Sandeep Banerjee – författare

The book illuminates the spatial utopianism of South Asian anti-colonial texts by showing how they refuse colonial spatial imaginaries to re-imagine the British Indian colony as the postcolony in diverse and contested ways. Focusing on the literary field of South Asia between, largely, the 1860s and 1920s, it underlines the centrality of literary imagination and representation in the cultural politics of decolonization.This book spatializes our understanding of decolonization while decoupling and complicating the easy equation between decolonization and anti-colonial nationalism. The author utilises a global comparative framework and reads across the English-vernacular divide to understand space as a site of contested representation and ideological contestation. He interrogates the spatial desire of anti-colonial and colonial texts across a range of genres, namely, historical romances, novels, travelogues, memoirs, poems, and patriotic lyrics.The book is the first full-length literary geographical study of South Asian literary texts and will be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience in the fields of Postcolonial and World Literature, Asian Literature, Victorian Literature, Modern South Asian Historiography, Literature and Utopia, Literature and Decolonization, Literature and Nationalism, Cultural Geography, and South Asian Studies.

This book traces the cultural and political economic routes through which East Pakistan was re-imagined as Bangladesh. It explores the social, cultural, and political strands that informed and influenced the experience of Bengali-speaking people in the region from 1947 to 1971 and beyond.Featuring cutting-edge contributions from scholars from across Bangladesh, Canada, India, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States, the book highlights the complex and contested ways in which a Bengali homeland was imagined, articulated, and, when the subjects were removed from it, remembered. Chapters engage with several significant historical issues that led to the 1971 India-Pakistan war: the refugee exodus and process of minoritization caused by the partition of 1947; the cultural world of East Pakistan, and the struggle for the Bengali language against Urdu hegemony. It remains especially attentive to how Bengaliness was revitalized by the events of 1971. The book consequently provides a complex picture of nation formation through genocide, ethnic cleansing, the minoritization of nested communities, and a community’s cultural sense of belonging.Through a sustained analysis of social evolution on both sides of Bengal, this book demonstrates how a sense of affection transforms into a political struggle for freedom and nation formation. It will be of interest to researchers of Bengal, Bangladesh, and South Asia studies, as well as Asian History.