Debjani Ganguly
Biographic Data
| ID | 3634960 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Debjani Ganguly |
| GIVEN NAMES | Debjani |
| FAMILY NAME | Ganguly |
| SIGNATURE | GANGULY D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Australian National University |
| ORCID | 0009-0003-3406-7449 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 27 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Drone Form and Techno-Futurities
What does it mean for humanity to inhabit a techno-planetary system in which it is not central? This essay will address a facet of this question by exploring the aesthetics of drone warfare. The drone features in my reading as a metonym for a techno-human continuum in which the human as an autonomous subject with interiority and capacity for ethical action appears as eminently dispensable. Aesthetic forms not only are informed by but also shape a…
War and Literary Studies
Angloglobalism, Multilingualism and World Literature
This essay explores the rise of global anglophone as a methodological rubric, and the place of English in global literary studies. My exposition pivots around a set of interwoven claims. While contemporary globalization has led to increasing linguistic homogenization, the rise of global anglophone does not herald the end of postcolonialism nor is it a force bent on erasing the cultural and linguistic diversity of literatures of the world. Rather,…
The Cambridge History of World Literature
World Literature is a vital part of twentieth-first century critical and comparative literary studies. As a field that engages seriously with function of literary studies in our global era, the study of World literature requires new approaches. The Cambridge History of World Literature is founded on the assumption that World Literature is not all literatures of the world nor a canonical set of globally successful literary works. It highlights sch…
Cambridge History of World Literature
Catastrophic Form and Planetary Realism
This essay explores the entanglement of radical humanisms and realist ontologies in theorizing catastrophe in the contemporary global novel. Both humanism and realism have been declared dead a few times this past century. I do not propose to rehearse this gesture, especially in an era when the imprint of the human is beginning to acquire geological and planetary proportions, and the boundaries of realism extend far beyond the ordinary visible rhy…
The Global Novel: Comparative Perspectives Introduction
The Global Novel:Comparative Perspectives Introduction Debjani Ganguly (bio) The novel looms large on the horizon of global literary studies. It not only travels well, but is also widely perceived as future-oriented and open-ended, ready to absorb within its polymorphous ambit the indeterminacy of the present. In April 2019, New Literary History hosted a symposium on "The Global Novel: Comparative Perspectives," with eight scholars who have exper…
This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form
Polysystems Redux: The Unfinished Business of World Literature
In responding to Muhsin al-Musawi’s two-part essay on the Arabic Republic of Letters, this essay proposes a rethinking of the world systems model in global literary studies in terms of a polysystems framework. Rather than trying to fit literary worlds—ancient, premodern, modern—within a single Euro-chronological frame culminating in a world capitalist systems model—where the non-European worlds appear as invariably inferior—it is worthwhile to se…
The Subaltern after Subaltern Studies: Genealogies and Transformations
Even if Subaltern Studies...begun 30 years ago has run its course, it has managed to scatter, reinvent and insert itself in several subsequent projects. 1 Partha Chatterjee, ‘After Subaltern Studies’
The World Novel, Mediated Wars and Exorbitant Witnessing
This essay traces the emergence of a new contemporary novel form at the conjunction of global violence in the wake of the Cold War, digital hyperconnectivity, and a mediated infrastructure of sympathy. Since the first Gulf War, and more so, in the rhetoric presaging the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have come to accept that there is very little difference between the technologies used to wage war and those used to view it. This essay argues th…
Limits of the Human
Modernity defines its civilisation and epoch, its political desires and ethical norms through the value and meaning of being human. It is in terms of the rights, needs and nature of a common humani
Deathworlds, the World Novel and the Human
Foundational to the English novel in the eighteenth century was a narrative grammar of the human structured around two ideas: sympathy and sovereignty. Linking these two were deliberations on the role of technology in determining the reach and extent of the sympathetic imagination. This essay reprises the novel's historical links with distant suffering and technologies of mediation – the staple of debates on the sentimental novel and the rise of …
Pain, Personhood and the Collective: Dalit Life Narratives
Dalit life narratives have gained prominence in the last two decades in line with the increasing visibility of Dalits in the Indian public sphere and their vociferous demands for a more just political and social order. This can be productively situated not just in the contemporary global context of the proliferation of narratives andtestimonios of human rights violations in other parts of the world, but also in the context of an emerging conversa…
Cultural Politics and Iconography: An Introduction
This collection of papers reflects on the many dimensions of contemporary narratives of iconography in public culture in Australia and Asia. The idea for the volume arose from a series of seminars held at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research in 2002. The series ‘Iconographies’ was convened by Penny Edwards and centred on research undertaken in the Asia-Pacific, with papers that interrogated national and cultural icons. Just as a biography might…
Literary globalism in the new millennium
Emily Apter The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006 289 pp ISBN 0 691 04997 1 Pb US$22.95 David Damrosch What Is World Literature? Princeton
Days in Rwanda, 1994: Trauma Aesthetics and Humanist Ethics in an Age of Terror
While we die with you watching us all the time, you live, you thrive Don't you get a feeling, sometimes, that you're living off our death
Pigments of the Imagination: Theorising, Performing and Historicising Mixed Race
On 28 August 2006, Time published an article called “Diving into the Gene Pool” by Carolina Miranda. Miranda, a Latin American by birth and a resident of New York, decided to test her genetic make
From Empire to Empire? Writing the Transnational Anglo-Indian Self in Australia
This paper situates late modern Anglo-Indian lifeworlds in Australia in a dialogue with the theoretical templates of globalisation and postcolonialism. More particularly it deploys contemporary Anglo-Indian life stories to challenge theoretical positions
Buddha, bhakti and superstition: A Post-Secular Reading of Dalit Conversion
This essay is an attempt to formulate ways of writing a revisionary ethnography of a religious conversion movement among a community of ex‐untouchable castes, called Mahars in India, from the point
History's Implosions: A Benjaminian Reading of Ambedkar
We secularists, it seems, know where we are going. We are on the road to nowhere: no illusions about eternal life, no need to pass a battery of tests to qualify for immortality, no worries about infinite boredom haunting the afterlife of a disembodied soul. Perhaps we compensate by clinging to an ethic of health and longevity. Perhaps some of us have even transfigured the promise of salvation into a doctrine of collective progress. Appearances de…
Can the dalit speak: Caste, postcoloniality and the new humanities
(2000). Can the dalit speak: Caste, postcoloniality and the new humanities? South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies: Vol. 23, Midnight to Millennium: Australia‐India Interconnections, pp. 43-62
Pain, Personhood and the Collective: Dalit Life Narratives
Dalit life narratives have gained prominence in the last two decades in line with the increasing visibility of Dalits in the Indian public sphere and their vociferous demands for a more just political and social order. This can be productively situated not just in the contemporary global context of the proliferation of narratives andtestimonios of human rights violations in other parts of the world, but also in the context of an emerging conversa…
Limits of the Human
Modernity defines its civilisation and epoch, its political desires and ethical norms through the value and meaning of being human. It is in terms of the rights, needs and nature of a common humani
Buddha, bhakti and superstition: A Post-Secular Reading of Dalit Conversion
This essay is an attempt to formulate ways of writing a revisionary ethnography of a religious conversion movement among a community of ex‐untouchable castes, called Mahars in India, from the point
History's Implosions: A Benjaminian Reading of Ambedkar
We secularists, it seems, know where we are going. We are on the road to nowhere: no illusions about eternal life, no need to pass a battery of tests to qualify for immortality, no worries about infinite boredom haunting the afterlife of a disembodied soul. Perhaps we compensate by clinging to an ethic of health and longevity. Perhaps some of us have even transfigured the promise of salvation into a doctrine of collective progress. Appearances de…
Catastrophic Form and Planetary Realism
This essay explores the entanglement of radical humanisms and realist ontologies in theorizing catastrophe in the contemporary global novel. Both humanism and realism have been declared dead a few times this past century. I do not propose to rehearse this gesture, especially in an era when the imprint of the human is beginning to acquire geological and planetary proportions, and the boundaries of realism extend far beyond the ordinary visible rhy…
From Empire to Empire? Writing the Transnational Anglo-Indian Self in Australia
This paper situates late modern Anglo-Indian lifeworlds in Australia in a dialogue with the theoretical templates of globalisation and postcolonialism. More particularly it deploys contemporary Anglo-Indian life stories to challenge theoretical positions
The Subaltern after Subaltern Studies: Genealogies and Transformations
Even if Subaltern Studies...begun 30 years ago has run its course, it has managed to scatter, reinvent and insert itself in several subsequent projects. 1 Partha Chatterjee, ‘After Subaltern Studies’
Cultural Politics and Iconography: An Introduction
This collection of papers reflects on the many dimensions of contemporary narratives of iconography in public culture in Australia and Asia. The idea for the volume arose from a series of seminars held at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research in 2002. The series ‘Iconographies’ was convened by Penny Edwards and centred on research undertaken in the Asia-Pacific, with papers that interrogated national and cultural icons. Just as a biography might…
Pigments of the Imagination: Theorising, Performing and Historicising Mixed Race
On 28 August 2006, Time published an article called “Diving into the Gene Pool” by Carolina Miranda. Miranda, a Latin American by birth and a resident of New York, decided to test her genetic make
Can the dalit speak: Caste, postcoloniality and the new humanities
(2000). Can the dalit speak: Caste, postcoloniality and the new humanities? South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies: Vol. 23, Midnight to Millennium: Australia‐India Interconnections, pp. 43-62
Can the dalit speak: Caste, postcoloniality and the new humanities
(2000). Can the dalit speak: Caste, postcoloniality and the new humanities? South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies: Vol. 23, Midnight to Millennium: Australia‐India Interconnections, pp. 43-62
History's Implosions: A Benjaminian Reading of Ambedkar
We secularists, it seems, know where we are going. We are on the road to nowhere: no illusions about eternal life, no need to pass a battery of tests to qualify for immortality, no worries about infinite boredom haunting the afterlife of a disembodied soul. Perhaps we compensate by clinging to an ethic of health and longevity. Perhaps some of us have even transfigured the promise of salvation into a doctrine of collective progress. Appearances de…
Buddha, bhakti and superstition: A Post-Secular Reading of Dalit Conversion
This essay is an attempt to formulate ways of writing a revisionary ethnography of a religious conversion movement among a community of ex‐untouchable castes, called Mahars in India, from the point
Days in Rwanda, 1994: Trauma Aesthetics and Humanist Ethics in an Age of Terror
While we die with you watching us all the time, you live, you thrive Don't you get a feeling, sometimes, that you're living off our death
Pigments of the Imagination: Theorising, Performing and Historicising Mixed Race
On 28 August 2006, Time published an article called “Diving into the Gene Pool” by Carolina Miranda. Miranda, a Latin American by birth and a resident of New York, decided to test her genetic make
From Empire to Empire? Writing the Transnational Anglo-Indian Self in Australia
This paper situates late modern Anglo-Indian lifeworlds in Australia in a dialogue with the theoretical templates of globalisation and postcolonialism. More particularly it deploys contemporary Anglo-Indian life stories to challenge theoretical positions
Literary globalism in the new millennium
Emily Apter The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006 289 pp ISBN 0 691 04997 1 Pb US$22.95 David Damrosch What Is World Literature? Princeton
Pain, Personhood and the Collective: Dalit Life Narratives
Dalit life narratives have gained prominence in the last two decades in line with the increasing visibility of Dalits in the Indian public sphere and their vociferous demands for a more just political and social order. This can be productively situated not just in the contemporary global context of the proliferation of narratives andtestimonios of human rights violations in other parts of the world, but also in the context of an emerging conversa…
Cultural Politics and Iconography: An Introduction
This collection of papers reflects on the many dimensions of contemporary narratives of iconography in public culture in Australia and Asia. The idea for the volume arose from a series of seminars held at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research in 2002. The series ‘Iconographies’ was convened by Penny Edwards and centred on research undertaken in the Asia-Pacific, with papers that interrogated national and cultural icons. Just as a biography might…
Limits of the Human
Modernity defines its civilisation and epoch, its political desires and ethical norms through the value and meaning of being human. It is in terms of the rights, needs and nature of a common humani
Deathworlds, the World Novel and the Human
Foundational to the English novel in the eighteenth century was a narrative grammar of the human structured around two ideas: sympathy and sovereignty. Linking these two were deliberations on the role of technology in determining the reach and extent of the sympathetic imagination. This essay reprises the novel's historical links with distant suffering and technologies of mediation – the staple of debates on the sentimental novel and the rise of …
The World Novel, Mediated Wars and Exorbitant Witnessing
This essay traces the emergence of a new contemporary novel form at the conjunction of global violence in the wake of the Cold War, digital hyperconnectivity, and a mediated infrastructure of sympathy. Since the first Gulf War, and more so, in the rhetoric presaging the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have come to accept that there is very little difference between the technologies used to wage war and those used to view it. This essay argues th…
Polysystems Redux: The Unfinished Business of World Literature
In responding to Muhsin al-Musawi’s two-part essay on the Arabic Republic of Letters, this essay proposes a rethinking of the world systems model in global literary studies in terms of a polysystems framework. Rather than trying to fit literary worlds—ancient, premodern, modern—within a single Euro-chronological frame culminating in a world capitalist systems model—where the non-European worlds appear as invariably inferior—it is worthwhile to se…
The Subaltern after Subaltern Studies: Genealogies and Transformations
Even if Subaltern Studies...begun 30 years ago has run its course, it has managed to scatter, reinvent and insert itself in several subsequent projects. 1 Partha Chatterjee, ‘After Subaltern Studies’
This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form
Catastrophic Form and Planetary Realism
This essay explores the entanglement of radical humanisms and realist ontologies in theorizing catastrophe in the contemporary global novel. Both humanism and realism have been declared dead a few times this past century. I do not propose to rehearse this gesture, especially in an era when the imprint of the human is beginning to acquire geological and planetary proportions, and the boundaries of realism extend far beyond the ordinary visible rhy…
The Global Novel: Comparative Perspectives Introduction
The Global Novel:Comparative Perspectives Introduction Debjani Ganguly (bio) The novel looms large on the horizon of global literary studies. It not only travels well, but is also widely perceived as future-oriented and open-ended, ready to absorb within its polymorphous ambit the indeterminacy of the present. In April 2019, New Literary History hosted a symposium on "The Global Novel: Comparative Perspectives," with eight scholars who have exper…
The Cambridge History of World Literature
World Literature is a vital part of twentieth-first century critical and comparative literary studies. As a field that engages seriously with function of literary studies in our global era, the study of World literature requires new approaches. The Cambridge History of World Literature is founded on the assumption that World Literature is not all literatures of the world nor a canonical set of globally successful literary works. It highlights sch…
Cambridge History of World Literature
War and Literary Studies
Angloglobalism, Multilingualism and World Literature
This essay explores the rise of global anglophone as a methodological rubric, and the place of English in global literary studies. My exposition pivots around a set of interwoven claims. While contemporary globalization has led to increasing linguistic homogenization, the rise of global anglophone does not herald the end of postcolonialism nor is it a force bent on erasing the cultural and linguistic diversity of literatures of the world. Rather,…
Drone Form and Techno-Futurities
What does it mean for humanity to inhabit a techno-planetary system in which it is not central? This essay will address a facet of this question by exploring the aesthetics of drone warfare. The drone features in my reading as a metonym for a techno-human continuum in which the human as an autonomous subject with interiority and capacity for ethical action appears as eminently dispensable. Aesthetic forms not only are informed by but also shape a…
Art (15 works) · Political science (15 works) · Sociology (15 works) · History (14 works) · Law (12 works) · Literature (11 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Aesthetics (7 works) · Politics (7 works) · Anthropology (6 works)