Entangled Modernities of Indian Literatures: Debating Decolonial Praxes and Transmodern Options

Introduction: Beyond the Anglophone—Comparative South Asian Literatures

Yu Zhang's Going to the Countryside: The Rural in the Modern Chinese Cultural Imagination, 1915–1965 studies cultural imaginings of the rural in a wide variety of forms and media from the New Culture Movement through the first seventeen years of the People's Republic of China. The book, however, does not focus on the rural per se, examining it, instead, from the perspective of the city-to-countryside move or, to be specific, "intellectuals, reformers, revolutionaries, leftist journalists, and idealistic youth crossing the increasing gap between the city and the countryside" (1). Zhang treats the practice of "going to the countryside" as intersecting with three major discourses between the May Fourth Movement and the eve of the Cultural Revolution: enlightenment, revolution, and socialist industrialization. The six chapters of the book are chronologically organized into three parts, each of which focuses on one of these discourses and related cultural practices and productions. Together these chapters examine a large array of questions, discourses, practices, movements, and cultural productions. To demonstrate the broad scope of the book and the wide variety of the questions it explores, let me provide a chapter-by-chapter summary first. I then will look at Zhang's main arguments in the book.Focusing on the 1910s and 1920s, part 1 discusses how intellectuals encountered the countryside as an object of social investigations, the hometowns they returned to, or the sites for carrying out their rural transformation programs. Chapter 1 brings together two different types of writings: social survey essays published in the journal New Youth and fictional works featuring homecoming by authors including Lu Xun, Xu Qinwen, Feng Yuanjun, and Yu Dafu. For Zhang, although these writings belong to two very different types, they share similar functions, particularly in their effort to critically reflect on the May Fourth iconoclasm and anti-traditionalism, which reduced the rural/hometown as the embodiment of China's primitivism and backwardness. As Zhang's reading of the texts shows, social survey essays turned away from May Fourth ideological prescriptions "by shifting the center of gravity to the concrete life of ordinary people, . . . concerned with how things actually were rather than how people ought to act" (23). Similarly, homecoming fiction also paid attention to the concrete and the lived, without dismissing the importance of preexisting relationships, hierarchies, and nonlinguistic ways of communication.Chapter 2 turns to intellectuals' rural reconstruction experiments in Ding County, Hebei Province. By studying how intellectuals used lantern slides, illustrated primers, and spoken drama "as major pedagogical tools and transformative vehicles to remake public life in the villages" (47), Zhang explores how these reformists were able to create a "rural vernacular," which made peasants' participation possible. Importantly, this vernacular pointed to "a new way of conceiving of the peasants" (47), who were included in the reformists' vision not only of the villages but also of the nation and the world. Zhang holds that such an inclusive vision challenged the May Fourth vernacular movement, which, with its overreliance on the linguistic, was inaccessible to peasants.The two chapters in part 2 explore the discourse of revolution in the 1930s and 1940s. Chapter 3 looks at traveling from urban centers to the Communist revolutionary base depicted in works by both Western and Chinese authors (Edgar Snow, Chen Xuezhao, Ding Ling, and Fang Ji) in various genres including journalistic writing, reportage, and short story. Focusing on these authors' different treatments of the discrepancy between urban and rural areas, Zhang also demonstrates why, despite its material impoverishment, the revolutionary base attracted attention both domestically and internationally. Notably, this chapter introduces gender as an analytical category, highlighting the differences between the ways urban male and female authors captured their "going to the revolutionary base" experiences.By studying Zhao Shuli's story "The Marriage of Little Erhei" and the evolution of the Ma Xiwu–Liu Qiao stories, chapter 4 examines cultural productions at the intersection between law and love in the revolutionary base in the 1940s. Based on real-life marriage disputes in the Shaan-Gan-Ning border region, these texts serve as windows into a rich plethora of intertwined questions: law, human sentiment, representation, propaganda, cultural production, media, communication, community, and subject formation. Zhang's perceptive analysis sheds light on the making of a new rural culture, in which the rural became "a multimedia space of revolutionary governance" (142).Part 3 examines representations of socialist industrialization in the pre–Cultural Revolution period of the PRC. Focusing on the "return to the village" movement, chapter 5 studies socialist-era homecoming, which, in contrast to the homecoming examined in chapter 1, was "treated as a moral and ideological decision" (148). Here Zhang highlights the aesthetic strategies of socialist visual images and films, suggesting that we should see homecoming as "a journey in which the young generation is urged to imagine themselves transforming the natural world, eliminating poverty, and building modern infrastructure" (148). This chapter pays special attention to the obsession with collective productivity and "the aesthetic components of 'labor-as-play' and 'industrial-as-artisanal'" (178).With its focus on socialist films from the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s, chapter 6 looks at a different kind of crossing: young people's railway travel from cities to China's frontier regions, where they devote themselves wholeheartedly to transforming wasteland into "the socialist industrial utopia" (186). As Zhang sees it, emotion has a special role in these cinematic representations: train compartments as well as construction sites are all presented as spaces where "quotidian sentiments such as camaraderie, professional care, domestic warmth, and communitarian intimacy were all utilized to generate collective energy and serve productive efficiency" (206).As the summary above shows, the chapters, chronologically organized into three parts, explore an extremely rich array of topics. What holds these parts together is "going to the countryside," which for the author represents "an unbroken tradition and a continuous and historically contingent practice" (9) commonly found in modern Chinese cultural productions. More important, "going to the countryside" is not just a thematic link that connects the parts of the monograph together; rather, it constitutes the basis of the book's overarching argument. In her introduction, Zhang writes, "This book argues that this new body of cultural productions [i.e., those featuring the urban-to-rural move] did not merely turn the rural into a constantly changing representational space; most importantly, the rural has been constructed as a distinct modern experiential and aesthetic realm characterized by revolutionary changes in human conceptions and sentiments, which were generated through the act of 'crossing' these two spaces" (3–4). In other words, Zhang argues that Chinese imaginings between 1915 and 1965 have transformed the rural into an aesthetic space for the articulation and exploration of modern experiences; moreover, these productive processes "have helped shape new human subjectivities and created affective and political communities through influencing people's understanding of the world" (10). This points to four major overarching elements of the book, which Zhang deploys throughout the book in her examination of the rural and the urban-to-rural crossing: the aesthetic, the modern, human subjectivities, and affects.Let's look at the aesthetic first. As mentioned, the three parts of the book each deal with a specific period and an associated discourse: enlightenment in the 1910s and 1920s, revolution in the 1930s and 1940s, and socialist industrialization between 1949 and 1965. Treating the rural as an aesthetic space, Zhang traces the evolution of the aesthetic modes and strategies adopted in cultural imaginings about the rural, providing a clear picture of how changes in the political and ideological landscape shaped the aesthetics of representing the rural.Compared with her treatment of the aesthetic, Zhang's discussion of the relationship between the rural and the modern is more energetic. Indeed, as I see it, modernity lies at the heart of Zhang's examination of modern Chinese imaginaries of the rural, and her treatment of the modern also encompasses questions of new human subjectivities and new affective communities. We may even say that the entire monograph is an exploration of the modern through the lens of the "spatial move from the cities to the countryside" (6), which Zhang emphatically takes to be "a distinctly modern experience" (6). Rather than seeing the rural as the opposite of the modern, Zhang highlights the active role bestowed on it in modernization programs launched by various parties during the New Culture movement, the 1930s and 1940s revolutionary era, and the early PRC socialist industrialization experiments. In the hands of the reformists of the rural reconstruction movement in Ding County, for instance, the rural became the site "to conceptualize the Chinese modern outside the context of the city" (46), and through the creation of a new "rural vernacular," "the modern . . . [became] a newly accessible quotidian experience for the local peasants" (75). In 1930s and 1940s Yan'an, cultural productions were used to rationalize links between modern values and seemingly primitive rural areas (118–19). In the socialist era, modernization of the countryside through industrialization was envisioned as an integral part of socialist construction. It is through this engagement with the modern that Zhang shows how cultural productions from different periods envisioned the emergence of new subjectivities: enlightened peasants, enthusiastic revolutionaries, and active participants in socialist industrialization, all of whom are modern citizens of China as well as members of emerging new political and affective communities. Moreover, it is also through this engagement that Zhang establishes linkages between the modernizing efforts in seemingly remote, primitive regions in China and processes of modernization in the larger global context.In short, I consider this energetic exploration of the modern in relation to the rural one of the major contributions of Zhang's monograph. While the rural or the idea of "going to the countryside" serves as a strong thematic link for the chapters of the book, it is the engagement with the modern, as I read it, that enables the constituent parts of the book to hang organically and interactively together.This excellent study has minor issues. Zhang's heavy reliance on the rural as the conceptual foundation for the entire book occasionally leads to issues, particularly when the use of the term is problematic. Take, for example, chapter 6. Although this chapter does an excellent job of analyzing cinematic representations of train travel and the industrialization of wasteland in the frontier regions, and although these films indeed feature spatial crossings, I am not fully convinced by Zhang's argument that wasteland is "as an analytical category of the rural" (183). Indeed, depending on the context, wasteland may be seen as the very opposite of "rural"—as that which needs to be transformed into agricultural land; for example, the rhetoric surrounding the transformation of the Beidahuang ("great northern wilderness") in Northeast China into farmland points to this perceived opposition between wasteland and the rural/countryside.In addition, as the book deals with so many overarching elements, the reader may sometimes find it challenging to grasp the linkages between them; indeed, the central argument, the "through-line," is not always easily locatable. This is partly because in addition to the overarching elements, each chapter has its own unique set of questions to examine and may make arguments that are not necessarily linked to the topics discussed in other sections of the book. (For instance, while the law is the main subject in chapter 4, the rest of the book does not treat it.) In other words, different sections of the book do not always speak to the central thesis or speak to each other. This is more of a characteristic than a weakness, but it may cause difficulty and is something the reader should be aware of.In conclusion, I consider Yu Zhang's Going to the Countryside: The Rural in the Modern Chinese Cultural Imagination, 1915–1965 a highly valuable addition to the scholarship on twentieth-century Chinese literary and cultural studies. Its great insight into the relationship between the rural and modernity in modern cultural productions would benefit readers who are interested in Chinese modernity in the global context. As Zhang points out in the introduction, scholarship on Chinese modernity from the past two decades is marked by an "urban turn," "assuming that modern life is essentially city life" (6). With its focus on the countryside as a privileged site of modernizing experiments and meaning production, this monograph presents a much-needed invitation to go beyond the urban as the privileged site of modernization and consider the ties between the rural and the modern. Furthermore, because the book examines an impressively wide array of types of materials, "from social-survey essay to modern fiction and reportage literature, from illustrations to theatrical performance and feature films, from official news essays to rural plays and storytelling" (10), it would also appeal to readers who are interested in the evolution of forms of cultural production and dissemination in twentieth-century China.

Reviewed by: In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India Meenakshi Mukherjee Priya Joshi. In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India. New York: Columbia UP, 2002. xix + 363 pp. Combining methods of book history with literary insights, Priya Joshi has written an unusual account of India's encounter with English [End Page 506] novels in the nineteenth century, going on to suggest how that encounter shapes Indian novelists in the twentieth century. She has delved into publishers' records in England, as well as catalogues of libraries in India, to find out what was being exported and what was being consumed in the colony. Based on available facts and figures, she has drawn up charts that throw light on the reading habits of the early generations of English-educated Indians. On the basis of such data, she argues that although literary novelists like Austen, Dickens, and Thackeray were read, a much larger impact was made by popular writers like G. W. M. Reynolds, Marion Crawford, Marie Corelli, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, or Wilkie Collins, as demonstrated by the profusion of adaptations and imitations of these writers in the Indian languages. (Scott, in fact, seems to have been the only canonical writer to influence Indian writers of the time.) Joshi's speculations on the reasons for the appeal of these colorful and sensational novels in colonial India form an interesting section of the book. If this fiction served as "what Gramsci has called a psychic stimulant among its readers," Joshi wonders, how does one explain the consistency in response across class, profession, and location all over the country for well over half a century? These and other questions raised by her will hopefully be taken up by subsequent researchers for further exploration. Joshi's work is divided into two parts: "Consuming Fiction" and "Producing Fiction." The first draws substantially upon archival research pertaining to the starting of special colonial editions by London publishers in the mid-nineteenth century, the sale and dissemination of these books in India, and the nature of their reception as revealed by the circulation registers of libraries in India and the reviews of these books in Indian periodicals. The "book" is seen both as an object of trade as well as a site for cultural transaction. Joshi quotes a little-known reviewer in Madras Christian College Magazine who admitted to regularly skipping parts of these British novels because the details were too unfamiliar: "I hurry over graphic descriptions of scenes which to me are outlandish, inventories of articles of furniture which it will never fall to my lot even to dream of buying." This comment leads Joshi to reflect on the conditions that generate realism and those that favor counter-realism in narrative fiction. All this is meant to provide a background for the second half of the volume, which focuses on writing by Indians. Establishing cause-and-effect patterns is difficult in the field of cultural production, and the links between the two halves of the book are not always clear. But the four chapters in the second half dealing with Indian writers and texts—from colonial to postcolonial—can be read on their own terms. Many novelists are mentioned in passing, but the central focus is on four—Bankim Chandra Chatterji (1838-1994), Krupa [End Page 507] Satthianathan (1862-94), Ahmed Ali (b.1910), and Salman Rushdie (b.1947). Chatterji is the only writer in this group who did not write in English (except for an early amateurish effort), and the available English translations of his Bangla novels are far from adequate, but Joshi uses him for examining the interface between two languages and more than two literary traditions in the early years of the novel in India. The other three writers span a century of Indian English writing, but have hardly ever been seen in a common frame. The choice of minority writers (Christian, woman, Muslim) is not dictated by political correctness, but because they provide convenient examples of the widening arc of the writer's concern—from an individual's growth within the family to the social documentation of a city, and finally to the political history of...

This is an interview of Manohar Mouli Biswas, Bangla Dalit activist and writer, where he expresses his views about the identity of Dalit people and the historiography of caste in India. He further speaks about the uniqueness of Bangla Dalit literature, its similarities with Dalit writings in other Indian regional languages and the position of Dalit women writers. He is candid enough to speak about certain autobiographical elements that provided him with the impetus to be a Dalit writer. He further speaks about Dalit drama and its performances which is a marker of its acceptance amongst the viewers. He emphasises on the role of translation of Dalit literature to generate awareness among the larger reading public towards Dalit literature.

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Dalit Literature is at once the expression of a “Dalit consciousness” about identity (both individual and communal), human rights and human dignity, and the community, as well as the discursive supplement to a ground-level sociopolitical movement that seeks redress for historically persistent oppression and social justice in the present. While its origins are often deemed to be coterminous with the movement dating back to the reformist campaigns in several parts of India during the 19th century, contemporary researchers have found precursors to both the Dalit consciousness and literary expressions in poets and thinkers of earlier eras, such as the saint-poets in the Punjab. Dalit literature’s later development has also run alongside political movements such as the Indian freedom struggle, even as B. R. Ambedkar’s campaign on behalf of what were then called the “depressed classes” intersected, sometimes fractiously, with the Indian National Congress, Mahatma Gandhi, and others in the struggle. Ambedkar’s own voluminous writings and speeches, tracts of various social and reformer organizations, debates, and letters also stimulated the literary. This bibliography includes primary texts in terms of foundational writings by B. R. Ambedkar, Jotirao Phule. and Periyar, followed by select examples of Dalit life writing, fiction, poetry, and anthologies that have brought together some of these texts. Later sections include critical-academic texts that cover some of the contexts, history, and development of Dalit literature. With more poetry, autobiographies, commentaries, anthologies, and compilations of Dalit texts appearing through the 20th century, the foundation for academic studies of the field of Dalit literature were also laid. Contextualizing Dalit texts in many cases, the essays and books listed here represent a wide variety of approaches. The contexts invariably involve the Dalit movement; the campaigns from the late 19th century; the various social, cultural, and political associations; the rise of Ambedkar and his influence; and other subjects. Many link Dalit narratives to other cultural productions, iconography, and practices. Others focus on the intersection of caste and class/political economy and capitalist modernity in the postcolonial state, or caste and patriarchy. And some others, working with Dalit literature from particular languages, offer a history of Dalit literature in that language. The role of this literature in shaping not only political mobilization but also the social imaginary of the Dalit communities and the public sphere are also key components of the protocols of reading and receiving Dalit texts engendered in the academic and cultural discussions around the domain. Aesthetics, politics, genre conventions, influences and the “voice” of resistance, anger, and despair are part of the discussion in many essays. Others offer comparative studies of Dalit texts. Read variously as the literature of protest, sympathy, solidarity, and resistance, Dalit literature thrives in Indian languages, and in multiple forms, although oral narratives and stories that are popular in gatherings and meetings remain largely uncollected. New forms such as the graphic novel have energized the field in recent years.

Tagore’s resolute opposition to nationalism is widely known but it is not often acknowledged that in contrast, most of his contemporary writers in the Indian languages were passionate supporters of Gandhi and the Indian national struggle for freedom. This is illustrated here through referencing the life and works of Premchand, who was as eminent a writer in Hindi as Tagore was in Bengali and who found Tagore’s writings a little too emotional and ‘feminine’ for his liking.

As someone who entered the United States as a foreign student in the late 1980s, my academic career was intensely shaped by the then burgeoning discourses on colonialism and postcolonialism.1 The triumvirate of Said, Spivak, and Bhabha functioned like a citation machine; and despite Said’s Orientalism, South Asia, especially India, dominated as the colonial/ postcolonial site par excellence. Much of this had to do not just with the presence of many a South Asian scholar studying, writing, and teaching in U.S. universities but also with the fact that some of the most brilliant work was being undertaken on India: Lata Mani’s work on the discourses on sati, the work of the Subaltern Studies historians, Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and her famous essays on the Rani of Sirmur, and of course Bhabha’s legendary essays “Sly Civility” and “Signs Taken for Wonders.” The outpouring of anglophone fiction from South Asia, topped off by the publication of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, made certain that there would be no dearth of work on South Asian (read Indian) postcolonial fiction, and even today, despite a fairer distribution of attention to other parts of the ex-colonial worlds, works on South Asia continue to dominate the scene. Much has been written about this privileging of South Asia (again, read India) and its incarnation as the quintessential postcolonial site, and I am not going to rehearse the debates here. But suffice it to say that while my teaching spans continents, my first book was part and parcel of the work on the discourse of gender and nationalism in colonial and postcolonial literary representations by British, Bengali, and anglophone South Asian writers. But, in another sense the book was comparative because it brought into play writers working in different languages, and I remember getting a report from Cambridge University Press asking me why there was no chapter on Rushdie.

This chapter examines a well-known short story ‘A Horse and Two Goats’, to address three questions regarding the art and achievement of its author, R K Narayan. The first question pertains to a reevaluation of R K Narayan's oeuvre on the occasion of his hundredth birth anniversary, which took place in 2006. Is he really a great writer? If so, how do we know it? The second question touches on the debate started by V S Naipaul about the ‘Hindu’ (non-modern, non-Western) mentality that pervades Narayan's world. Is Naipaul right? The answers to both questions are tied up with the third and chief question, which is that of language and representation in Narayan's writings and which I shall take up first. I shall argue that Narayan, in a manner of speaking, ‘solves’ the problem of representing Indian reality in a (not entirely Indian language) English by crafting a special kind of style, which we may call an artful plainness. This strategy, which is the opposite of Raja Rao's or Salman Rushdie's, relies on a largely correct, syntactically and lexically limited, narrative technique to create an effect that exceeds its form. The key, in other words, to understanding Narayan's unique contribution to Indian English literature and to reevaluating his greatness is this question of language and representation. Narayan's achievement lies in a minimalism.

Virginia Woolf has been celebrated as an innovative modernist who broke with past traditions, greatly contributing to changing the future of the novel as well as women’s place in cultural production. Paradoxically, however, Woolf’s modernist originality can be shown to be inscribed, reversely, in her rescripting of the past. As will be argued in the book, her historiographical narratives form a topos in which her political thought, and particularly her feminism, are uniquely intertwined with her literary modernism and the condition of modernity itself. Woolf’s notion of history and historiographical practices, as encountered in both her fictional and critical writings, are informed by the experience of modernity, its nature, failures and possibilities, in as much as the historical epoch of modernity not only forms the context of Woolf’s life and works but also ushers in a novel phase of relating to the past, consequent on the demand for constant break and innovation peculiar to it. It constitutes the historical moment when the very division between the old and the new was consolidated and a cult of the new was established alongside a sense of loss of what had been. It is this sense of the present, as a ‘now’ which is incessantly always-already passing, that also creates the need to capture the past through remembrance, which historiography and art are called upon to meet. The narration of the past and its vicissitudes thus, by inversion, comprises a prime modus of articulating the consciousness and experience of modernity.

This article maps out the genealogy of the Korean term sajin, which began to be used as a translation for photography in late-nineteenth-century Korea. A genealogical study of the term sajin and its extension to the naming of photography provides a foundation to comprehend the processes in which the reception of photography as a new cultural product was framed by Korean indigenous practices of representation and their related cultural discourses. One of the main objectives of this essay is to highlight the fact that the concepts of photography and photographic technology were not simply imported into Korea from the West, but were actively recoded in ways that responded to established cultural and political discourses of Korea, and intercultural dialogues between East Asian countries. Emphasising the discursive specificity of photography in Korea, I move beyond the familiar discourse of centre and periphery that has shaped the narrative of western globalisation. This article will be of interest to contemporary historians and theorists of photography who are seeking alternatives to Euro-American notions of photography and its history.

African Women and the Documentary: Storytelling, Visualizing History, from the Personal to the Political1 Beti Ellerson (bio) The practice of storytelling, of relating actuality, the real, of recounting history, the personal, the social, the political, are all features of the screen culture in which African women have evolved in myriad ways as stakeholders in the cultural production of their society and world. Telling stories through documentary in particular has been a dominant mode among African women, perhaps out of a genuine interest in addressing the pressing issues in their societies and relating stories that would otherwise not be told. Their filmmaking practice is indicative of the diversity of themes they address, using eclectic approaches, autobiographical, experimental, hybrid, consciousness-raising, sociopolitical, as well as within translocal and transnational spaces—some going beyond the cultural references of the filmmakers. This article brings together current trends and tendencies incorporating African women who span the globe, utilizing diverse languages, reflecting a plurality of experiences, histories, cultures, and geographies. African Women’s Documentary Filmmaking Practices as Intangible Cultural Heritage African women film documentarians are making an invaluable contribution to Africa’s intangible cultural heritage, an observation that scholar Bertrand Cabedoche remarks in his research on documentary cinema in sub-Saharan Africa. 2 The notion of documentary filmmaking practice by African women as intangible culture heritage is worthy of broader exploration, especially in light of the prevalence of this genre in African women’s cultural production. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), cultural heritage does not end at monuments and [End Page 223] collections of objects. It also includes traditions or living expressions inherited from our ancestors and passed on to our descendants, such as oral traditions, performing arts, social practices, rituals, festive events, knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe or the knowledge, and skills to produce traditional crafts. 3 The above-mentioned practices, all of which African women documentarians incorporate in their work, are visual evidence of their role as cultural agents and the vital function they play as cultural producers. Hence, the preservation of these traditions and expressions through documentation via the moving image is essential. Two pioneering African women, Cameroonian Thérèse Sita-Bella and Efua Theodora Sutherland of Ghana, used the moving image to document historical events of their respective societies. Trailblazing journalist Thérèse Sita-Bella entered this domain even before most of the male filmmakers recognized today as pioneers. She produced Tam Tam à Paris in 1963, a thirty-minute film documenting the National Dance Company of Cameroon during its tour in Paris. In 1969, the film was featured at the first edition of the emblematic Panfrican Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO). Similarly, renowned playwright Efua Sutherland stepped into African cinema history with the 1967 production of Araba: The Village Story. The film was produced for the US television network ABC to document the successful Atwia Experimental Community Theatre Project, universally known as a groundbreaking model for the Theatre for Development. 4 Both foremothers in African cinema, though having only produced one film each, their documentation of African culture and experiences is indicative of the practices of many African women. Some women enter cinema as a primary career, while others use the filmmaking as a medium of expression in their work in other fields. UNESCO further observes that an understanding of the intangible cultural heritage of different communities helps with intercultural dialogue, and encourages mutual respect for other ways of life. 5 African women’s documentary work is increasingly visible on the international film festival circuit and cultural venues worldwide, indicative of both the growing global interest in sharing cultures through the moving image and the evolution in dialogic exchanges that these visual documents invoke. While all categories and genres are represented at most of these venues, the predominance of documentary work by African women makers is evidence of their significant contribution to this genre. UNESCO also emphasizes that the importance of intangible cultural heritage is not the cultural manifestation itself, but rather the wealth of knowledge and skills that is transmitted through it from one generation to the next. 6 In this regard, the first generation of African...

En el presente artículo se presentan reflexiones enfocadas a evidenciar la necesidad de redimensionar el discurso de los derechos humanos en un espectro de mayor conciencia sobre la incompletitud de los mismos; un espectro que permita percibir el analfabetismo intercultural presente en su origen y en sus expresiones contemporáneas. Ello se sustenta en la inexistencia de una visión única de derechos humanos al concebir estos como productos culturales y la consideración del proyecto intercultural como un marco más propicio para lograr una inclusión real de distintas cosmovisiones. Por último, con base en algunos casos de la Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos (Corte IDH o CoIDH) en materia de pueblos y comunidades indígenas y tribales, se presentan disertaciones sobre cómo la interacción entre derechos humanos e interculturalidad –a través de diálogos interculturales- puede ser una ruta para despensar y repensar a dichos derechos; considerarlos desde una visión consciente de sus limitaciones para así, poder estar más cerca de la generación de una “concepción intercultural de los mismos”.

Reviewed by: Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel Efraim Sicher Robert Alter , Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. 175 pp. The city has never failed to fascinate us with its enormity and monstrosity, its teeming diversity of human life, and above all, its modernity. The experience of modernity is an urban one that challenges the social hierarchy, moral values, and sense of time and space that were familiar in a pre-industrial and predominantly rural age. It is no wonder, then, that the nineteenth-century novelist should be attracted to the urban experience as a testing ground for both the practice of literary realism and the representation of contemporary society. The city became the topos as well as the locus of writing when a new literate public was forming and when the cultural, economic, and political power of the nation was shifting to urban centers. In The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History (1998), Richard Lehan joined together urban studies and a Marxist orientation to give us a literary history of the European and American cities. The interstice of literary studies and human geography is exemplified in Writing the City, edited by Peter Preston and Paul Simpson-Housley (1994), which looks at modern literary representations of cities around the world, not just in European and American traditions. We are accustomed to this topic being treated under the heading of modernism, as in Burton Pike's seminal The Image of the City in Modern Literature (1981), and we have become used to a thematic treatment of a mythical place in studies that focus on Dickens's London, Balzac's Paris, or Joyce's Dublin. But we do not often pause to consider how the novel form may have been affected by the urban revolution, how it responded in its language to the fragmentation and commodification of urban life which, as Georg Simmel [End Page 131] showed, affected the senses as well as the sensibilities, changing the way we see things. Robert Alter's Imagined Cities is an original contribution to the growing body of criticism which examines the connection between literature and the modern city. Its underlying thesis is that only by looking at the language of the novel can we understand how the city experience impacts literary traditions. This is not, then, a study of how the historical situation of city life is reflected or of how the novel participates in the city's cultural production. Indeed, Alter promptly, and without too much ceremony, brushes aside New Historicists and anyone who reads extra-textually. Not that context is unimportant to Alter — it is — but for him the literary text is not to be submerged in theoretical structures or ideological strictures. Citation and referencing of secondary sources (as befits lectures delivered in New York, Oxford, and elsewhere) are kept to a minimum. Instead, Alter treats us to an efficient reading, with generous but not heavy helpings from the texts themselves in order to show a paradigm that precedes and influences modernism. The development of the realist novel is, as Alter reminds us, too messy to be considered linear, and Zola, in his poetics of demolition in the description of Hausmann's reconstruction of Paris in La Curée (The Chase), proceeds from Balzac rather than from Flaubert. It is in Flaubert, however, that Alter finds the key to a mode of realism that anticipates the modernists. The flâneur in The Sentimental Education, he explains, is no longer the leisurely stroller gazing on fetishized objects of desire but a filter for the "mind of the new urban man" that "becomes a maelstrom in which the centrifugal elements of experience are whirled together in dizzying combinations" (20). The demise of the flâneur results not so much from Walter Benjamin's analysis of this figure as anachronistic during the Second Empire but from Alter's conclusion that "Flaubert's breakthrough in the representation of the urban realm was to perceive the modern metropolis simultaneously as a locus of powerful, exciting, multifarious stimuli and as a spatial reality so vast and inchoately kinetic that it defied taxonomies...

Using select indigenous novels translated from the Malayalam language, this paper will study how fictional spaces created by writers of Indian regional languages become a counter-narrative for colonial history and decolonise narrative and physical spaces. The paper will examine how postcolonial texts become ethnographic and social commentaries on colonial binaries and become resistance narratives to the hegemonic powers. Questions like how regional writers decolonise occidental maps, how the authors write alternative histories, how different versions of postcolonial communities are portrayed, how a postcolonial nation-state is built through literature, how communities that were left out in colonial discourses are brought back to the folds; how the history of a place influences power and identity of people; how Malayali writers locate an imagined space within actual geographic space through cartography; what determines the boundaries of these spaces- economically, culturally, historically, and politically, etc. will be addressed.