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- NAME: Rani Neutill
- FIELD IN HISTORY AND LITERATURE: Postcolonial Studies
- Ph.D., UC Berkeley (Ethnic Studies)
- AREAS OF INTEREST:
- Post-colonial literature and theory
- Film and Film theory
- Asian American Studies and literature
- Psychoanalysis
- Subaltern Studies
- Ethnic American Literature
- DISSERTATION: Intimacies of Hatred
- My dissertation, Intimacies of Hatred, looks at three South Asian American/Anglophone novels, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Interpreter of Maladies and Bapsi Sidwah’s Cracking India (as well as the filmic adaptation by Deepa Mehta, Earth), and Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines. I begin my dissertation with a set of questions in response to the communal violence that forged the independence and Partition of India, and the diasporic literature that represents this historical event. Can forms of mourning find a place in the literary re-creation of the world of diasporic India? Can psychoanalytic categories such as mourning and melancholia help us understand the constitutive losses that were incurred in India’s gaining independence? And finally, how do practices of re-writing the historical narratives of communal conflict attempt to provide a discursive space for national and, equally importantly diasporic mourning? I argue that South Asian American/Anglophone literature, forms a space in which we can both understand the historical moments of communal conflict, but simultaneously literature may be a venue from which we can re-image these events and re-imagine relationships of difference, both religious and national. The South Asian Anglophone novel, whose most urgent undertaking is the re-imagining of relationships of difference, is a site for the mourning of traumatic losses that forged India’s independence.
- E-MAIL ADDRESS: neutill@fas
- OFFICE: Barker 040
- HOME PHONE: 510-872-9850
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