Writing Indians and Jews Metaphorics of Jewishness in South Asian Literature

by Guttman, Anna

• ISBN13: 9781137339676
• ISBN10: 1137339675
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-06-13
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Jews and Jewishness loom large in the contemporary South Asian cultural imaginary, both on the subcontinent, and in the diaspora. Along with less canonical authors, Writing Indians and Jews examines many of South Asia's most celebrated and best known contemporary writers working in English – Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Anita Desai, Amitav Ghosh – who have placed Jewish characters and themes at the center of recent works. Anna Guttman argues that the work of Indian Jewish writers complicates the fields of postcolonial studies and her investigations make an important contribution to the study of contemporary South Asian and diasporic literature, and understandings of anti-Semitism, religious fundamentalism, and globalization.

Author Biography

Anna Guttman is Associate Professor of Postcolonial Literature at Lakehead University, Canada. She is the co-editor of The Global Literary Field and author of The Nation of India in Contemporary Indian Literature.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Jews and Indians: Imagining Mobile Subjects
2. Terror and the Archive: Textualizations of (Jewish?) History in Contemporary South Asian Literature
3. "I would always be the Asian, the Shylock": Postcolonial Economies of Jewishness
4. Jewish and Indian: Narrating Between Race, Faith, Ethnicity, and Nation
5. Conclusion