This course seeks to comprehend the contours of an Indian modernity through its literary representations over the last century, as viewed from within the shifting framework of the family. Widely recognized as one of the most common ways of conceptualizing the nation, the family metaphor has been sharply critiqued in postcolonial scholarship, where the putative homogeneity of the family is seen to elide the diversity and multiplicity of the nation and normalize its hierarchies. This in turn has prompted calls for models of national belonging that are less invested in affect. What tends to go unnoticed in attempts to rescue the heterogeneity of the nation, however, is the constructedness of families. Postcolonial critiques of ‘the family metaphor’ gloss over the long history of alternative family forms which simultaneously interrogate the presumed stability, normalcy and naturalness of the traditional family as also foreground its many contradictions.
Weekly readings will examine a series of literary texts from the last hundred years of Indian Writing in English and in English translation from other Indian languages, focusing on models of family that resist nationalist appropriation via foregrounding relational patterns and diversities that fall outside of the familiar circuits of heterosexual desire but that nonetheless retain the affective charge characteristic of belongingness to the nation. The discussion of literary texts will alternate weekly with readings drawn from a range of disciplines including history, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, literary theory, politics, sexuality studies, visual cultures, and more, aimed at unpacking a complex history of Indian modernity, paying special attention to questions of subjectivity, citizenship, secularism, mass media, consumption, agency and care. Weeks 8 and 13 are reserved for solo or group presentations on short prescribed texts that invite analysis of the course’s chief concerns.
- Kursleiter*in: Annabell Fender
- Kursleiter*in: Dr. Ira Raja