HYBRIDITY AND POSTCOLONIALISM: Twentieth Century Indian Literature

Recent debates on postcolonial literatures have increasingly come to resort to the term hybridity. The present volume seeks to discuss the concept of ?hybridity? in relation to (expatriate) Indian writing. The individual essays are partly theoretical and partly practical. They trace a variety of hybrid constellations in literary texts, attempt to relate the concept of hybridity to postcolonialism, and seek to illustrate typical developments within Indian literature in English in their relationship to the hybridization of cultural processes in a (post)colonial environment. Authors discussed include Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Hanif Kureishi, Sara Suleri, Bharati Mukherjee and many others. Among the topics on which individual essays focus are feminist issues, the use of exoticist and oriental clich?s (for instance, the topos of Eastern chaos), of ritual and community, of displacement and migrancy. The collection accommodates a variety of methodological approaches but emphasizes the theoretical perspectives, particularly postcolonial and feminist theory. Homi Bhabha?s theories figure prominently in the volume but also give rise to some critical comments and rewritings. The collection unites voices from Europe with scholarly contributions from the United States, thereby formally instituting a kind of cross-atlantic hybridity of the scholarly discourse on India, hybridity, and postcolonialism.