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South Asia and its Others: Reading the “Exotic”
Editor: V.G. Julie Rajan and Atreyee Phukan
Date Of Publication: Jul 2009
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-0991-7
Isbn: 1-4438-0991-8
The essays in South Asia and Its Others: Reading the "Exotic" reveal fresh perspectives on the notion of exoticism in South Asia, and also challenge and extend existing scholarship in the broader discourse of what constitutes South Asia. Significantly, the anthology considers how the phenomenon of "exoticization" may be interpreted as a strategic methodology utilized by writers of South Asian descent to examine critically both the post-colonialist ramifications of casteism, religious intolerance, and gender violence across differing cultural contexts within the region, and how current perceptions of "native" and "diasporic" South Asian subjects problematize ideologies of authenticity across Western-Eastern divides. The papers in this collection show how authors of South Asian ethnicity construct their own version of an "exotic" South Asia globally and the colonialist discourse of "exocitism" is employed as a discursive tool that uncovers the ambiguity that continues to mark the marginality of identities even today.

V.G. Julie Rajan is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies, Rutgers University, U.S.A. Her monographs

include, The Phenomenon of Women Suicide Bombers: Narratives of Violence (Routledge, forthcoming), and Femininity, Nation, and Violence:

Post-Independence Narratives of Resistance Written by Women Residing in India (forthcoming). Rajan's edited collections include The Home and the

World: South Asia in Transition (Cambridge Scholars Publishers, 2006),

Violence and Gender in the Globalized World: The Intimate and the Extimate (Ashgate, 2008), and From Word to Canvas: Appropriations of Myth in

Women's Aesthetic Production (Cambridge Scholars Publishers, 2009).

Atreyee Phukan is Assistant Professor of English at the University of San

Diego, U.S.A., where she teaches postcolonial and world literature. Her

principal research interests lie in expressions of cultural and racial

"hybridity" in literatures of the Caribbean and South Asian diaspora.

Phukan's work on these literatures appear in the anthology 19th and 20th

Century World Writers (2004) and in the Journal of Caribbean Literatures

(January 2008). Phukan's other publications include The Home and the

World: South Asia in Transition (Cambridge Scholars Publishers, 2006). She

is currently working on a book-length project that examines the historical

and cultural place of Indian indentureship in Trinidadian literature.

"V. G. Julie Rajan and Atreyee Phukan's latest South Asia and Its Others: Reading the "Exotic" offers searing insight on the historically over-determined subject of the Orient. The scholars in this collection offer fresh and urgent theorization on how the "other" has been re-presented, and misrepresented, within western/non-western or external/internal accounts thereby rupturing the tired binaries and licit complicities that have kept the "other" industrial complex of exoticization, marginalization, and exploitation thriving in the new economy of transnational cyber-capitalism. Traversing the canon from Arundhati Roy to Ardhasir Vakil, the editors, who begin with a discerning critique on the filmic discourse surrounding the recent Slumdog Millionaire, touch on all that is relevant rendering it luminous. A must-read for academics, students and all who are interested in manifestations of South Asia on the global stage."

—Shreerekha Subramanian, Assistant Professor of Humanities, University of Houston-Clear Lake

"By bringing diasporic imaginaries of South Asia in conversation with the vagaries of late capitalism, this book breaks new ground even as it dwells on familiar themes of exoticism and otherness. The authors forcefully argue for a reassessment of power and marginality as these are reconstituted through neo-orientalist literary aesthetics and practices and within emergent politics of inclusions and exclusions."

—Mona Bhan, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, DePauw University

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