Pramod K Nayar
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 102750 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Pramod K Nayar |
| NOMBRES | Pramod K |
| APELLIDO | Nayar |
| FIRMA | NAYAR P K |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Hyderabad |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2317-6570 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 94 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 90 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 93 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1971 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
India and imperial vulnerability
Palliative imperial labour
Posthumanism
This review is divided into three sections that, taken together, map the state and shape of the year’s work in posthumanism. The first section, ‘Surveys, Elaborations, and Trajectories’, considers works that explore multiple dimensions of posthumanism, with some choosing to focus on specific thematics, antecedents, or connections. This sections maps the sustained interest in genealogies of the posthuman, particularly its intersections with older …
Posthumanism
The year’s work in posthumanism includes both surveys of the field and publications that contribute significantly to posthumanist thought by examining processes and practices that call the singularity of the human into question. If we were to think of the principal strands of posthumanist thought that dominated publications in 2023, then human embodiment, environmentalism, and care-beyond-the-human, appearing in multiple collections and essays, w…
How to Include Artificial Bodies as Citizens
This essay ponders on the thorny issue of including artificial beings under the category of “citizen.” The increasing humanization of the artificial being, it suggests, prevents us from seeing and treating the machine as a being. But if the humanoid robot performs all the functions of a human being, and acquires cultural traits such as emotional intelligence, rational thinking, or altruism, then on what grounds do we deny it the same status as a …
Posthumanism
Varieties of posthumanism in literature and popular culture received sustained attention, as expected, in 2022. Human–nonhuman relationships, whether in terms of the human–animal or human–artificial-being relationship; issues of care for/of the nonhuman; theological debates around posthumanism, especially with regard to rituals, practices of belief, and the ‘digital afterlife’; and the different genealogies of the posthuman, were themes that info…
The Famine Projects and Digital Trauma Studies in India
In this essay, I examine two aspects of the twin projects’ foregrounding of trauma: the modes of representing trauma in the digital and the consequent construction of a trauma globalectic. Preserving, and in many cases, retrieving, cultural trauma in the digital age as Famine and Dearth and Famine Tales demonstrate, will mean a media archaeology that merges different forms and genres of/in media. Conjoining instances of social injustice and suffe…
Posthumanisms
Posthumanism as a school of thought and a theme in literary and cultural texts strives to keep pace with developments such as terraforming or genetic engineering, but also engages philosophically and politically with those developments, in the form of enunciating questions about human identity, nonhuman agency, and ethics. In more recent times, posthuman thought has moved into areas as diverse as climate change, the Anthropocene, legal identity, …
Biopower, Biopolitics and Pandemic Vulnerabilities
This essay examines Covid Chronicles: A Comics Anthology from the perspective of biopower and biopolitics. It contends that, on the one hand, the comics capture individual suffering and collective trauma of the pandemic; on the other hand, these comics draw attention to the role the state plays in regulating bodies to be monitored, governed and, in some cases, deemed disposable
The Textual Apparatus of Empire in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
This essay argues that the collapse of Empire in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is troped as the erosion of textuality. Five key instances of this textual collapse occur in the novel: the maps Marlow reads as a child, the accounting books, the seaman’s manual, the Kurtz Report and the Company papers. There are also a few minor instances of similar textual collapses, which also come to attention here. The essay notes that in each case the text’s signi…
Pandemic Photography
This essay examines several photographs taken during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in India in 2021. It argues that the photographs capture an “atmo-terror” (terror from the air). The paper records the evolution of atmo-technics: alongside the dehumanization of the patient/sufferer, acts of resilience were reported and recorded. A “civil contract” of photography may be inferred from them
The art of Covid-19
This article examines one strand of COVID art that encodes a heteroclitic cultural imaginary – and is irregular and unsettling. Banksy's murals and paintings parody classical artworks, and are themselves parodied, so as to capture the new cultural realities of the COVID era. In the case of other artists, such as Chiara Grilli, the traditional heliotrope is parodied to convey a similar reality, like Banksy's inversion of the superhero mythology. W…
Essays in Celebrity Culture
To the Posthuman Born(e)
In this essay, I argue that VanderMeer’s imagining of such a world in Borne is at once posthuman and post-natural, and the two are interconnected. The crux of the argument is that the posthuman is contingent upon, even as it produces, the post-natural
Essays in Celebrity Culture
Visualising Resilience
This article argues that Joe Sacco in Safe Area Goražde , first published in 2000, constantly draws our attention to the resilience of the Goražde people who recover from their horrific experiences of the 1994–95 massacres, as a way of pointing to the continuing trauma of the same people. First, Sacco depicts both individual and social resilience. He then presents the inhabitants of the town as living in perpetual risk, for resilience demands the…
Drawing Migrants and Carceral Spaces
This article is part of the Global Perspectives Media and Communication special issue on “Media, Migration and Nationalism,” guest-edited by Koen Leurs and Tomohisa Hirata, and focuses on an unusual work, Tings Chak’s Undocumented, a graphic text on the detention centers in Canada. It argues that Canadian cities incorporate heterotopias—refugee spaces—that invert the city spaces. The refugee centers themselves invoke an architectural uncanny when…
The Colonial Home
Colonial domesticity in India was often a fraught exercise. Guidebooks such as Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner’s The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook offered advice on how a household may be run. This essay examines the above work to argue that domesticity was in fact political. It involved the organization of material objects in the English home in the colony, and the organization of native servant bodies. These were two sites of imperi…
Indian Travel Writing in the Age of Empire
Indian Travel Writing in the Age of Empire studies a variety of travel narratives by Indian kings, evangelists, statesmen, scholars, merchants, leisure travellers and reformers. It identifies the key modes through which the Indian traveller engaged with Europe and the world-from aesthetic evaluations to cosmopolitan nationalist perceptions, from exoticism to a keen sense of connected and global histories. These modes are constitutive of the ident…
Desecration and the politics of 'image pollution
This essay examines the culture of statue-desecration in contemporary India. The focus is the desecration of Ambedkar statues. The first section argues that the installation of Ambedkar statues is a process of sacralising, reconfiguring public histories and modernities, while instituting a new iconicity. In section two, the essay moves on to examining the ‘profane aesthetics’ of desecration. This includes studying the emergence of a ‘counter-spec…
Bollywood Stars and Cancer Memoirs
Bollywood Stars and Cancer MemoirsThe Year in India Pramod K. Nayar (bio) Two cancer memoirs from Bollywood heroines were published in 2019: Manisha Koirala's Healed: How Cancer Gave Me A New Life and Lisa Ray's Close to the Bone. Koirala's text begins with her diagnosis, and concludes with her healing and subsequent attempts to establish a new lifestyle. Ray's text arrives at "cancer time"—Nancy Miller's term, defined as the time spent in "diagn…
The Long Walk
The Covid-19 pandemic has made a commonplace of the carceral imaginary. Isolation, social distancing, quarantine have become watchwords. Physician instructions, epidemiologist advice, state orders jostle alongside memes and jokes about being under 'lockdown', barricaded-in and homebound across the world. An immobility regime dominates now with cancelled airline, bus and train services. Yet, the same regime has generated an extreme mobility in nat…
Graphic Memory, Connective Histories, and Dalit Trauma
The collage-style merging of histories of oppression in Srividya Natarajan and Aparajita Ninan’s A Gardener in the Wasteland is an exercise in memorializing. Here memorialization has its ontological and etiological foundations in the Dalit narratives’ fusion, without reduction, of different histories of oppression. The national signifier of caste appropriates the global form of the graphic narrative. The spatial rhetorics of the graphic page enab…
Ecoprecarity
Ecoprecarity: Vulnerable Lives in Literature and Culture presents an examination of ecoprecarity - the precarious lives that humans lead in the process and event of ecological disaster, and the increasing precarious state of the environment itself as a result of human interventions - in contemporary literary-cultural texts. It studies the representation of 'invasion narratives' of the human body and the earth by alien life forms, the ecodystopian…
The Transnational Early Modern
Bama's Karukku
This essay argues that Dalit autobiographies must be treated as testimonio, atrocity narratives that document trauma and strategies of survival. Using Bama's Karukku as a case-study, it explores the shift between the generic conventions of individual life-writing and collective biography in this text. It analyses the strategy of witnessing in Bama's narrative, arguing that she functions as a witness to a community's suffering, and calls upon read…
Brutal Reasoning
Early modern English thinkers were fascinated by the subject of animal rationality, even before the appearance of Descartes's Discourse on the Method (1637) and its famous declaration of the automatism of animals. But as Erica Fudge relates in Brutal Reasoning, the discussions were not as straightforward-or as reflexively anthropocentric-as has been assumed. Surveying a wide range of texts-religious, philosophical, literary, even comic-Fudge expl…
English Writing and India, 1600-1920
This book explores the formations and configurations of British colonial discourse on India through a reading of prose narratives of the 1600-1920 period. Arguing that colonial discourse often relied on aesthetic devices in order to describe and assert a degree of narrative control over Indian landscape, Pramod Nayar demonstrates how aesthetics furnished a vocabulary and representational modes for the British to construct particular images of Ind…
The Long Walk
The Covid-19 pandemic has made a commonplace of the carceral imaginary. Isolation, social distancing, quarantine have become watchwords. Physician instructions, epidemiologist advice, state orders jostle alongside memes and jokes about being under 'lockdown', barricaded-in and homebound across the world. An immobility regime dominates now with cancelled airline, bus and train services. Yet, the same regime has generated an extreme mobility in nat…
Towards a postcolonial critical literacy
This article argues that the graphic novel of BR Ambedkar's life, Bhimayana, generates a postcolonial critical literacy. Critical literacy forces the reader to link personal experiences with socio-historical and institutional power relations, and alerts us to reflect on issues of otherness in the text. In the first section, the article argues that Bhimayana's innovations of form and content, and its extensive metaphorization and multiple register…
The Imperial Sublime
JEMCS2.2 (Fall/Winter 2002) The ImperialSublime:EnglishTravel Writing and India, 1750-1820 Pramod K. Nayar was a periodofcrisisfor theEnglishinIndia. The severalwars,chargesof corruption, infighting at the East IndiaHouse(London), mounting debts,1 theParliamentary investigations ofthe1780s,andthetrial ofWarren Hastings (beginning in 1788), followed by the appointment and disputedrecallof Governor-General ArthurWellesley,eroded the East India Comp…
Autobiogenography
This essay examines the genre of autobiogenography, where autobiography is now written from the molecular level upward. Autobiogenography documents a process of self-discovery mediated through knowledge of one's genetic makeup. It maps processes of self-fashioning and the making of a genosocial self. Individuals, while being aware of possessing “predictive” selves, occasionally seek to demonstrate the self's variation from the predictions
Indigenous cultures and the ecology of protest
Through a reading of two Dalit texts, Bama's testimonio entitled Karukku and Baby Kamble's life writing The Prisons We Broke, and tribal eco-activist C. K. Janu's unfinished autobiography Mother Forest, this article examines the ecology of protest in postcolonial India. It argues that the narrative devices and rhetorical strategies of these texts propose what E. P. Thompson terms a "moral economy" that constitutes, in these cases, a critique of e…
The Politics of Form in Dalit Fiction
This article examines two Dalit novels, Bama’s Sangati and Sivakami’s The Grip of Change. It argues that the two novels hybridise the very novel form through the appropriation of different registers, the mythic, the historical and the immediate. It argues that this narrative hybridisation is a political project, reflecting a radicalisation of consciousness itself. Bama and Sivakami, I argue further, transform folkloric and local-mythic language a…
Colonial Subjects and Aesthetic Understanding
This essay examines Indian travel literature to Victorian Britain, specifically the narratives of the Raja ofKolhapur (1872), Lala Baijnath (1893), N.L. Doss (1893), Jhinda Ram (1893), Jagatjit Singh (1895), G. Parameswaran Pillai (1897) and T.B. Pandian (1897). It argues that within these narratives documenting mobility, eye-witnessing and cultural negotiations with the "foreign," one can discern the emergence of an aesthetic subject.1 Aesthetic…
Marvelous Excesses
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Colonial Home
Colonial domesticity in India was often a fraught exercise. Guidebooks such as Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner’s The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook offered advice on how a household may be run. This essay examines the above work to argue that domesticity was in fact political. It involved the organization of material objects in the English home in the colony, and the organization of native servant bodies. These were two sites of imperi…
Desecration and the politics of 'image pollution
This essay examines the culture of statue-desecration in contemporary India. The focus is the desecration of Ambedkar statues. The first section argues that the installation of Ambedkar statues is a process of sacralising, reconfiguring public histories and modernities, while instituting a new iconicity. In section two, the essay moves on to examining the ‘profane aesthetics’ of desecration. This includes studying the emergence of a ‘counter-spec…
Bollywood Stars and Cancer Memoirs
Bollywood Stars and Cancer MemoirsThe Year in India Pramod K. Nayar (bio) Two cancer memoirs from Bollywood heroines were published in 2019: Manisha Koirala's Healed: How Cancer Gave Me A New Life and Lisa Ray's Close to the Bone. Koirala's text begins with her diagnosis, and concludes with her healing and subsequent attempts to establish a new lifestyle. Ray's text arrives at "cancer time"—Nancy Miller's term, defined as the time spent in "diagn…
Genetic Prosopography and Caste
Donna Haraway’s theorization of natureculture webs has enormous potential for reading collective biographies (prosopography) that involve genetic ‘roots’ and ‘routes’. This essay examines the genetic prosopographic narratives revolving around caste identity in India and their imbrication of genetic ‘testimony’ and contemporary cultural identities. Genetically informed prosopography in the Indian media emphasises genetic roots, cultural codes (of …
The forms of history
This article examines This Side, That Side: Restorying Partition: Graphic Narratives from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, a 2013 anthology of graphic texts on the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent into Indian and Pakistan and the 1971 creation of Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan). Hillary Chute has argued that politically oriented graphic narratives confront the problem of representing history through an urgent visualizing of historical ci…
Civil and Corrupt Asia
Jan Huygen van Linschoten (1562-1611) was a Dutchman who, in 1596, penned the famous Itinerario, an account of his travel to the Indian Peninsula and its eastern surroundings that described the inhabitants of this vast region and quickly became a travel guide for everyone going there. Van Linschoten is held as a key eyewitness of the Portuguese-Asian empire at its height, and as one who worked to shift the center of European expansion from the Ib…
How to Include Artificial Bodies as Citizens
This essay ponders on the thorny issue of including artificial beings under the category of “citizen.” The increasing humanization of the artificial being, it suggests, prevents us from seeing and treating the machine as a being. But if the humanoid robot performs all the functions of a human being, and acquires cultural traits such as emotional intelligence, rational thinking, or altruism, then on what grounds do we deny it the same status as a …
Pandemic Photography
This essay examines several photographs taken during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in India in 2021. It argues that the photographs capture an “atmo-terror” (terror from the air). The paper records the evolution of atmo-technics: alongside the dehumanization of the patient/sufferer, acts of resilience were reported and recorded. A “civil contract” of photography may be inferred from them
The art of Covid-19
This article examines one strand of COVID art that encodes a heteroclitic cultural imaginary – and is irregular and unsettling. Banksy's murals and paintings parody classical artworks, and are themselves parodied, so as to capture the new cultural realities of the COVID era. In the case of other artists, such as Chiara Grilli, the traditional heliotrope is parodied to convey a similar reality, like Banksy's inversion of the superhero mythology. W…
Brand Postcolonial
Biopics
BiopicsThe Year in India Pramod K. Nayar (bio) The biographical movie has seen a resurgence in India in recent years. Biopics have revolved around sports stars such as the athlete Milkha Singh in Bhaag Milkha Bhaag (2013), cricketers M. S. Dhoni in M. S. Dhoni: The Untold Story (2016), Mohammad Azharuddin in Azhar (2016), and Sachin Tendulkar in Sachin: A Billion Dreams (2016). Films have also been built around other real-life people whose action…
Dalit Poetry and the Aesthetics of Traumatic Materialism
This article examines and theorises the emergence of an aesthetic of Dalit poetry that it terms ‘traumatic materialism’. It resists the tendency to treat Dalit poetry as social documentary, and instead unravels an aesthetic that builds on the realist mode but moves beyond it. Studying two main themes in Dalit poems, corporeal trauma and labour, the article proposes that traumatic materialism forces us to move beyond the realist mode of recording …
Watery friction
This essay examines the construction of the River Narmada – the site of one of the largest popular protests in post-Independence India – as celebrity and cultural icon. It argues that the river’s iconicity emerges from a grammar of protest built around the friction of discourses of environmentalism and social justice. In the first section, examining the myths around the river, I propose that its iconicity lies in its cultural legibility as mother…
Leadership, Bureaucracy and Planning in India
The Fiction of Josef Škvorecký
Part 1 Novels: The Cowards The End of the Nylon Era The Tank Corps The Lion Club The Miracle The Swell Season The Engineer of Human Souls Scherzo Capriccioso. Part 2 Short Works: short stories novellae detective and mystery stories.
Colonial Proxemics
The Imperial Sublime
JEMCS2.2 (Fall/Winter 2002) The ImperialSublime:EnglishTravel Writing and India, 1750-1820 Pramod K. Nayar was a periodofcrisisfor theEnglishinIndia. The severalwars,chargesof corruption, infighting at the East IndiaHouse(London), mounting debts,1 theParliamentary investigations ofthe1780s,andthetrial ofWarren Hastings (beginning in 1788), followed by the appointment and disputedrecallof Governor-General ArthurWellesley,eroded the East India Comp…
Virtual Worlds
Preface TechnoCulture Art, Aesthetics, Popular Culture Politics Body Gender Bibliography and Webliography Index
"Another Source for Coleridge's Pleasure-Dome in "Kubla Khan
Before Orientalism
Sick Economies
Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England
Marvelous Excesses
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Civil and Corrupt Asia
Jan Huygen van Linschoten (1562-1611) was a Dutchman who, in 1596, penned the famous Itinerario, an account of his travel to the Indian Peninsula and its eastern surroundings that described the inhabitants of this vast region and quickly became a travel guide for everyone going there. Van Linschoten is held as a key eyewitness of the Portuguese-Asian empire at its height, and as one who worked to shift the center of European expansion from the Ib…
The Consumer Society and the Postmodern City
The Darker Side of the Renaissance
Reviewed by Pramod K. Nayar University of Hyderabad, India The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization. By Walter D. Mignolo. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. Pp. xxii + 463, preface, illustrations, maps, afterword, notes, bibliography, index.) Walter Mignolo's study of colonialism's three main "technologies"—language and writing, memory and archiving, and cartography—visualizes the European Renai…
The Lost Land of Lemuria
"The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories, by Sumathi Ramaswamy." Canadian Journal of History, 41(1), pp. 185–186
Bama's Karukku
This essay argues that Dalit autobiographies must be treated as testimonio, atrocity narratives that document trauma and strategies of survival. Using Bama's Karukku as a case-study, it explores the shift between the generic conventions of individual life-writing and collective biography in this text. It analyses the strategy of witnessing in Bama's narrative, arguing that she functions as a witness to a community's suffering, and calls upon read…
The Darker Side of the Renaissance
Book Review| October 01 2006 The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization, Walter D. Mignolo. Pramod K. Nayar Pramod K. Nayar Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Folklore (2006) 119 (474): 498–499. https://doi.org/10.2307/4137659 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo…
The A to Z of the Renaissance
Part 1 Preface Part 2 Chronology Part 3 Introduction Part 4 THE DICTIONARY Part 5 Bibliography Part 6 About the Author
Sensual Relations
Reviewed by: Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory Pramod K. Nayar Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory. By David Howes. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2003. Pp. xvi + 283, illustrations, maps, bibliography, references, index.) David Howes's study of sensuality in social and cultural theory opens with a survey and critique of the textual—and therefore "disembodied"—turn in et…
Sociology’s Quest for ‘Society’
Sensual Relations
Book Review| January 01 2007 Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory, David Howes. Pramod K. Nayar Pramod K. Nayar Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Folklore (2007) 120 (475): 121–123. https://doi.org/10.2307/4137892 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Cit…
Rhetoric and Wonder in English Travel Writing, 1560-1613
Trauma, Testimony, and Human Rights
English Writing and India, 1600-1920
This book explores the formations and configurations of British colonial discourse on India through a reading of prose narratives of the 1600-1920 period. Arguing that colonial discourse often relied on aesthetic devices in order to describe and assert a degree of narrative control over Indian landscape, Pramod Nayar demonstrates how aesthetics furnished a vocabulary and representational modes for the British to construct particular images of Ind…
Brutal Reasoning
Early modern English thinkers were fascinated by the subject of animal rationality, even before the appearance of Descartes's Discourse on the Method (1637) and its famous declaration of the automatism of animals. But as Erica Fudge relates in Brutal Reasoning, the discussions were not as straightforward-or as reflexively anthropocentric-as has been assumed. Surveying a wide range of texts-religious, philosophical, literary, even comic-Fudge expl…
Object Protocols
At one point in his account of his stay in India, Sir Thomas Roe, ambassador from the court of King James I to the Mughal Emperor Jahangir, is asked by the emperor to show him his locket. Inside the little ornament is a portrait of Roe's wife. Jahangir inquires about the identity of the woman in the portrait and Roe, for some inexplicable reason, describes her as a dead friend (Roe 222), when in fact it was his wife, very much alive, whom he had …
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