English - Publications

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    A new biological citizenship: Posthumanism in Octavia Butler's Fledgling
    ( 2012-12-01) Nayar, Pramod K.
    This essay argues that Octavia Butler's Fledgling traces, in the transformation of the protagonist Shori from mere zoē into bíos, the evolution of a posthumanist condition where vampires coevolve with humans. This occurs in three stages before climaxing in a posthumanist corporeality that involves a multispecies biological citizenship. Shori's biovalue and biological citizenship is at once corporeal and moral. Biovalue in Butler's posthumanist vision, I conclude, inheres in the moral enhancement of Shori and is the result of her multispecies citizenship. Copyright © for the Purdue Research.
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    A short history of English literature
    ( 2009-01-01) Nayar, Pramod K.
    A History of English Literature is a comprehensive survey, in chronological fashion, of the major periods, authors and movements from Chaucer to the present. Written for undergraduate and postgraduate students in South Asian universities, this History locates authors, genres and developments within their social, political and historical contexts. Informed by contemporary literary and cultural theory, this account also prepares the student for further explorations in particular genres and periods in English literature.
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    Affective travel: Terror and the human rights narrative in Véronique Tadjo's the Shadow of Imana
    ( 2009-09-01) Nayar, Pramod K.
    Travel writing, this paper argues, is linked to human rights discourse because it constructs genocidal spaces through an ethnography of mourning within its narrative of witnessing, the creation of new contact zones of suffering and violation, and generating an affective literacy about the world as constituted by genocidal spaces. It examines Véronique Tadjo's The Shadow of Imana, a travel narrative about Rwanda, for this purpose. Beginning with the assumption that human rights demand a narrative, it explores two major components of Tadjo's work. It is proposed here that Rwanda is constructed as a 'genocidal space' because it is a space of human rights violation. The first part of the paper deals with Tadjo's 'narrative of witnessing'. This 'narrative' is generated through two modes: the semi-ethnographic 'observation' mode and the deeply subjective. The narrative also constructs an ethnography of mourning through representation of 'sites of mourning'. Further, it also enacts individual stories of terror. It is in this last that the individual subject emerges-and the individual, as Michael Ignatieff and others have argued, is the locus of human rights. The second part of the paper develops the idea of 'affective geographies'. Adapting the notion of 'contact zones' from M L Pratt, it argues that the emergence of 'new' contact zones is built on the recognition of suffering. This 'contact zone' is one where Tadjo encounters violations, deprivation, death and mourning. By folding the singularity of suffering terror into something larger (an ethnography), Tadjo's travel narrative enables the creation of an entire archive of feelings, and this is the affective geography of the world. By widening our knowledge of suffering about the world, travel writing creates an 'affective literacy'. This 'affective literacy' induced by narratives such as Tadjo's, is the source of the discourse of human rights. © 2009 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
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    African American travel writing and the politics of mobility: The narrative of nancy prince
    ( 2009-04-22) Nayar, Pramod K.
    This article examines a 19th-century travel narrative by an African-American woman, Nancy Prince, and identifies three principal rhetorical modes in her narrative: mobility, labour and community. It suggests that Prince's rhetoric of mobility consists of a mobility of poverty, when she moved from one place to another due to her straitened circumstances, and a mobility of agency, when she travelled as a means to assert her individuality, but within specific 'structures of travel'. Prince's rhetoric of labour gives her agency as an individual when she undertakes ethnographic information-gathering and maps her own suffering. Labour, like mobility, helps her demonstrate an individual self. Finally, the rhetoric of community aligns Prince with the evangelical movement. Her agency as a black person becomes iconic of the transformation of her race itself - through the choice of a career and the practice of a profession outside the USA. This rhetoric takes her narrative out of the mere category of travel writing into one about community-building and racial identity. © 2009 SAGE Publications.
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    Autobiogenography: Genomes and Life Writing
    ( 2016-09-01) Nayar, Pramod K.
    This essay examines the genre of autobiogenography, where autobiography is now written from the molecular level upward. Autobiogenography documents a process of self-discovery mediated through knowledge of one's genetic makeup. It maps processes of self-fashioning and the making of a genosocial self. Individuals, while being aware of possessing “predictive” selves, occasionally seek to demonstrate the self's variation from the predictions.
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    Bama's Karukku: Dalit autobiography as testimonio
    ( 2006-12-01) Nayar, Pramod K.
    This essay argues that Dalit autobiographies must be treated as testimonio, atrocity narratives that document trauma and strategies of survival. Using Bama's Karukku as a case-study, it explores the shift between the generic conventions of individual life-writing and collective biography in this text. It analyses the strategy of witnessing in Bama's narrative, arguing that she functions as a witness to a community's suffering, and calls upon readers to undertake "rhetorical listening" as secondary witnesses. This act of recording trauma and witnessing, the essay proposes, is one of subaltern agency. Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications.
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    Biocultural metrics and the moral policing of young people’s politics in contemporary India
    ( 2018-01-01) Nayar, Pramod K.
    This chapter focuses on the measures the Indian government uses to police young women’s politics. Paradoxically, these measures rely on traditional techniques as opposed to digital and ‘flash’ techniques - curfews, moral policing and dress codes - where traditional techniques draw on the strength of familial and social networks to help police and control dissent amongst young women on college campuses and, thereby, cement the role of women in the private sphere. Moreover, these measures further marginalise women and students from vulnerable populations, making higher education and upward mobility less accessible to them.
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    Biopics the year in India
    ( 2017-09-01) Nayar, pramod K.
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    Black mobility and the construction of the self: Mary seacole's the wonderful adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands
    ( 2011-06-01) Nayar, Pramod K.
    This essay examines the formation of subjectivity in the black British writer, Mary Seacole. Her travel memoir, the immediate text for this study, exhibits, the essay argues, not a passive black subjectivity, but an agential one. This subjectivity is constructed through three modes. The first mode is the act of travel. Mobility, I argue, offers the black an agential role, and therefore contributes to the making of her identity. In the second mode, Seacole constructs an entrepreneurial self where, as a business woman, she overcomes obstacles. Finally, in the latter half of the memoir, Seacole describes her services as a nurse on the Crimean war front. In this section, narrating her experiences and documenting testimonials by those she treated, Seacole, in contrast with the early identities, constructs the Selfless Self where her service to society gives her an identity. I conclude by proposing that it is necessary to examine alternate modes of subjectivity that blacks and other oppressed races managed to construct through travel and labor in the nineteenth century. © 2011 IUP.
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    Brand postcolonial: ‘Third world’ texts and the global
    ( 2018-01-01) Nayar, Pramod K. ; Penier, Izabella ; Leverton, Adam ; Zmarzlinski, Adam
    Aims and Scope The postcolonial author, whether Kamila Shamsie from Pakistan, Chimamanda Adichie from Nigeria or Arundhati Roy from India, is a brand. Instantly recognizable in the literary-cultural marketplace, the postcolonial, this book argues, positions itself and influences the transnational cultural industry. Through a study of numerous postcolonial themes in emblematic authors, the book maps the making of the postcolonial celebrity. From an examination of the authenticity debate through the themes of indigeneity, subalternity and humanism the book moves to the fashioning of a postcolonial literary-ethnic chic for global consumption.
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    Branding bill: The shakespearean commons
    ( 2015-03-21) Nayar, Pramod K.
    Situating William Shakespeare within the study of brands, this article examines the process and results of Shakespeare-as-brand, which mediates the supply and demand of Shakespearean products whether about his life, his loves, his texts, his editors, and his readers or consumers. Shakespeare as a commons continues to gather cultural capital because of the iterability of the brand in mass/popular forms and media that now possess the maximum cultural legibility (like the graphic novel or Hollywood romance). This is possible even more in the digital age because the Shakespearean page, stage, and image are all available simultaneously on a screen, making Shakespeare an interactive, global archive.
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    Celebrity
    ( 2015-01-01) Nayar, Pramod K.
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    Citizenship and identity in the age of surveillance
    ( 2015-01-01) Nayar, Pramod K.
    This book is a study of cultures of surveillance, from CCTV to genetic data-gathering and the new forms of subjectivity and citizenship that are forged in such cultures. It studies data, bodies and space as domains within which this subjectivity of the vulnerable individual emerges. The book also proposes that we can see a shift within cultures of surveillance where, from active participation in the process of surveilling, a witness-citizen emerges. The book therefore seeks to alter surveillance as a mere top-down system, instead arguing that surveillance is also a mode of engagement with the world enabling trust, accountability and eventually a responsible humanitarianism.
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    Civil modernity: The management of manners and polite imperial relations in India, 1880—1930
    ( 2016-10-01) Nayar, Pramod K.
    This essay argues that etiquette books produced during the period 1880-1930 sought to contain the increasingly Westernised and cosmopolitan colonial subject by creating a regime of respectability and civility. These books formulated norms of social interaction, imparting advice on rational, hierarchic behaviour and cultural literacy. This discourse of civility was a mode of ameliorating the threat of the hybridised colonial subject by framing his cultural and social interactions within very particular modes of conduct while retaining the hierarchies necessary for imperial dominance.
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