of the texts.