Contagion Narratives

This volume is a collection of ten essays that direct their gaze to the unfolding of contagions in the non-classical contexts of Asia and Africa. Or, to borrow from the title of one of Partha Chatterjee’s books, they are reflections on the pandemic in most of the world. Featuring many scholars (of the humanities and social sciences) in the Global South, these chapters take as their intellectual focus the political-social as well as the ethical challenges posed by the contagions in the "East." Through analyses of literary narratives/films/video games, this Contagion Narratives traces the manufactured narratives of victimization by majority-communities and the lethal divides consequently being drawn between a reconstituted "authentic majority" and the more vulnerable minority ‘other’ in these societies. The essays in this collection are animated by imaginations of liveable alternatives on a planet on the brink. This volume traces lineages to Buchi Emecheta and Rabindranath Tagore rather than Albert Camus, to Satyajit Ray and the indie traditions rather than Hollywood, and to Buddhism rather than Christianity, to track the historic journeys of "modernity." Using an eclectic set of analytical tools and strategies of textual criticism, this volume argues that ideas of "democracy," even while they carry echoes of other societies, are markedly different as they travel from Gaddafi’s Libya to Wuhan under lockdown to colonial Bengal.

R. Sreejith Varma is an assistant professor at the Department of English, School of Social Sciences and Languages at Vellore Institute of Technology, India. He earned his PhD from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 2018. Along with Swarnalatha Rangarajan, he is the translator of Mayilamma: The Life of a Tribal Eco-Warrior (2018) that chronicles the life of Mayilamma, the tribal leader of the anti-Coca-Cola campaign in Plachimada, Kerala. This translation project was the winner of the 2015 ASLE-USA Translation Grant. He is also a bilingual poet who writes in English and Malayalam, his first language.

Ajanta Sircar is a professor in the Department of English, School of Social Sciences and Languages, Vellore Institute of Technology, India. She completed her PhD from the University of East Anglia, Norwich (1993–1997). She has won numerous national and international awards such as the Commonwealth Fellowship, 1993, to most recently being nominated as Visiting Chair, India Studies, Georgetown University, Washington DC (2014–2015), by the Ministry of External Affairs, Govt. of India. She is the author of two books: Framing the Nation: Languages of ‘Modernity' in India (2011) and The Category of Children’s Cinema in India (2016).