I work on postcolonial, global and world literatures. My recent monograph, This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form, tracks the interlaced histories of globalism, information technology, ethnic violence and humanitarian connectivity through the genre of the novel. It reprises the novel’s historical links to distant suffering and technologies of mediation - the staple of debates on the sentimental novel and the rise of Abolitionism in the late 18th century - in the context of the emergence of novels written against the backdrop of contemporary global wars and ethnic conflict. New media technologies and multiple visual regimes have been critical in mediating these sites of violence for diverse publics around the world. My book addresses the ways in which contemporary global novels capture the impact of this hyper-mediated violence in their points of view, their space-time configurations, their modes of addressing the reader and their moral imagination. Works on the Palestinian crisis, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Kashmir conflict, post-9/11 America, and the Rwanda genocide, feature as case studies. 

 

I am currently at work on a book project, Catastrophic Form: Drones, Toxins, Climate. The project explores the contemporary novel and its mediation of human/posthuman life-forms in the era of techno-security and biogenetic capitalism, and anthropogenic climate change. Three iconic catastrophic scenarios feature in my analysis: drone warfare, industrial/nuclear accidents and devastated coastal ecologies. The larger horizon of this research lies in the contemporary emergence of a vibrant interdisciplinary discourse on biological, technogenic and geological understandings of human beings and their relation to political belonging and social justice.

 

My first monograph, Caste, Colonialism and Counter-Modernity (2005), is both an intellectual history and a revisionist ethnography of caste and untouchability in India from the point of view of theoretical developments in the field of postcolonial studies. Spanning a period from the eighteenth century to the present, the book traces the discursive horizons of 'caste' from early colonial histories and anthropological tracts to contemporary dalit literature and postcolonial historiographical projects such as Subaltern Studies. It argues that caste is not so much an essence responsible for India's ‘backwardness’ as a constellation of variegated social practices that are in a constant state of flux and that cannot be completely contained in a narrative of nation-building, modernisation and development. What is offered in this analysis is not an endorsement of either the caste-system or casteism, but a resistance to the reified ways in which caste continues to figure in social scientific and nation-building discourses.

 

I am the general editor of a two-volume The Cambridge History of World Literature (2020), and of a CUP book series Cambridge Studies in World Literature.

 

I have published essays on Indian language worlds in The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature (2011) and on Dalit life-stories in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Indian Culture (2012). Other recent publications include essays on the novel after 1989 in The Cambridge Companion to the Postcolonial Novel (2015), and the normative provenance of world literature in The Values of Literary Studies (CUP 2015).

 

Two other edited volumes on postcolonial and global studies include Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public Intellectual (2007), and Rethinking Gandhi and Nonviolent Relationality: Global Perspectives (2007)

2019, Georgetown University, ‘Anglo-Globalism, Area Studies and World Literature,’ American Comparative Literature Association Annual Conference

 

2018, Leuven University, ‘Drone Vision and Bio-Techno Terror,’ plenary lecture at the conference, “Romanticism in the Age of World Wars,’ November 11-13

 

2018, University of Pennsylvania, “Cultural Transitions”, invited panel speaker to Perry World House colloquium on “Competing Visions for the World Order” September 24-25.

 

2018, UCLA, “World Literature: Interlaced Histories, Translational Thresholds and Global Grammars”, American Comparative Literature Association Annual Conference

 

2018, Cornell University, “Catastrophic Comparisons: Reading Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People via Chernobyl” Society for Novel Studies

 

2016, New York University, ‘Real Virtualities in the Era of Humanitarian Reason’

 

2016, Cornell University, ‘The Skin of the World: Allegories of Global Terror,’, plenary lecture for the Society of the Humanities conference on ‘Performing Skin.’

 

2016, University of Bologna, “The Global South and Indian Ocean Worlds”

 

2015, University of Wisconsin-Madison, ‘The Contemporary Novel as Global Form,’ Mellon Sawyer Seminar

 

2013, Goldsmiths College, University of London, ‘Novelization after 1989.’

 

2013, University of Warwick, ‘What is the “World” in the World Novel?’

 

2013, University of Leeds, ‘A Non-Synchronous Contemporaneity: Novel Worlds after 1989,’  

 

2013, University of Cambridge, ‘Networks and Assemblages: Novelization in Our Time’

 

2013, University of Queensland, ‘Humanitarian Scripts in the World Novel.’

 

2012, University of Oxford, Wadham College,’ Hypermediated Deathworlds: New Wars, The World Novel and Exorbitant Witnessing’

 

2012, University of Toronto, Centre for Diaspora and Translational Studies, ‘Novelisation and Witnessing in the Era of Humanitarian Wars’

 

2012, Duke University, ‘Deathworlds and the Global Novel’, invited panel convener for biennial conference on ‘Novel Worlds’ convened by the Society for Novel Studies, 26-28 April

 

2011, University of Cambridge, ‘What is the “World” in World Literature’, plenary address at the ‘Future University’ conference, at CRASSH, 1 July

 

2011, Duke University, ‘Global Humanities: An Antipodean Perspective’, Franklin Humanities Institute, 7 April

 

2010, Brown University, ‘Translation and Incommensurability’, CHCI Annual Conference, 16 June, panel coordinator and invited speaker.

 

2010, University of Michigan, ‘The World Novel, Distant Suffering and the Humanitarian Imagination after 1989’, Institute for the Humanities, 26 March, 2010, invited speaker and fellow

 

2010, University of Chicago, ‘The Language Question in Postcolonial India’, Centre for South Asia Studies, 8 April, invited speaker and fellow

 

2009, Stanford University, Humanities Centre, ‘Rethinking World Literature’, 15 December, invited speaker