This volume addresses cultural and literary narratives of trauma in South Asian literature. Presenting a novel cross-cultural perspective on trauma theory, the essays within this volume study the divergent cultural responses to trauma and violence in various parts of South Asia, including Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Afghanistan, which have received little attention in literary writings on trauma in their specific circumstances. Through comprehensive sociocultural understanding of the region, this book creates an approachable space where trauma engages with themes like racial identity, ethnicity, nationality, religious dogma, and cultural environment. With case studies from Kashmir, the 1971 liberation war of Bangladesh, and armed conflict in Nepal and Afghanistan, the volume will be of interest to scholars, students and researchers of literature, history, politics, conflict studies, and South Asian studies.

This collection on women’s narratives includes articles exploring the works of women authors who were either born in South Asia or identified as being from that region. It discusses themes of gender, identity politics, diaspora, trauma, and the new ‘self’ of women. The volume addresses a great range of creative output by South Asian women authors and examines how their writings critically engage with the social, cultural, and political issues of their times, while also simultaneously exploring the themes of social discrimination, empowerment, and economic exploitation.

Annotation Who has the right to speak about trauma? As cultural products, narratives of social suffering paradoxically release us from responsibility while demanding that we examine our own connectedness to the circumstances that produce suffering. As a result, the text's act of "speaking havoc" rebounds in unsettling ways. Speaking Havoc investigates how literary and cinematic fictions intervene in the politics and reception of social suffering. Amitav Ghosh's modernist novel The Shadow Lines (1988), A Fine Balance (1995) by Rohinton Mistry, the short stories of Saadat Hasan Manto, Salman Rushdie's postmodernist novel Shame (1983), and the "spectacular" films of Maniratnam each bear witness to social violence in South Asia. These works confront squarely the catastrophes and innumerable minor tragedies that arise from clashes among religious and ethnic communities. Focusing on central events such as the Partition of 1947, the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984, and more recent religious conflicts between India and Pakistan, Nagappan demonstrates the differing ways that narratives engage the political violence that has marked the last fifty years of South Asian history. Is it possible to tell fully the stories of those who have died and those who have survived? Can writing really act as a counter to silence? In his compassionate engagement with these concerns, Nagappan demonstrates the relevance of literature and literary studies to fundamental sociological, anthropological, and political issues. With its interdisciplinary scope, historical perspective, and lucid style, Speaking Havoc is destined to become a foundational text for scholars of South Asian studies and postcolonial and culturalstudies, and for readers interested in trauma and social suffering as well as in the literature, films, and histories that take this field as their topic.

The contributors to this volume re-think established insights of memory and trauma theory and enrich those studies with diverse Asian texts, critically analyzing literary and cultural representations of Asia and its global diasporas. They broaden the scope of memory and trauma studies by examining how the East/ West binary delimits horizons of "trauma" by excluding Asian texts. Are memory and trauma always reliable registers of the past that translate across cultures and nations? Are supposedly pan-human experiences of suffering disproportionately coloured by eurocentric structures of region, reason, race, or religion? How are Asian texts and cultural producers yet viewed through biased lenses? How might recent approaches and perspectives generated by Asian literary and cultural texts hold purchase in the 21st century? Critically meditating on such questions, and whether existing concepts of memory and trauma accurately address the histories, present states, and futures of the non-Occidental world, this volume unites perspectives on both dominant and marginalized sites of the broader Asian continent. Contributors explore the complex intersections of literature, history, ethics, affect, and social justice across East, South, and Southeast Asia, and on Asian diasporas in Australia and the USA. They draw on yet diverge from "Orientalism" and "Area Studies" given today’s need for nuanced analytical methodologies in an era defined by the COVID-19 global pandemic. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars invested in memory and trauma studies, comparative Asian studies, diaspora and postcolonial studies, global studies, and social justice around contemporary identities and 20th and 21st century Asia.

The volume addresses the pertinent need to examine childhood trauma revolving around themes of war, sexual abuse, and disability. Drawing narratives from spatial, temporal, and cultural contexts, the book analyses how conflict, abuse, domestic violence, contours of gender construction, and narratives of ableism affect a child’s transactions with society. While exploring complex manifestations of children’s experience of trauma, the volume seeks to understand the issues related to translatability/representation, of trauma bearing in mind the fact that children often lack the language to express their sense of loss. The book in its study of childhood trauma does a close exegesis of select literary pieces, drawings done by children, memoirs, and graphic narratives. Academicians and research scholars from the disciplines of childhood studies, trauma studies, resilience studies, visual studies, gender studies, cultural studies, disability studies, and film studies stand to benefit from this volume. The ideas that have been expressed in this volume will richly contribute towards further research and scholarship in this domain.

Partition occurring simultaneously with British decolonization of the Indian subcontinent led to the formation of independent India and Pakistan. While the political and communal aspects of the Partition have received some attention, its enormous personal and psychological costs have been mostly glossed over, particularly when it comes to the splitting of Bengal. The memory of this historical ordeal has been preserved in literary archives, and these archives are still being excavated. This book examines neglected narratives of the Partition of India in 1947 to study the traces left by this foundational trauma on the national- and regional-cultural imaginaries in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. To arrive at a more complex understanding of how Partition experiences of violence, migration, and displacement shaped postcolonial societies and subjectivities in South Asia, the author analyses, through novels and short stories, multiple cartographies of disorientation and anxiety in the post-Partition period. The book illuminates how contingencies of political geography cut across personal and collective histories, and how these intersections are variously marked and mediated by literature. Examining works composed in Bengali and other South Asian languages, this book seeks to broaden and complicate existing conceptions of what constitutes the Partition literary archive. A valuable addition to the growing field of Partition studies, this book will be of interest to scholars of South Asian history, gender studies, and literature.

The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms delivers a new, inclusive examination of science fiction, from close analyses of single texts to large-scale movements, providing readers with decolonized models of the future, including print, media, race, gender, and social justice. This comprehensive overview of the field explores representations of possible futures arising from non-Western cultures and ethnic histories that disrupt the “imperial gaze”. In four parts, The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms considers the look of futures from the margins, foregrounding the issues of Indigenous groups, racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities, and any people whose stakes in the global order of envisioning futures are generally constrained due to the mechanics of our contemporary world. The book extends current discussions in the area, looking at cutting-edge developments in the discipline of science fiction and diverse futurisms as a whole. Offering a dynamic mix of approaches and expansive perspectives, this volume will appeal to academics and researchers seeking to orient their own interventions into broader contexts.