2019 Conference Program
South Asian Literatures in the World
You can download the 2019 Conference Program here as a PDF file. You can also download the Conference Abstracts PDF and the participant Biographies PDF.
Keynote Address: John Stratton Hawley, Barnard College, Columbia University, NYC
SATURDAY, JANUARY 5, 2019
5:00-7:00 PM: Executive Committee Meeting
Lincoln
DAY 1: SUNDAY, JANUARY 6, 2019
7:30 AM: REGISTRATION DESK OPENS
8:00-8:20 AM: CONFERENCE COMMENCEMENT
Wilde
● John C. Hawley, SALA President
● Madhurima Chakraborty, Conference co-chair. “South Asian Literatures in the World.”
SESSION 1: 8:30-9:45 AM
Wilde
Locating the Inventions of South Asia—Opening Plenary (Roundtable)
Chair: Nalini Iyer, Seattle University
● Neilesh Bose, University of Victoria
● Rajani Sudan, Southern Methodist University
● Susan Andrade, University of Pittsburgh
● Ana Cristina Mendes, University of Lisbon, Center for English Studies
● Waseem Anwar, Forman Christian College, Lahore
SESSION 2: 10:00 -11:15 AM
2A Wilde
Gender, Environment, and Crisis in South Asian Graphic Narratives (Roundtable)
Chair: Kavita Daiya, George Washington University
● Kavita Daiya, George Washington University. “Migration Stories.”
● Lopamudra Basu, University of Wisconsin-Stout. “Postcolonial Masculinities in Sarnath Banerjee’s Novels.”
● Sukanya Gupta, University of Southern Indiana. “Sarnath Banerjee’s All Quiet in Vikaspuri as Text/Image Activism & Cli-Fi.”
● Nidhi Shrivastava, University of Western Ontario. “Priya’s Shakti:, Recasting of Familiar Mythological Constructs in Order to Criticize Rape Culture.”
2B Cibo Matto
The Politics of Kashmir
Chair: Abdollah Zahiri, Seneca College
● Rituparna Mitra, Marlboro College. “The Ghazal and the Gathering of World’s in Ali’s ‘The Country Without a Post office’.”
● Wafa Hamid, Lady Shriram College for Women, University of Delhi. “’Discourses of Silence’: (Re)Writing Cashemere, Kashmir, Kashimir in Agha Shahid Ali’s Poetry.”
● Upasana Dutta, University of Chicago. “The Broken Body, the Stuttering Image: Malik Sajad’s Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir.”
● Prithwa Deb, Debraj Roy College, Golaghat, Assam. “Nation, Identity and Body: Reading the Disputed Boundaries in Contemporary South Asian Graphic Narrative.”
2C Churchill
Aravind Adiga and the Contours of South Asia
Chair: Waseem Anwar, Forman Christian College, Lahore
● Md. Rezaul Haque, St. John’s University, New York. “Going beyond the Binary of Self and Other: The Case of South Asian English Fiction.”
● Matthew Nelson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “My Shanghai”: China and Fantasies of Futurity in Adiga’s Last Man in Tower.”
● Amrita De, SUNY Binghamton. “Of Regional, Homosocial Interactions and the act of ‘Writing Itself Into Being’: Locating The White Tiger in South Asian literary imagination.”
● Ambreen Hai, Smith College. “Indian and Sri Lankan Connections and Disconnections: Male-Male Servant-Employer Relations in Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger and Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef.”
SESSION 3: 11:30 AM-12:45 PM
3A Wilde
The Indian Ocean and the Past Present of Empire
Chair: Pallavi Rastogi, Louisiana State University
● Nienke Boer, Yale-NUS College. “Oceanic Tales, Imperial Legacies: Robinson Crusoe in the Indian Ocean.”
● Sean M. Kennedy, CUNY-Grad Center. “Corruption: A Pre-History From Fanqui-Town.”
● Usha Rungoo, SUNY Purchase. “The Shipping Container and the Human Cargo Ship: Bridging (Neo)Colonial Histories in Amal Sewtohul’s Made in Mauritius.”
● Nelofer Qadir, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “Kifa Urongo’: Structures of Unfreedom in Paradise.”
3B Cibo Matto
South Asia in Conflict: The Ethics and Politics of Postcolonial Witnessing
Chair: Kavita Daiya, George Washington University
● Amanda Lagji, Pitzer College. “The Enduring Spectacle of the Aftermath: Embodying the Blast in The Association of Small Bombs.”
● Purnima Bose, Indiana University. “History and Rumor in Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes.”
● Saumya Lal, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “Precarious Empathy and the Crisis of Witnessing in Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator.”
● Maryse Jayasuriya, University of Texas at El Paso. “Ethics and Empathy in Sri Lankan Representations of Refugees.”
3C Churchill
South Asian Waterways: Contemporary Migratory and Sexual Flows
Chair: Christopher Ian Foster, Jackson State University
● Christopher Ian Foster, Jackson State University. “From A. R. F. Webber’s Sunlit Western Waters to Shani Mootoo’s Gulf of Paria: On the Intersection of Migration and Sexuality in South Asian Caribbean Literature.”
● Rahul K. Gairola, Murdoch University. “Peering Outside of the Pink Tent: Postcolonial DH along the Queer Rim of the Indian Ocean.”
● Respondent: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Columbia University.
1:00-2:00 PM—LUNCH
SESSION 4: 2:15-3:30 PM
Wilde
Professionalization Panel I: Publications: Challenges and Opportunities (Roundtable)
Chair: Nalini Iyer, Incoming Editor, South Asian Review
● John C. Hawley, Professor, Santa Clara University
● Ranjit Arab, Senior Acquisitions Editor, University of Iowa Press
● Rebecca Guest, Managing Editor, Arts & Humanities Journals, Taylor & Francis
● Sage Milo, Development Editor, Digital Resources, Taylor & Francis
SESSION 5: 3:45-5:00 PM
Wilde
The World of South Asian Literature: A Creative Writing Panel
Chair: Madhurima Chakraborty, Columbia College Chicago
● Mary Anne Mohanraj, University of Illinois Chicago. “Putting Sri Lankans in Space.”
● S. Shankar, University of Hawai‘i. “Challenges of Literary Invention: Writing in English What is Outside English.”
● Samrat Upadhyay, Indiana University. “Translating South Asia.”
● Amin X. Ahmad, Northwestern University. “Sex, Lies, and Bad Guys: Writing the
Immigrant Suspense Novel.”
● Oindrila Mukherjee, Grand Valley State University. “This or That?: The Conundrum of Writing Contemporary South Asia.”
5:15-6:15 PM: GENERAL BUSINESS MEETING
Wilde
6:15-7:30 PM: DINNER ON YOUR OWN
7:30-9:30 PM: HUMARA MUSHAIRA
Chair: Amritjit Singh, Ohio University
DAY 2: MONDAY, JANUARY 7, 2019
7:30 AM: REGISTRATION DESK OPENS
SESSION 6: 8:00-9:15 AM
6A Wilde
Professionalization Panel II: Altered Expectations in Uncertain Times (Roundtable)
Chair: Moumin Quazi, Tarleton State University; Aniruddha Mukhopadhyay, Texas A&M University-Kingsville
● Aniruddha Mukhopadhyay, Texas A&M University-Kingsville. “Going on the Job Market as an International Grad Student”
● Anuja Madan, Kansas State University. “My First Two Years on the Tenure-Track.”
● Cynthia Leenerts, East Stroudsburg University. “Stickin’ to the Union: Solidarity in the Face of Uncertain Times.”
● Robin E. Field, King’s College. “Planning your Long-Term Career Arc.”
● Moumin Quazi, Tarleton State University. “A New Professor’s Changing Expectations for New Faculty.”
6B Cibo Matto
South Asia and Diasporas before World War II
Chair: Nalini Iyer, Seattle University
● Prabhjot Parmar, University of the Fraser Valley. “‘The corner of a picture’”: Literary Representations of Indian Soldiers in the Great War.”
Clara A.B. Joseph, University of Calgary. “The Account of Priest Joseph (1502): Why an Indian Christian Text Does (Not) Matter.”
● Abdollah Zahiri, Seneca College (King Campus). “South by the Southwest: Ghadar Activists in Iran in the 1930’s and 1940’s.”
● Amrita Mishra, University of Texas at Austin. “Indenture’s Intimacies: Effects of early Indian Nationalism in Raise the Lanterns High and Sea of Poppies.”
6C Churchill
Transnational Circulations of South Asia
Chair: Maryse Jayasuriya, University of Texas at El Paso
● Supurna Dasgupta, University of Chicago. “The ‘slithering fish’: Feeding the Global ‘Popular’ through South Asian Anglophone Poetry.”
● Sayanti Mondal, Illinois State University. “Picturing Experience: Performing Transnational Identity in Bhajju Shyam’s The London Jungle Book.”
● Bhavya Tiwari, University of Houston. “Going Beyond English: World Literature and South Asian Literature.”
● Sohinee Roy, North Central College. “Playhouse: Art and Politics in the Bildung of a Child.”
SESSION 7: 9:30-10:45 AM
7A Wilde
Situating South Asian Anglophone Literature in the World: The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Volume 10. (Roundtable)
Chair: Alex Tickell, The Open University
● Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, New York University. “The Novel of India.”
● Ruvani Ranasinha, King’s College. “Novels of Sri Lanka: Feminist Readings of Conflict within the ‘Global’ Economy of South Asian fiction.”
● Kavita Daiya, George Washington University. “Gender, Sexuality, and the Family in South Asian Fiction.”
● Charlotta Salmi, Queen Mary, University of London. “Picturing South Asia: The Rise of the Regional Graphic Narrative.”
7B Cibo Matto
Interrogating the Space of Transnationalism
Chair: Robin E. Field, Kings College
● Sagnika Chanda, University of Pittsburgh. “The Mexican and South Asian Telemigrant: Transnational Immigrant Labor and Internet Utopianism in Sleep Dealer and Digital India.”
● Sritama Chatterjee. “‘As if a map had been redrawn in front of us’: Reading Spatiality, Aesthetics of Slowness, and Ethics of ‘Worlding’ in Benyamin’s Goat Days.”
● Robin E. Field, King’s College. “Space and Temporality in Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘Third and Final Continent’.”
● Kay Sohini Kumar, Stony Brook University. “Across Borders and In-Between Spaces.”
7C Churchill
Connecting in Margins
Chair: Meghan Gorman-DaRif, University of Texas at Austin
● Meghan Gorman-DaRif, University of Texas at Austin. “Decentering Division: Representations of Indian-Kenyan Solidarity in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction”
● Muhammad Waqas Halim, Information Technology University, Lahore & Asad Ahmad Khan, Heidelberg University. “The Untold Story of Resistance in Balochistan: Voices of dissent in Balochi Short Stories of Anees Sharif.”
● Amelie Daigle, Boston College. “Tangible Gains and Intangible Losses: Global Inequity and Labor Migration in Ratika Kapur’s The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma and Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits.”
● Jessica K. Young, New College of Florida. “‘This is a Dirge for the World…This is Saga for a Nation:’ The Air India Tragedy and (Trans)national Recognition.”
SESSION 8: 11:00 AM-12:15 PM
8A Wilde
Cosmopolitanism and South Asian Identity
Chair: John Hawley, Santa Clara University
● Brant Moscovitch, St. Anthony’s College, University of Oxford. “Cosmopolitanism and the Rise of Anti-Colonial Internationalism, 1919-1939.”
● Sarah Beth Mohler, Truman State University. “Russian Literary Imagination’s Influence on South Asian Literature: A Close Analysis of Tolstoy’s Influence on Seth and Mueenuddin.”
● Arnab Dutta Roy, University of Connecticut. “Cosmopolitanism and Tradition: A Critique of U.R. Ananthamurthy’s Samskara.”
● Maswood Akhter, Fulbright Scholar, Regis College. “‘Universal’ or ‘Culture-Specific’? : Raising the Issue of Critical Injustice (and Academic Apartheid) in the Reception of South Asian/Postcolonial Literature.”
8B Cibo Matto
The Unwanted
Chair: Shazia Rahman, Western Illinois University
● Tavleen Purewal, University of Toronto. “‘Final Humiliation’: Opaque Relations of Shame in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss.”
● Binod Paudyal, Northern Arizona University. “Undesirability: Refugees and the Undocumented in South Asian Diasporic Literature.”
● Shazia Rahman, Western Illinois University. “Postcolonial International Conflict Through an Animal Studies Lens.”
● Sreyashi Ray, University of Minnesota. “Pachyderms, Tribals and the Precarity of Postcolonial Animality: A Comparative Reading of Mahasweta Devi’s Fiction.”
8C Churchill
Resistance, Borders, Conflict in South Asian Literature
Chair: Rahul K. Gairola, Murdoch University
Nudrat Kamal, Habib University, Karachi. “Borders, Diaspora, and Belonging: Tracing the Conceptualization of Home in South Asian Partition Fiction.”
● Md. Alamgir Hossain, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “University, Neoliberalism, and the Undercommons: Resistance in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist.”
● Asif Iqbal, Michigan State University. “Partition of East Bengal in Shahidulla Kaiser’s Sangsaptak.”
● Arun Kumar Pokhrel, Oklahoma State University. “Global Subaltern Spaces: Landscape,
Community, and Historical Memory in Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss.”
12:15 -1:15 PM—LUNCH
● Discussion group on Neil Lazarus’s The Postcolonial Unconscious (Wilde)
● Open session lunch (Dickinson)
SESSION 9: 1:30- 2:30 PM
9A Wilde
Pakistani Literatures in the World
Chair: Amritjit Singh, Ohio University
● Waseem Anwar, Forman Christian College, Lahore. “Pakistani English Literatures in the World: Center-Margin Dialectic and Alternative Epistemologies in Shahid Nadim’s Plays.”
● Zakia Resshid Ehsen, Riphah International University, Pakistan “Falling Through the Cracks: Neoliberalism and Power Constructs in Nadeem Aslam’s novel A Blind Man’s Garden.”
● Sushil Sivaram, Rutgers University. “(Re)Staging the Postcolonial in the World: The Jaipur Literature Festival and the Pakistani Novel.”
● Masood Raja, University of North Texas. “National Expectations, Metropolitan Market and Pakistani Writing in English.”
9B Churchill
Genre Innovations
Chair: Cynthia Leenerts, East Stroudsburg University
● Hans-Georg Erney, Georgia Southern University. “Stung by a Charso-Bee: Daljit Nagra’s Transnational Ramayana Retelling.”
● Hella Bloom-Cohen, St. Catherine’s University. “The Case of Victoria and Abdul: Archival Creative Nonfiction and the Violent Romance of Highbrow Cinema.”
● Anwesha Maity, University of Winsconsin-Madison. “Technoscience and the Global South: Postcolonial Science Fiction (SF) from Bangladesh.”
● Titas De Sarkar, University of Chicago. “The Lives of the Lowly—Postcolonial Youth and the Problem of Genre.”
SESSION 10: 2:30- 3:45 pm
10A Wilde
The Subaltern in Context
Chair: Aniruddha Mukhopadhyay, Texas A&M University-Kingsville
● Fouzia Rehman Khan, Sardar Bahadur Khan Women’s University. “Can the Subalterns Sketch? A Critical Semiotic Analysis of the Novel Munnu. A Boy from Kashmir.”
● Anjali Singh & Rajiv Ranjan Dwivedi. Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University. “Studying Postcolonialism in Dalit Narrative: A Critical Take on Sushila Takbhoura’s Autobiography Shikenje Ka Dard.”
● Aniruddha Mukhopadhyay, Texas A&M University-Kingsville. “Disconcerting Dalit Masculinity in Daya Pawar’s Baluta.”
10B Cibo Matto
The Global Salman Rushdie
Chair: Moumin Quazi, Tarleton State University
● Ana Cristina Mendes. University of Lisbon. “Globetrotting Shakespeare: The King Lear Intertext in Preti Taneja’s We that are Young and Salman Rushdie’s The Golden House.”
● Romy Rajan, University of Florida. “Neoliberalism and the Return of Religion in Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh.”
● Pennie Ticen, Virginia Military Institute. “Updating the Interregnum: Salman Rushdie’s ‘Anti-Chutnification’ in The Golden House.”
10C Churchill
Community and Belonging
Chair: Prathim-Maya Dora-Laskey, Alma College
● Prathim-Maya Dora-Laskey, Alma College. “More than Kin(d): Building Community and Solidarity in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.”
● Ruma Sinha, Syracuse University. “Living Among the Dead: The Graveyard as Site of Affiliation and Antagonism in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.”
● Manju Dhariwal, LNM Institute of Information Technology. “Gender, Narration and Nation: A Critical Rereading of Alka Sarawgi’s Kali katha: Via Bypass.”
4:00-5:00 PM
Cibo Matto
Graduate Student Caucus
5:00-6:30 PM: CONFERENCE KEYNOTE & AWARDS CEREMONY
Wilde
● John Stratton Hawley. Barnard College, Columbia University. “Verbal Icon, Iconic Word: Surdas Between Poem and Painting”
7:00- 9:00 PM CONFERENCE BANQUET (TICKETS REQUIRED)
Venue: Gaylord Restaurant 100 E Walton St, Chicago, IL 60611
SPECIAL THANKS TO SANTA CLARA UNIVERSITY AND COLUMBIA COLLEGE CHICAGO FOR THEIR SUPPORT OF THE CONFERENCE.