The Oxford India Anthology of Tamil Dalit Writing


Book Description

Presenting the different phases of Dalit writing from the late nineteenth century to the present in Tamil Nadu, this anthology represents the work of 42 writers. The 78 selections from poetry, fiction (short stories and excerpts from novels), drama, and prose (autobiographies, speeches, biographies, and archival materials), with all, save 12, pieces specially translated for this anthology help understand the operations of caste power in Indian society and politics.




The Oxford India Anthology of Malayalam Dalit Writing


Book Description

With 55 selections from songs, poems, short stories, excerpts from novels, biographical sketches, plays, and critical writings, this volume represents the work of 36 writers and 19 translators. With all, save three, pieces specially translated for this anthology, the selections arranged chronologically present a worldview and vocabulary of the Dalit movement in Kerala built on rebellion and a struggle for identity and recognition.




The Oxford India Anthology of Telugu Dalit Writing


Book Description

The anthology is an attempt to showcase over a hundred years of Dalit writing in Telugu, representing Dalit movements, Dalit activism, Dalit womens activism, and Dalit critiques of Hinduism and the Left, besides other specific concerns. Perhaps no other state in India has had an active Dalit movement alongside the movements led by the Left. Other states too have a formidable body of Dalit literature, but the Dalit movement in Andhra Pradesh has sustained itself despite a series of other mainstream movements. The selection represents nearly a century of Dalit writing and Dalit movements, and at every turn, bears proof to the fact that Telugu Dalit writing is diverse, deeply embedded in modernity, in changing culture, and in the politics of the region and the nation. The anthology brings together a living tradition that spans ancient and contemporary periods and all aspects of Dalit life. The selection begins with poems and songs from the oral tradition, the oldest known verbal art forms which is the backbone of Telugu Dalit arts and letters. Moving on chronologically, it includes poems, short stories, novel excerpts, critical writings, etc. capturing the Dalit nationalist, regional and feminist movements that ran parallel to elite movements.




Tell Me How It Ends


Book Description

"Part treatise, part memoir, part call to action, Tell Me How It Ends inspires not through a stiff stance of authority, but with the curiosity and humility Luiselli has long since established." —Annalia Luna, Brazos Bookstore "Valeria Luiselli's extended essay on her volunteer work translating for child immigrants confronts with compassion and honesty the problem of the North American refugee crisis. It's a rare thing: a book everyone should read." —Stephen Sparks, Point Reyes Books "Tell Me How It Ends evokes empathy as it educates. It is a vital contribution to the body of post-Trump work being published in early 2017." —Katharine Solheim, Unabridged Books "While this essay is brilliant for exactly what it depicts, it helps open larger questions, which we're ever more on the precipice of now, of where all of this will go, how all of this might end. Is this a story, or is this beyond a story? Valeria Luiselli is one of those brave and eloquent enough to help us see." —Rick Simonson, Elliott Bay Book Company "Appealing to the language of the United States' fraught immigration policy, Luiselli exposes the cracks in this foundation. Herself an immigrant, she highlights the human cost of its brokenness, as well as the hope that it (rather than walls) might be rebuilt." —Brad Johnson, Diesel Bookstore "The bureaucratic labyrinth of immigration, the dangers of searching for a better life, all of this and more is contained in this brief and profound work. Tell Me How It Ends is not just relevant, it's essential." —Mark Haber, Brazos Bookstore "Humane yet often horrifying, Tell Me How It Ends offers a compelling, intimate look at a continuing crisis—and its ongoing cost in an age of increasing urgency." —Jeremy Garber, Powell's Books




Listen to the Flames


Book Description




Dalit Literatures in India


Book Description

This book breaks new ground in the study of Dalit Literature, including in its corpus, a range of genres such as novels, autobiographies, pamphlets, poetry, short stories as well as graphic novels. With contributions from major scholars in the field, it critically examines Dalit literary theory and initiates a dialogue between Dalit writing and Western literary theory.







Tamil Dalit Feminist Poetics


Book Description

Tamil Dalit feminist poetry occurs in the nexus of caste demands and literary expectations based on Tamil “high culture,” as set in the literary conventions of both classical and contemporary aesthetics. Tamil Dalit feminist poets and their allies challenge literary expectations set for women poets as well as caste stigma. In Tamil Dalit Feminist Poetics: Resistance, Power, and Solidarity, Pramila Venkateswaran argues that Dalit poets Sukirtharani, Arangamallika, Umadevi, Meena Kandasamy, and Tamil feminist allies, such as Malathi Maitri and Kutty Revathi, challenge the literary tradition of Tamil poetry by presenting their radical poems on themes based on their experience and witnessing the trauma of violence on Dalit women’s bodies, thus placing caste and gender at the center of their work. They assert their subjectivity, offering us a feminist poetics that is rich with insights on the Dalit body, spirituality, music, culture, Dalit connection to land, and democracy. Their poems theorize women’s experiences, using metaphor, symbol, folk idioms, as well as satire and irony to express feminist connectedness to all spheres of life. Replete with anti-caste resistance of language, form, and content, Tamil Dalit feminist poets reframe both feminism and contemporary Tamil poetry. Thus, Dalit feminist poetry and other cultural productions are vehicles for solidarity and democracy.




Dalit Text


Book Description

This book, companion to the much-acclaimed Dalit Literatures in India, examines questions of aesthetics and literary representation in a wide range of Dalit literary texts. It looks at how Dalit literature, born from the struggle against social and political injustice, invokes the rich and complex legacy of oral, folk and performative traditions of marginalised voices. The essays and interviews systematically explore a range of literary forms, from autobiographies, memoirs and other testimonial narratives, to poems, novels or short stories, foregrounding the diversity of Dalit creation. Showcasing the interplay between the aesthetic and political for a genre of writing that has ‘change’ as its goal, the volume aims to make Dalit writing more accessible to a wider public, for the Dalit voices to be heard and understood. The volume also shows how the genre has revolutionised the concept of what literature is supposed to mean and define. Effervescent first-person accounts, socially militant activism and sharp critiques of a little-explored literary terrain make this essential reading for scholars and researchers of social exclusion and discrimination studies, literature (especially comparative literature), translation studies, politics, human rights and culture studies.




The Light of Knowledge


Book Description

Since the early 1990s hundreds of thousands of Tamil villagers in southern India have participated in literacy lessons, science demonstrations, and other events designed to transform them into active citizens with access to state power. These efforts to spread enlightenment among the oppressed are part of a movement known as the Arivoli Iyakkam (the Enlightenment Movement), considered to be among the most successful mass literacy movements in recent history. In The Light of Knowledge, Francis Cody’s ethnography of the Arivoli Iyakkam highlights the paradoxes inherent in such movements that seek to emancipate people through literacy when literacy is a power-laden social practice in its own right. The Light of Knowledge is set primarily in the rural district of Pudukkottai in Tamil Nadu, and it is about activism among laboring women from marginalized castes who have been particularly active as learners and volunteers in the movement. In their endeavors to remake the Tamil countryside through literacy activism, workers in the movement found that their own understanding of the politics of writing and Enlightenment was often transformed as they encountered vastly different notions of language and imaginations of social order. Indeed, while activists of the movement successfully mobilized large numbers of rural women, they did so through logics that often pushed against the very Enlightenment rationality they hoped to foster. Offering a rare behind-the-scenes look at an increasingly important area of social and political activism, The Light of Knowledge brings tools of linguistic anthropology to engage with critical social theories of the postcolonial state.