Frontiers of South Asian Culture

"Frontiers of South Asian Culture: Nation, Trans-Nation and Beyond is a fascinating collection of essays on postcolonial literature, film, and culture. The collection covers a broad geographic range — and it also incorporates recent theoretical approaches such as ecocriticism, humour studies, food studies, and graphic art criticism. Donna L. Potts, Professor and Chair, Department of English, Washington State University, Pullman, USA. A thoroughly engaging and timely intervention in the debates on nationhood, globalism, and regional cultures. Moving consciously away from existing frameworks, Frontiers of South Asian Culture: Nation, Trans-Nation and Beyond offers new insight and provocations on the significance of transnationalism as both a context and methodological approach to literature and cinema. The book’s great value lies in its marshalling of original material and reflections to shed light on the complex entanglements found in India's diverse territorial imaginations. Ranjani Mazumdar, Professor of Cinema Studies, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, India. In the wake of decolonisation, the process of national identity formation in the independent countries of South Asia inhibited mutual understanding and discouraged collective scrutiny of the human condition. With its emphasis on the entangled cultural and political histories of South Asian locations, regions, and nations, Frontiers of South Asian Culture: Nation, Trans-Nation and Beyond realises a commendable academic milestone. Senath Walter Perera, Professor Emeritus, Department of English, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka. Frontiers of South Asian Culture: Nation, Trans-Nation and Beyond by Parichay Patra and Amitendu Bhattacharya offers a rich palette of essays that look at a range of cultural practices and texts to flesh out imaginaries of the nation and beyond. Working along literary and cinematic registers, the edited collection confronts the challenges of understanding borders and boundaries, yielding valuable insight on the conundrums of our contemporary existence. Lakshmi Subramanian, Formerly Professor, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, India. This is an eclectic collection of scholarly essays that together map the regional imaginary of ""South Asia"", considering literature and cinema, sometimes regarded as stand-alone media forms, sometimes as driving each other. We see how the trans/national is configured in specific regional locales — Sri Lanka, Goa, Assam, Pondicherry and Bangladesh, besides West Bengal. At the same time, the essays look at flows — of rivers, trains, ideas, and people as they traverse across spaces. This unique volume combines the scholarship of the young as well as the established in the fields of comparative/literary studies and film studies. Nikhila H., Professor, Department of Film Studies, The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India. This capacious volume richly extends the very idea of the frontier and space-time — artistically, as well as politically. The comparative framework of the regional-national frees us from the narrow precincts of nationhood and the detached local as well as from the ersatz universality of the global. The porosity of encountering cultural seepage is a tantalizing possibility. Through the lens of the transnational, the volume grapples with the deeper questions of tradition and modernity, style and meaning, space and temporality. An abundant experience."" Prasanta Chakravarty, Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Delhi, India."