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.

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.