Ulka Anjaria
Biographic Data
| ID | 1484743 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ulka Anjaria |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ulka |
| FAMILY NAME | Anjaria |
| SIGNATURE | ANJARIA U |
| AFFILIATIONS | Brandeis University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5290-8852 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 16 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 10 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
About the Volume Editors
Copyright Page
The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures
The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures is a compilation of scholarship on Indian literature from the 19th century to the present in a range of Indian languages. On one hand, because of reasons associated with national academic structures, publishing resources, and global visibility, English writing gets privileged over all the other linguistic traditions in the scholarship on Indian literatures. On the other hand, within the scholarship…
Bad Subjects of Good Freedoms
In Mukti Lakhi Mangharam’s book, Freedom Inc.: Gendered Capitalism in New Indian Literature and Culture , she identifies “Freedom Inc.” as a neoliberal celebration of individual empowerment that contrasts with the multiple ways people have imagined freedom in a longer history of Indian literature and philosophy, which are much more open to collective empowerment and political transformation. This critique is certainly valid, but where in it is th…
Mazaa
The goal of this special section of South Asia is to generate new ways to describe and theorise mazaa, a Hindi-Urdu word that can mean fun, pleasure and play. Scholarly writing often treats fun and pleasure as either frivolous, and therefore irrelevant, or as symbols of a more important social phenomenon. At times, this is motivated by political critique; researchers often believe that entertainment necessarily supports the status quo. At other t…
Queering the Indian Novel
In September 2018, Section 377 of the colonial-era penal code was ruled unconstitutional by the Indian Supreme Court, at long last decriminalising homosexuality in the country. By most accounts, th
Notes on the Indian Contemporary
The Persistence of Realism
The Persistence of Realism Ulka Anjaria (bio) A review of Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism. New York: Verso, 2013. Against the myriad negative definitions of realism advanced by scholars—realism as not naturalism, romance, modernism—Fredric Jameson suggests a dialectical model in which realism emerges by means of its opposites: at one end, from récit, “the narrative situation itself and the telling of a tale as such” (10) and, at the ot…
Realism in the Twentieth-Century Indian Novel
Relationships which have no name’
This essay argues that popular film of the 1970s opened up a space for representing new kinds of social relationships specifically by means of its use of melodramatic formulas. Against a dominant periodization of the decade which emphasizes rupture, I argue that over the course of the long 1970s we see a process of repetition and resignification whereby formulas such as the 'lost-and-found' plot and the love triangle were re-presented and their c…
Staging Realism and the Ambivalence of Nationalism in the Colonial Novel
This essay moves away from accounts of social realism, which privilege its political aims over its aesthetic innovations. I argue that social realism written under colonialism was part of a larger intellectual project to rethink the desirability and content of nationalism by testing the limitations and plasticity of the realist mode. I look specifically at moments of self-referentiality in social realist writing as well as in the repeated claims …
Text, genre, society
This paper proposes a renewed, interdisciplinary approach to the study of popular Hindi film, which uses the notion of genre to understand the relationship between individual films and social questions in contemporary India at large. We argue that ‘text’, ‘genre’, and ‘society’ are three crucial nodes that allow us to access the many levels at which individual films and groups of texts make meaning. The first half of the paper outlines three read…
A Literary Kartography
Mazaa
The goal of this special section of South Asia is to generate new ways to describe and theorise mazaa, a Hindi-Urdu word that can mean fun, pleasure and play. Scholarly writing often treats fun and pleasure as either frivolous, and therefore irrelevant, or as symbols of a more important social phenomenon. At times, this is motivated by political critique; researchers often believe that entertainment necessarily supports the status quo. At other t…
Text, genre, society
This paper proposes a renewed, interdisciplinary approach to the study of popular Hindi film, which uses the notion of genre to understand the relationship between individual films and social questions in contemporary India at large. We argue that ‘text’, ‘genre’, and ‘society’ are three crucial nodes that allow us to access the many levels at which individual films and groups of texts make meaning. The first half of the paper outlines three read…
Relationships which have no name’
This essay argues that popular film of the 1970s opened up a space for representing new kinds of social relationships specifically by means of its use of melodramatic formulas. Against a dominant periodization of the decade which emphasizes rupture, I argue that over the course of the long 1970s we see a process of repetition and resignification whereby formulas such as the 'lost-and-found' plot and the love triangle were re-presented and their c…
Queering the Indian Novel
In September 2018, Section 377 of the colonial-era penal code was ruled unconstitutional by the Indian Supreme Court, at long last decriminalising homosexuality in the country. By most accounts, th
A Literary Kartography
Text, genre, society
This paper proposes a renewed, interdisciplinary approach to the study of popular Hindi film, which uses the notion of genre to understand the relationship between individual films and social questions in contemporary India at large. We argue that ‘text’, ‘genre’, and ‘society’ are three crucial nodes that allow us to access the many levels at which individual films and groups of texts make meaning. The first half of the paper outlines three read…
A Literary Kartography
Staging Realism and the Ambivalence of Nationalism in the Colonial Novel
This essay moves away from accounts of social realism, which privilege its political aims over its aesthetic innovations. I argue that social realism written under colonialism was part of a larger intellectual project to rethink the desirability and content of nationalism by testing the limitations and plasticity of the realist mode. I look specifically at moments of self-referentiality in social realist writing as well as in the repeated claims …
Realism in the Twentieth-Century Indian Novel
Relationships which have no name’
This essay argues that popular film of the 1970s opened up a space for representing new kinds of social relationships specifically by means of its use of melodramatic formulas. Against a dominant periodization of the decade which emphasizes rupture, I argue that over the course of the long 1970s we see a process of repetition and resignification whereby formulas such as the 'lost-and-found' plot and the love triangle were re-presented and their c…
The Persistence of Realism
The Persistence of Realism Ulka Anjaria (bio) A review of Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism. New York: Verso, 2013. Against the myriad negative definitions of realism advanced by scholars—realism as not naturalism, romance, modernism—Fredric Jameson suggests a dialectical model in which realism emerges by means of its opposites: at one end, from récit, “the narrative situation itself and the telling of a tale as such” (10) and, at the ot…
Notes on the Indian Contemporary
Queering the Indian Novel
In September 2018, Section 377 of the colonial-era penal code was ruled unconstitutional by the Indian Supreme Court, at long last decriminalising homosexuality in the country. By most accounts, th
Mazaa
The goal of this special section of South Asia is to generate new ways to describe and theorise mazaa, a Hindi-Urdu word that can mean fun, pleasure and play. Scholarly writing often treats fun and pleasure as either frivolous, and therefore irrelevant, or as symbols of a more important social phenomenon. At times, this is motivated by political critique; researchers often believe that entertainment necessarily supports the status quo. At other t…
About the Volume Editors
Copyright Page
The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures
The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures is a compilation of scholarship on Indian literature from the 19th century to the present in a range of Indian languages. On one hand, because of reasons associated with national academic structures, publishing resources, and global visibility, English writing gets privileged over all the other linguistic traditions in the scholarship on Indian literatures. On the other hand, within the scholarship…
Bad Subjects of Good Freedoms
In Mukti Lakhi Mangharam’s book, Freedom Inc.: Gendered Capitalism in New Indian Literature and Culture , she identifies “Freedom Inc.” as a neoliberal celebration of individual empowerment that contrasts with the multiple ways people have imagined freedom in a longer history of Indian literature and philosophy, which are much more open to collective empowerment and political transformation. This critique is certainly valid, but where in it is th…
Art (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Aesthetics (6 works) · History (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Political science (5 works) · South Asian Cinema and Culture (5 works) · Law (4 works)