The Rhetoric of Hindu India: Nationalism in the Age of Metropolitan Millennials

This presentation offers insights into Manisha Basu’s forthcoming book from Cambridge University Press. One of the principal contentions of the book is that the success of Hindu nationalism in the current Indian context is based in a politics of language that attaches a kind of cybernetic global English to an ostensibly pan-Indian culture and idiom, now being fashioned in violently homogeneous terms. It is this politics of language that inscribes for Hindutva an emerging technocratic middle-class—the imperial avatar, in a globalized world, of millennial India. Manisha Basu’s research and teaching interests are in postcolonial studies, South Asian literatures and cultures, Anglophone African literatures, and critical and literary theory. Her essays have appeared in venues like boundary 2, Comparative Literature, and Ariel, amongst others. She is at present working on an edited collection of essays entitled The Aesthetics and Politics of Global Hunger. This event is sponsored by the Postcolonial Studies Research Group. The Postcolonial Studies Research Group gratefully acknowledges the support of the Department of English and the Faculty of Arts.

Location:

Social Science 1015

Speaker:

Manisha Basu, Assistant Professor of English, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

More information at http://www.ucalgary.ca/events/calendar/rhetoric-hindu-india-nationalism-age-metropolitan-millennials