Amitava Kumar – författare

First published in 2003.When Amitava Kumar left Patna, India, he envisioned himself as an up-and-coming citizen of the world, leaving behind the confines of Indian traditions. Yet like the wave of exiles that preceded him, he found that once we leave our past, we are defined by it: in the U.S. he is pigeonholed by his appearance and quizzed about saris and arranged marriages. BR>There is no beginning that is a blank page, writes Kumar. Circling the three capitals of the Indian diaspora, Bombay-London-New York captures the contours of the expatriate experience, touching on the themes of abandonment, nostalgia, and exile that have powered some of the most prominent Indian writers today -- Naipaul, Rushdie, Roy, Kureishi, as well as E.M. Forster and Gandhi. BR>With resonant, poetic language and a storyteller's sensibility, Kumar explores the works of these writers through the lens of his own life as an immigrant and writer. As their fiction reveals, the past of the expatriate is mythical,shaped by memory and loss. BR>With tales of life in India and London and meditations on the form Indian fiction gives to the lives of those who read about it, this is a sweeping, passionate search to find one's own story in the stories of others.

First published in 2003.When Amitava Kumar left Patna, India, he envisioned himself as an up-and-coming citizen of the world, leaving behind the confines of Indian traditions. Yet like the wave of exiles that preceded him, he found that once we leave our past, we are defined by it: in the U.S. he is pigeonholed by his appearance and quizzed about saris and arranged marriages. BR>There is no beginning that is a blank page, writes Kumar. Circling the three capitals of the Indian diaspora, Bombay-London-New York captures the contours of the expatriate experience, touching on the themes of abandonment, nostalgia, and exile that have powered some of the most prominent Indian writers today -- Naipaul, Rushdie, Roy, Kureishi, as well as E.M. Forster and Gandhi. BR>With resonant, poetic language and a storyteller's sensibility, Kumar explores the works of these writers through the lens of his own life as an immigrant and writer. As their fiction reveals, the past of the expatriate is mythical,shaped by memory and loss. BR>With tales of life in India and London and meditations on the form Indian fiction gives to the lives of those who read about it, this is a sweeping, passionate search to find one's own story in the stories of others.

For more than a generation, Indian writers in English have won praise in the West. The roll call of Indian-born writers is startling: Rushdie, Mukerjee, Mehta, Ghosh, Naipaul, Kureishi, Narayan, Mistry, among many others.Amitava Kumar, himself an Indian writer now 'away' in America, is editing a broad anthology of work by Indian writers whose lives and literary identities have been formed by their experiences in some form of exile. Spanning writing from the 1920s to the present, Away contains work by the writers mentioned above, alongside earlier pieces by Gandhi, Nehru, and Tagore, and a wide range of writers over the last half-century.

For more than a generation, Indian writers in English have won praise in the West. The roll call of Indian-born writers is startling: Rushdie, Mukerjee, Mehta, Ghosh, Naipaul, Kureishi, Narayan, Mistry, among many others.Amitava Kumar, himself an Indian writer now 'away' in America, is editing a broad anthology of work by Indian writers whose lives and literary identities have been formed by their experiences in some form of exile. Spanning writing from the 1920s to the present, Away contains work by the writers mentioned above, alongside earlier pieces by Gandhi, Nehru, and Tagore, and a wide range of writers over the last half-century.

Passport Photos, a self-conscious act of artistic and intellectual forgery, is a report on the immigrant condition. A multigenre book combining theory, poetry, cultural criticism, and photography, it explores the complexities of the immigration experience, intervening in the impersonal language of the state. Passport Photos joins books by writers like Edward Said and Trinh T. Minh-ha in the search for a new poetics and politics of diaspora. Organized as a passport, Passport Photos is a unique work, taking as its object of analysis and engagement the lived experience of post-coloniality--especially in the United States and India. The book is a collage, moving back and forth between places, historical moments, voices, and levels of analysis. Seeking to link cultural, political, and aesthetic critiques, it weaves together issues as diverse as Indian fiction written in English, signs put up by the border patrol at the U.S.-Tijuana border, ethnic restaurants in New York City, the history of Indian indenture in Trinidad, Native Americans at the Superbowl, and much more.The borders this book crosses again and again are those where critical theory meets popular journalism, and where political poetry encounters the work of documentary photography. The argument for such border crossings lies in the reality of people's lives. This thought-provoking book explores that reality, as it brings postcolonial theory to a personal level and investigates global influences on local lives of immigrants.

A New York Times Book of the YearChosen by Barack Obama as one of his books of the year Meet Kailash. Also known as Kalashnikov. Or AK-47. Or just plain AK. His journey from India has taken him to graduate school in New York where he keeps falling in love: not just with women, but with literature and radical politics, the fuel of youthful exuberance. Each heady affair brings new learning: about himself, and about his relationship to a country founded on immigration - a country that is now unsure of the migrant's place in the nation's fabric. But how can AK learn to belong when he's in a constant state of exile

The university classroom has been turned into an intensely bitter battlefield. Conservatives are attacking the academy's ability to teach, and at times its very right to educate. As the dust begins to settle, the contributors to this volume weigh in with a constructive and wide-ranging statement on the progressive possibilities of teaching. This is, in many ways, a book for the morning after the PC Wars, when the shouting dies down and the imperatives of pedagogy remain. Asserting a complex, inter-related agenda for teachers and students, Class Issues is an anthology of essays on radical teaching. Leading scholars of literary and cultural studies, queer studies, ethnic studies and working-class literature examine the challenges that confront progressive pedagogy, as well as the histories that lie behind the achievements of cultural studies. Class Issues offers a plan for the construction of an alternative public sphere in the rapidly changing space of the classroom in the academy.Class Issues is a compilation of important new work on the tradition of radical teaching as well as forceful suggestions for the mobilization of radical consciousness.Contributers:Goerge Lipsitz, Bruce Robbins, Maria Damon, John Mowitt, Donald K. Hedrick, Neil larsen, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Peter Hitchcock, Alan Wald, Mike Hill, Ronald Strickland,Henry A. Giroux, Rachel Buff, Jason Loviglio, Carol Stabile, Timothy Brennan, Jeffrey R. di Leo, Christian Moraru, Vijay Prashad, Judith halberstam, Gregory L. Ulmer, John P. Leavey, Jr., Jeffrey Williams.

The university classroom has been turned into an intensely bitter battlefield. Conservatives are attacking the academy's ability to teach, and at times its very right to educate. As the dust begins to settle, the contributors to this volume weigh in with a constructive and wide-ranging statement on the progressive possibilities of teaching. This is, in many ways, a book for the morning after the PC Wars, when the shouting dies down and the imperatives of pedagogy remain. Asserting a complex, inter-related agenda for teachers and students, Class Issues is an anthology of essays on radical teaching. Leading scholars of literary and cultural studies, queer studies, ethnic studies and working-class literature examine the challenges that confront progressive pedagogy, as well as the histories that lie behind the achievements of cultural studies. Class Issues offers a plan for the construction of an alternative public sphere in the rapidly changing space of the classroom in the academy.Class Issues is a compilation of important new work on the tradition of radical teaching as well as forceful suggestions for the mobilization of radical consciousness.Contributers:Goerge Lipsitz, Bruce Robbins, Maria Damon, John Mowitt, Donald K. Hedrick, Neil larsen, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Peter Hitchcock, Alan Wald, Mike Hill, Ronald Strickland,Henry A. Giroux, Rachel Buff, Jason Loviglio, Carol Stabile, Timothy Brennan, Jeffrey R. di Leo, Christian Moraru, Vijay Prashad, Judith halberstam, Gregory L. Ulmer, John P. Leavey, Jr., Jeffrey Williams.

A trailblazing interrogation of the cultural, political, and economic implications of World Bank hegemony.World Bank literature is more than a concept-it is a provocation, a call to arms. It is intended to prompt questions about each word, to probe globalization, political economy, and the role of literary and cultural studies. As asserted in this major work, it signals a radical rewriting of academic debates, a rigorous analysis of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and a consideration of literature that deals with new global realities. Made more relevant than ever by momentous antiglobalization demonstrations in Seattle and Genoa, World Bank Literature brings together essays by a distinguished group of economists, cultural and literary critics, social scientists, and public policy analysts to ask how to understand the influence of the World Bank/IMF on global economic power relations and cultural production. The authors attack this question in myriad ways, examining World Bank/IMF documents as literature, their impact on developing nations, the relationship between literature and globalization, the connection between the academy and the global economy, and the emergence of coalitions confronting the new power. World Bank Literature shows, above all, the multifarious and sometimes nefarious ways that abstract academic debates play themselves out concretely in social policy and cultural mores that reinforce traditional power structures. Contributors: Anthony C. Alessandrini, Kent State U; Bret Benjamin, SUNY, Albany; John Berger; Suzanne Bergeron, U of Michigan, Dearborn; Lorrayne Carroll, U of Southern Maine; Manthia Diawara, NYU; Grant Farred, Duke; Barbara Foley, Rutgers; Claire F. Fox, U of Iowa; Rosemary Hennessy, SUNY, Albany; Doug Henwood, Left Business Observer; Caren Irr, Brandeis; Joseph Medley, U of Southern Maine; Cary Nelson, U of Illinois; Gautam Premnath, U of Massachusetts, Boston; Bruce Robbins, Columbia; Andrew Ross, NYU; Subir Sinha, U of London; Kenneth Surin, Duke; Rashmi Varma, U of North Carolina; Evan Watkins, U of California, Davis; Phillip E. Wegner, U of Florida; Richard Wolff, U of Massachusetts.

Part reportage and part protest, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb is an inquiry into the cultural logic and global repercussions of the war on terror. At its center are two men convicted in U.S. courts on terrorism-related charges: Hemant Lakhani, a seventy-year-old tried for attempting to sell a fake missile to an FBI informant, and Shahawar Matin Siraj, baited by the New York Police Department into a conspiracy to bomb a subway. Lakhani and Siraj were caught through questionable sting operations involving paid informants; both men received lengthy jail sentences. Their convictions were celebrated as major victories in the war on terror. In Amitava Kumar’s riveting account of their cases, Lakhani and Siraj emerge as epic bunglers, and the U.S. government as the creator of terror suspects to prosecute. Kumar analyzed the trial transcripts and media coverage, and he interviewed Lakhani, Siraj, their families, and their lawyers. Juxtaposing such stories of entrapment in the United States with narratives from India, another site of multiple terror attacks and state crackdowns, Kumar explores the harrowing experiences of ordinary people entangled in the war on terror. He also considers the fierce critiques of post-9/11 surveillance and security regimes by soldiers and torture victims, as well as artists and writers, including Coco Fusco, Paul Shambroom, and Arundhati Roy.

A young poet is killed by her lover, a politician, in the eastern Indian state of Bihar. Soon afterward, across India in Bombay, an idealistic journalist is hired by a movie director to write a Bollywood screenplay about the murdered poet. Research for the script takes the writer, Binod, back to Bihar, where he and his cousin Rabinder were raised. While the high-minded Binod struggles to turn the poet’s murder into a steamy tale about small towns, desire, and intrigue, Rabinder sits in a Bihari jail cell, having been arrested for distributing pornography through a cybercafÉ. Rabinder dreams of a career in Bollywood filmmaking, and, unlike his cousin, he is not burdened by ethical scruples. Nobody Does the Right Thing is the story of these two cousins and the ways that their lives unexpectedly intertwine. Set in the rural villages of Bihar and the metropolises of Bombay and Delhi, the novel is packed with telling details and anecdotes about life in contemporary India. At the same time, it is a fictional investigation into how narratives circulate and vie for supremacy through gossip, cinema, popular fiction, sensational journalism, and the global media.

It is not only the past that lies in ruins in Patna, it is also the present. But that is not the only truth about the city that Amitava Kumar explores in this vivid, entertaining account of his hometown. We accompany him through many Patnas, the myriad cities locked within the city-the shabby reality of the present-day capital of Bihar; Pataliputra, the storied city of emperors; the dreamlike embodiment of the city in the minds and hearts of those who have escaped contemporary Patna's confines. Full of fascinating observations and impressions, A Matter of Rats reveals a challenging and enduring city that exerts a lasting pull on all those who drift into its orbit.Kumar's ruminations on one of the world's oldest cities, the capital of India's poorest province, are also a meditation on how to write about place. His memory is partial. All he has going for him is his attentiveness. He carefully observes everything that surrounds him in Patna: rats and poets, artists and politicians, a girl's picture in a historian's study, and a sheet of paper on his mother's desk. The result is this unique book, as cutting as it is honest.

To be a writer, Amitava Kumar says, is to be an observer. The twenty-six essays in Lunch with a Bigot are Kumar's observations of the world put into words. A mix of memoir, reportage, and criticism, the essays include encounters with writers Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, discussions on the craft of writing, and a portrait of the struggles of a Bollywood actor. The title essay is Kumar's account of his visit to a member of an ultra-right Hindu organization who put him on a hit-list. In these and other essays, Kumar tells a broader story of immigration, change, and a shift to a more globalized existence, all the while demonstrating how he practices being a writer in the world.

To be a writer, Amitava Kumar says, is to be an observer. The twenty-six essays in Lunch with a Bigot are Kumar's observations of the world put into words. A mix of memoir, reportage, and criticism, the essays include encounters with writers Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, discussions on the craft of writing, and a portrait of the struggles of a Bollywood actor. The title essay is Kumar's account of his visit to a member of an ultra-right Hindu organization who put him on a hit-list. In these and other essays, Kumar tells a broader story of immigration, change, and a shift to a more globalized existence, all the while demonstrating how he practices being a writer in the world.

'This profound book is full of lives whose beauty lies in the wholeness of their telling.' – Salman Rushdie'Kumar's late father’s life breaks like a slowly cresting wave over the sad and joyful ground of this story . . . Always deeply human; the heart is everywhere in these pages . . . beautiful, truthful fiction.' – James Wood, The New YorkerA novel that tells the story of modern India, through the life of one apparently ordinary man, from the death of Gandhi to the rise of Modi.Jadunath Kunwar's beginnings are humble, even inauspicious. His mother, while pregnant, nearly dies from a cobra bite. As his life skates between the mythical and the mundane, Jadu finds meaning in the most unexpected places. He meets the sherpa who first summited Everest. He befriends poets and politicians. He becomes a historian. And he has a daughter, Jugnu, a television journalist with a career in the United States – whose perspective sheds its own light on his story.All the while, currents of huge change sweep across India – from Independence to Partition, Gandhi to Modi, the Mahabharata to Somerset Maugham, cholera to COVID – and buffet both Jadu and Jugnu's lives.Amitava Kumar's remarkable My Beloved Life explores how we tell stories and write history, how the lives of individuals play out against the background of historical change, and how no single life is without consequence.'A novel of vaulting ambition and tenderness, about how histories, both personal and national, are built, refracted and revised.' – Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies

'This profound book is full of lives whose beauty lies in the wholeness of their telling.' – Salman Rushdie'Kumar's late father’s life breaks like a slowly cresting wave over the sad and joyful ground of this story . . . Always deeply human; the heart is everywhere in these pages . . . beautiful, truthful fiction.' – James Wood, The New YorkerA novel that tells the story of modern India, through the life of one apparently ordinary man, from the death of Gandhi to the rise of Modi.Jadunath Kunwar's beginnings are humble, even inauspicious. His mother, while pregnant, nearly dies from a cobra bite. As his life skates between the mythical and the mundane, Jadu finds meaning in the most unexpected places. He meets the sherpa who first summited Everest. He befriends poets and politicians. He becomes a historian. And he has a daughter, Jugnu, a television journalist with a career in the United States – whose perspective sheds its own light on his story.All the while, currents of huge change sweep across India – from Independence to Partition, Gandhi to Modi, the Mahabharata to Somerset Maugham, cholera to COVID – and buffet both Jadu and Jugnu's lives.Amitava Kumar's remarkable My Beloved Life explores how we tell stories and write history, how the lives of individuals play out against the background of historical change, and how no single life is without consequence.'A novel of vaulting ambition and tenderness, about how histories, both personal and national, are built, refracted and revised.' – Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies

Amitava Kumar's Every Day I Write the Book is for academic writers what Annie Dillard's The Writing Life and Stephen King's On Writing are for creative writers. Alongside Kumar's interviews with an array of scholars whose distinct writing offers inspiring examples for students and academics alike, the book's pages are full of practical advice about everything from how to write criticism to making use of a kitchen timer. Communication, engagement, honesty: these are the aims and sources of good writing. Storytelling, attention to organization, solid work habits: these are its tools. Kumar's own voice is present in his essays about the writing process and in his perceptive and witty observations on the academic world. A writing manual as well as a manifesto, Every Day I Write the Book will interest and guide aspiring writers everywhere.

Amitava Kumar's Every Day I Write the Book is for academic writers what Annie Dillard's The Writing Life and Stephen King's On Writing are for creative writers. Alongside Kumar's interviews with an array of scholars whose distinct writing offers inspiring examples for students and academics alike, the book's pages are full of practical advice about everything from how to write criticism to making use of a kitchen timer. Communication, engagement, honesty: these are the aims and sources of good writing. Storytelling, attention to organization, solid work habits: these are its tools. Kumar's own voice is present in his essays about the writing process and in his perceptive and witty observations on the academic world. A writing manual as well as a manifesto, Every Day I Write the Book will interest and guide aspiring writers everywhere.

From the acclaimed author of Immigrant, Montana comes a one-of-a-kind novel about memory, politics, a world of lies, and the ways in which truth can be not only stranger than fiction, but a fiction of its own.'A shimmering assault on the Zeitgeist.' – The New YorkerWhen Satya attends a prestigious artists’ retreat, he finds the pressures of the outside world won’t let up: the US president rages online; a dangerous virus envelops the globe; and the twenty-four-hour news cycle throws fuel on every fire. These Orwellian interruptions begin to crystallize into an idea for his new novel about the lies we tell ourselves and each other. Satya scours his life for moments where truth bends toward the imagined, and misinformation is mistaken as fact.As he sifts through newspaper clippings, the President’s tweets, childhood memories from India, and experiences as an immigrant, a husband, father, and teacher, Amitava Kumar’s A Time Outside This Time captures our feverish political moment with a precisely observant intelligence and an eye for the uncanny.A brilliant meditation on life in a post-truth era, this piercing novel captures the sentiment on all our minds, of how impossible it can feel to remember, or to imagine, a time outside of this one.

In the summer of 1999, while India and Pakistan were engaged in a war, Amitava Kumar—a Hindu Indian writer living and teaching in the United States—married a Pakistani Muslim woman. That event led to a process of discovery that prompted Kumar to examine the hatreds and intimacies joining Indians and Pakistanis, Hindus and Muslims, fundamentalists and secularists, writers and rioters.In Husband of a Fanatic, Kumar chronicles the entanglements that his new marriage provoked—from ambivalent encounters with family to his disquieting lunch with the amiable bigot who had posted Kumar’s name on his internet blacklist of Hindu traitors. Kumar also travels across the South Asian continent, visiting a classroom in riot-torn Gujarat, a village beside the Ganges, and a psychiatric ward in Kashmir. With a poet’s eye for detail, Kumar draws a map of violence, moving between the wars and nuclear rivalry dividing two nation-states.Employing elegant and spare prose, Husband of a Fanatic is a fiercely personal reflection on the idea of the enemy.