Engagements with Hybridity in Literature: An Introduction is a textbook especially for undergraduate and graduate students of literature. It discusses the different dimensions of the notion of hybridity in theory and practice, introducing the use and relevance of the concept in literary studies. As a structured and up-to-date source for both instructors and learners, it provides a fascinating selection of materials and approaches . The book examines the concept of hybridity, offers a historical overview of the term and its critique, and draws upon the key ideas, tends, and voices in the field. The book critically engages with the theoretical intellectual and literary discussions of the concept from the time of the colonialism to the postmodern era and beyond. The book enables students to develop critical thinking through engaging them in case studies addressing a diverse selection of literary texts from various genres and cultures.ifferent genres that open up new perspectives and opportunities for analysis. Each chapter offers a specific theoretical background and close readings of hybridity in literary texts. To improve the students’ analytical skills and knowledge of hybridity, each chapter includes relevant tasks, questions, and additional reference materials.

Engagements with Hybridity in Literature: An Introduction is a textbook especially for undergraduate and graduate students of literature. It discusses the different dimensions of the notion of hybridity in theory and practice, introducing the use and relevance of the concept in literary studies. As a structured and up-to-date source for both instructors and learners, it provides a fascinating selection of materials and approaches . The book examines the concept of hybridity, offers a historical overview of the term and its critique, and draws upon the key ideas, tends, and voices in the field. The book critically engages with the theoretical intellectual and literary discussions of the concept from the time of the colonialism to the postmodern era and beyond. The book enables students to develop critical thinking through engaging them in case studies addressing a diverse selection of literary texts from various genres and cultures.ifferent genres that open up new perspectives and opportunities for analysis. Each chapter offers a specific theoretical background and close readings of hybridity in literary texts. To improve the students’ analytical skills and knowledge of hybridity, each chapter includes relevant tasks, questions, and additional reference materials.

Suggesting that women are 'reshaping English' as Rushdie suggests, Kuortti interviews 7 women writers to find out why they write in English, which cannot be neutral. As a colony, the language was inescapably associated with class, race and power; after independence it has grown in power and status, yet the problematic of English as the language of the hegemonic West remains. Even so a new canon of women writing in English is being formed. Interviewing the writers Shashi Deshpande, the late Shama Futehally, Githa Hariharan, Lakshmi Kannan, Sujatha Mathai, Anuradha Marwah-Roy and Mina Singh, Kuortti also presents extracts from their writings.

The title of this book - Changing Worlds, Changing Nations - underlines the transforming status of the discourse on nationalism and transnationalism. The book focuses on how the realities and identities of people are influenced by the changes taking place in the various dimensions of nation-states. The term 'transnationalism' sounds simplistic, yet it is not so explicit in nature and is apparently enveloped in a myriad of confounding applications. Transnationalism, as it is largely understood, is a concept that disrupts and scatters the idea of centrality and periphery. It may be properly conceived as: a kind of relationship between nation-states, a crossing of national borders, a cultural/political interplay between different national cultures, or a mode of mobility of trans/national subjects. To be more precise, transnationalism means a form of multi-nationalism; something that shares cultural connections with more than one nation. Changing Worlds, Changing Nations consists of 13 contributions that consider the feasibility of nation-states in a transnational era and examine the role of language and culture in seeking a new identity. The book focuses on the Indian context as a case study of the thematic, but it extends this nationalistic framework to reflect on other, wider contexts. The hope is that the book as a whole, and the individual articles on their own, will spark new discussions and analyses of literary works in view of transnationalism. There is an ethical call that needs to be addressed in order to maintain the relevance of discussions of post-colonial and transnational issues.

Joel Kuortti's Writing Imagined Diasporas: South Asian Women Reshaping North American Identity is a study of diasporic South Asian women writers. It argues that the diasporic South Asians are not merely assimilating to their host cultures but they are also actively reshaping them through their own, new voices bringing new definitions of identity. As diaspora does not emerge as a mere sociological fact but it becomes what it is because it is said to be what it is, the writings of imagined diasporas challenge "national" discourses.Diaspora brings to mind various contested ideas and images. It can be a positive site for the affirmation of an identity, or, conversely, a negative site of fears of losing that identity. Diaspora signals an engagement with a matrix of diversity: of cultures, languages, histories, people, places, times. What distinguishes diaspora from some other types of travel is its centripetal dimension. It does not only mean that people are dispersed in different places but that they congregate in other places, forming new communities. In such gatherings, new allegiances are forged that supplant earlier commitments. New imagined communities arise that not simply substitute old ones but form a hybrid space in-between various identifications. This book looks into the ways in which diasporic Indian literature handles these issues. In the context of diaspora there is an imaginative construction of collective identity in the making, That a given diaspora comes to be seen as a community is the result of a process of imagining, at the same time creating new marginalities, hybridities and dependencies, resulting in multiple marginalizations, hyphenizations and demands for allegiance.The study concentrates on eleven contemporary women writers from the United States and Canada who write on South Asian diasporic experiences. The writers are Ramabai Espinet, Jhumpa Lahiri, Amulya Malladi, Sujata Massey, Bharati Mukherjee, Uma Parameswaran, Kirin Narayan, Anita Rau Badami, Robbie Clipper Sethi, Shauna Singh Baldwin, and Vineeta Vijayaraghavan.