Contagion Narratives: The Society, Culture and Ecology of the Global South(Routledge Studies in World Literatures and the Environment)

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.

Table of Contents:
Introduction – Ajanta Sircar and R. Sreejith Varma 1. Environmental Humanities, Medical Humanities, and Pandemic Futures – Karen Thornber 2. Re-Seeing Animal Research Ethics in Light of COVID-19 – Andrew Fenton 3. Remembering That Which is Yet to Pass – Feroz Hassan 4. COVID-19, Migrant Crisis and Social Contagion of Good Life: A Case Study from Indian Sundarbans – Kalpita Bhar Paul 5. Cognition of Contagion: A Study of Video Games – Jai Singh 6. The Postcolonial Afterlife in South Africa: AIDS, Xenophobia and Healing in Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow – Sourit Bhattacharya 7. Pathologizing Otherness: Theorizing Parallelisms between COVID- 19 Restrictions and Strands of Otherness in Contemporary African Novels - Andrew Nyongesa, Justus Makokha and Murimi Gaita 8. Rabindranath Tagore’s Chaturanga and the Calcutta Plague: Medicine, Modernity and Culture – Soumyarup Bhattacharjee 9. Narrativizing Disease and Famine on Screen: A Contemporary Reading of Satyajit Ray's Enemy of the People and Distant Thunder – Abhik Mukherjee 10. Agricultural Insecurity, Contagion and Rural Adivasi Women: A Consideration of Mahasweta Devi’s "Douloti the Bountiful" – Allison Nowak Shelton

About the Author :
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).