Name: South Asia and its Others
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South Asia and its Others

Reading the “Exotic”

Edited By: Atreyee Phukan, V.G. Julie Rajan

£34.99

These essays reveal how writers of South Asian descent use "exoticization" as a strategic tool. They critically examine casteism, religious intolerance, and gender violence, uncovering the ambiguity that continues to mark marginalized identities today.

The essays in South Asia and Its Others: Reading the "Exotic" reveal fresh perspectives on the notion of exoticism in South Asia, and also challenge…

The essays in South Asia and Its Others: Reading the “Exotic” reveal fresh perspectives on the notion of exoticism in South Asia, and also challenge and extend existing scholarship in the broader discourse of what constitutes South Asia. Significantly, the anthology considers how the phenomenon of “exoticization” may be interpreted as a strategic methodology utilized by writers of South Asian descent to examine critically both the post-colonialist ramifications of casteism, religious intolerance, and gender violence across differing cultural contexts within the region, and how current perceptions of “native” and “diasporic” South Asian subjects problematize ideologies of authenticity across Western-Eastern divides. The papers in this collection show how authors of South Asian ethnicity construct their own version of an “exotic” South Asia globally and the colonialist discourse of “exocitism” is employed as a discursive tool that uncovers the ambiguity that continues to mark the marginality of identities even today.

V.G. Julie Rajan is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers University, U.S.A. Her monographs
include, The Phenomenon of Women Suicide Bombers: Narratives of Violence (Routledge, forthcoming), and Femininity, Nation, and Violence:
Post-Independence Narratives of Resistance Written by Women Residing in India (forthcoming). Rajan’s edited collections include The Home and the
World: South Asia in Transition (Cambridge Scholars Publishers, 2006),
Violence and Gender in the Globalized World: The Intimate and the Extimate (Ashgate, 2008), and From Word to Canvas: Appropriations of Myth in
Women’s Aesthetic Production (Cambridge Scholars Publishers, 2009).

Atreyee Phukan is Assistant Professor of English at the University of San
Diego, U.S.A., where she teaches postcolonial and world literature. Her
principal research interests lie in expressions of cultural and racial
“hybridity” in literatures of the Caribbean and South Asian diaspora.
Phukan’s work on these literatures appear in the anthology 19th and 20th
Century World Writers (2004) and in the Journal of Caribbean Literatures
(January 2008). Phukan’s other publications include The Home and the
World: South Asia in Transition (Cambridge Scholars Publishers, 2006). She
is currently working on a book-length project that examines the historical
and cultural place of Indian indentureship in Trinidadian literature.