Mangalagiri States of Disconnect

The China-India Literary Relation in the Twentieth Century
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-0-231-55611-8
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 296 Seiten

Winner, 2025 Anna Balakian Prize, International Comparative Literature Association

In an interconnected world, literature moves through transnational networks, crosses borders, and bridges diverse cultures. In these ways, literature can bring people closer together. Today, as hopes for globalization wane and exclusionary nationalism is on the march, can literature still offer new ways of relating with others? Comparative literature has long been under the spell of circulation, contact, connectivity, and mobility—what if it instead sought out their antitheses?

States of Disconnect examines the breakdown of transnationalism through readings of literary texts that express aversion to pairing ideas of China and India. Focusing on practices of comparison, Adhira Mangalagiri considers how these texts articulate the undesirability or impossibility of relating with national others, tracing portrayals of violence, silence, and distance. She proposes the concept of “disconnect”: a crisis of transnationalism perceptible in moments when a connection is severed, interrupted, or disavowed. Despite their apparent insularity, texts of disconnect offer possibilities for relating ethically across national borders while resisting both narrow nationalisms and globalized habits of thought. Reading a variety of largely untranslated twentieth-century Chinese and Hindi short stories, novels, and poems, Mangalagiri develops three new strategies for comparison—friction, ellipses, and contingency—that together comprise a critical vocabulary of disconnect. Foregrounding transnationalism’s discontents, States of Disconnect offers a different path by which literary texts can cultivate a critical sensibility for making sense of a world rife with division.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mangalagiri, Adhira

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturen sonstiger Sprachräume Ost- & Südostasiatische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturen sonstiger Sprachräume Indische & Dravidische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Strömungen & Epochen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Note on Transliteration and Translation
Introduction
1. Anatomy of Antagonism: The Indian Policeman in Chinese Literature
2. Revolution Redux: Agyeya’s China Stories
3. Dialogue and Its Discontents: 1950s Cultural Diplomacy Untold
4. Word and World in Crisis: Hindi Texts of 1962
5. On Correspondence: Lu Xun and Premchand
Conclusion: A Comparatist’s Guide to Disconnect
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Adhira Mangalagiri is a lecturer in the Department of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London.