Ever since T.B. Macaulay leveled the accusation in 1835 that 'a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India,' South Asian literature has served as the imagined battleground between local linguistic multiplicity and a rapidly globalizing English. In response to this endless polemic, Indian and Pakistani writers set out in another direction altogether. They made an unexpected journey to Latin America. The cohort of authors that moved between these regions include Latin-American Nobel laureates Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz; Booker Prize notables Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Mohammed Hanif, and Mohsin Hamid. In their explorations of this new geographic connection, Roanne Kantor claims that they formed the vanguard of a new, multilingual world literary order. Their encounters with Latin America fundamentally shaped the way in which literature written in English from South Asia exploded into popularity from the 1980s until the mid-2000s, enabling its global visibility.

Ever since T.B. Macaulay leveled the accusation in 1835 that 'a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India,' South Asian literature has served as the imagined battleground between local linguistic multiplicity and a rapidly globalizing English. In response to this endless polemic, Indian and Pakistani writers set out in another direction altogether. They made an unexpected journey to Latin America. The cohort of authors that moved between these regions include Latin-American Nobel laureates Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz; Booker Prize notables Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Mohammed Hanif, and Mohsin Hamid. In their explorations of this new geographic connection, Roanne Kantor claims that they formed the vanguard of a new, multilingual world literary order. Their encounters with Latin America fundamentally shaped the way in which literature written in English from South Asia exploded into popularity from the 1980s until the mid-2000s, enabling its global visibility.

A major interpretation of recent South Asian diasporic writing and cinema in specifically transatlantic terms Ruth Maxey provides readings of canonical and less well-known South Asian American and British Asian texts and key cinematic works. She explores the formal and thematic tendencies of the works, relating them to gender politics, the marketplace, and issues of literary value and historical change. While engaging with established debates, Maxey also intervenes in new ways in transatlantic, postcolonial literary, and Asian American cultural studies. Key features * Looks at writers including Jhumpa Lahiri, Bharati Mukherjee, Mohsin Hamid, Hanif Kureishi, Monica Ali, and Nadeem Aslam * Explores films such as Mischief Night, Mississippi Masala, A Love Supreme, and Praying with Anger * Sources used include articles from mainstream American, Asian and British newspapers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Hindu, New Statesman, The Daily Telegraph, and The Guardian * Engages with critics including Susan Koshy, Sukhdev Sandhu, Rajini Srikanth, and James Procter * The book is organised around the four key themes of: home & nation, travel & return, racial mixing, and food & eating.

“Cartographies of Engagement: The Parallels and Intersections of Latin American and South Asian Authors,” establishes comparisons between Latin American authors who lived in South Asia and their South Asian contemporaries from 1906 to the present. Working in South Asian literatures in English, Hindi and Urdu, and Latin American literature in Spanish, this project recovers a century-long literary exchange between two previously unassociated regions and suggests a shared trajectory of professionalization for authors in the Global South. In the first half of the twentieth century, authors from both regions traveled abroad as a means of supporting themselves – whether through cultural exchanges, diplomatic postings, or in visiting positions with foreign universities. I suggest that their growing commitment to transnational solidarity was not a precondition for these travels, but the product of them. In the second half of the century, authors from both regions experienced a radical shift as their writing gained cache in the global north. I therefore conclude by demonstrating the connections between the emergence of Latin American Boom literature and its translation into English in the 1960s, its influence on the subsequent generation of South Asian Anglophone writers, and their own emergence as a global phenomenon beginning in the 1980s with Midnight’s Children. In bringing together two world areas that are rarely associated, it reveals a paradox in contemporary methods of comparative literary scholarship: even as disciplines expand to accommodate an ever greater diversity of language traditions, the frameworks for comparing those traditions remain remarkably narrow. In mapping the circulation of authors and texts around the globe, literary scholars have typically relied on just two different types of what I call “literary cartographies.” First, “cartographies of domination,” describe historical relations of power, as elaborated in postcolonial and decolonial theories. Second, “cartographies of contiguity,” describe relations based on physical proximity and historical routes of exchange, such as area studies designations or the more recent “oceanic turn.” By contrast, this project carves out methodological space for “cartographies of engagement,” which highlight the routes of authors and texts that contravene larger patterns of political domination and economic exchange

This book grows out of the question, "What is South Asian American writing and what insights can it offer us about living in the world at this particular moment of tense geopolitics and inter-linked economies?" South Asian American literature, with its focus on the multiple geographies and histories of the global dispersal of South Asians, pulls back from a close-up view of the United States to reveal a wider landscape of many nations and peoples. Drawing on the cosmopolitan sensibility of scholars like Anthony Appiah, Vinay Dharwadker, Martha Nussbaum, Bruce Robbins, and Amartya Sen, this book argues that to read the body of South Asian American literature justly, one must engage with the urgencies of places as diverse as Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, India, Burma, Pakistan, and Trinidad. Poets, novelists, and playwrights like Indran Amirthanayagam, Meena Alexander, Amitav Ghosh, Michael Ondaatje, Shani Mootoo, Amitava Kumar, Tahira Naqvi, and Sharbari Ahmed exhort North American residents to envision connectedness with inhabitants of other lands. These writers' significant contribution to American literature and to the American imagination is to depict the nation as simultaneously discrete and entwined within the fold of other nations. The world out there arrives next door.

This book turns to the intellectual discourses that have emerged from India and Latin America, two outposts of the Global South, on the themes of imperialism, sovereignty, development, and socio-economic, racial and caste inequalities. It recovers the elided reflective traditions of thinkers, writers and activists from these peripheries and highlights the distinctive ideas, alliances and parallelisms in their works, as well as the manner in which they articulate liberatory paradigms which continue to have contemporary relevance. The book maps the innovative epistemic engagements of thinkers from India and Latin America, highlighting the manner in which they have disrupted and challenged the hierarchies of global knowledge production. It argues that political, spatial and historical distinctions notwithstanding, the experiences of peripheralization, their common traditions of resistance to oppression and their deeply entangled histories have forged a shared intellectual identity and a rich alternative set of emancipatory epistemologies grounded in the realities and histories of Southern nations. The book recovers this body of work as mass movements the world over seek civilizational alternatives to capitalist modernity. The book will be of interest to students and researchers of development studies, history, political science, sociology, political economy, South Asian studies, Latin American studies and Global South studies.

Based on over a decade of original archival research, this book shows how Urdu travel writing gave voice to a global imagination that reflected the ambition and aspiration of Indians and Pakistanis as they negotiated their place in the changing world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this interdisciplinary study, author Daniel Majchrowicz traces the social and literary history of the Urdu travelogue from 1840 to 1990 in six chronological chapters. Each chapter asks how travel writers used the genre to give meaning to the shifting social and political realities of their colonial and postcolonial worlds. The book particularly highlights the role of women writers in the production of a global imagination in Urdu with an emphasis on travel writing on Asia and Africa.