Manisha Basu
Biographic Data
| ID | 3682074 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Manisha Basu |
| GIVEN NAMES | Manisha |
| FAMILY NAME | Basu |
| SIGNATURE | BASU M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7080-4272 |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 9 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 9 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
Mealies, mothers, and meats
This essay argues that the Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga’s 1988 debut novel, Nervous Conditions stages the twinned tropes of food and motherhood as important material and psychoaffective sites on which colonized subjects navigate questions of desire, identity, and resistance. Employing food regimes theory, “Mealies, Mothers, and Meats” shows that different maternal figures appear in the novel as stewardesses of foodways which are the corporeal ba…
Thick as Thieves
In her 2006 Young Adult novel, The Case of the Missing Marquess, Nancy Springer narrativises Enola Holmes as Sherlock Holmes’ intrepid and extraordinarily intelligent sister, a young woman with the ability to challenge even that great detective's iconic deductive abilities. I suggest that this overtly feminist impulse in rewriting the Victorian world of Conan Doyle is supplemented in Springer's novel with a nod toward the politics of intersection…
The Rhetoric of Hindu India
This book examines the late twentieth-century rise of the urban, right-wing Hindu nationalist ideology known as metropolitan Hindutva. This ideology, the book assesses, aspires to be a pan-Indian, urban form that is home to the emerging, digitally enabled, technocratic middle classes of the nation. Through close analyses of the writings of a range of self-styled public intellectuals, from Arun Shourie and Swapan Dasgupta to Chetan Bhagat and Amis…
Rhetoric of Hindutva
"Examines the rise of the urban right-wing Hindu nationalist ideology in India called Hindutva between 1984 and 2004"
A Battle of the Books
A Battle of the Books:Linguistic Antagonisms and the Crisis of Postcolonial Secularism Manisha Basu Introduction In his contribution to a timely collection of essays entitled The Crisis of Secularism in India, Partha Chatterjee identifies a new element in what is increasingly being considered legitimate politics in contemporary South Asian contexts. This is the idea, he writes, "being voiced, not from the extremist fringes but from the very cente…
A Matter of Light and Shade
This essay reads exemplary instances of the fictional work of Indian novelist R. K. Narayan (1906-2001) as expressions of critical anachronism in a world literary marketplace that, despite claiming diversity as a global, even transcendental, value, remains committed to both the uniformity of literature as a conceptual form and the ubiquity of national models of cultural production. Narayan’s fictional world very deftly brings to light a plethora …
The Stuff that Realisms are Made on
R. K. Narayan's realism has been consistently read either as an expression of an authentic Indianness or as an expression of a deeply universalist consciousness. This essay shifts the terms of the debate to demonstrate that for Narayan, reality is an effect of the relationships of force between different linguistic environments as they interact and consolidate themselves against each other. More specifically, it is the particularities of Narayan'…
The Hamartia of Light and Shadow
The Hamartia of Light and Shadow: Susan Sontag in the Digital Age Manisha Basu Review of: Susan Sontag. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador, 2003. In the first of the six essays in On Photography (1977), Susan Sontag had claimed that after repeated exposure, photographs of atrocity became less real for their audience, and therefore less able to evoke sympathy. In her final book Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag moves, self-ad…
Aiming the Canon
Aiming the Canon: National Emergency and the Errant Courses of the Literary Manisha Basu (bio) William Spanos provocatively occasions his book, The Errant Art of Moby Dick: the Canon, the Cold War and the Struggle for American Studies with an untimely call for a thinking that attempts to wrestle with the failure of the oppositional momentum of contemporary theory in the face of a more ‘traditional’ discourse of canon formation. The call for such …
No prominent works on this page.
Aiming the Canon
Aiming the Canon: National Emergency and the Errant Courses of the Literary Manisha Basu (bio) William Spanos provocatively occasions his book, The Errant Art of Moby Dick: the Canon, the Cold War and the Struggle for American Studies with an untimely call for a thinking that attempts to wrestle with the failure of the oppositional momentum of contemporary theory in the face of a more ‘traditional’ discourse of canon formation. The call for such …
The Hamartia of Light and Shadow
The Hamartia of Light and Shadow: Susan Sontag in the Digital Age Manisha Basu Review of: Susan Sontag. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador, 2003. In the first of the six essays in On Photography (1977), Susan Sontag had claimed that after repeated exposure, photographs of atrocity became less real for their audience, and therefore less able to evoke sympathy. In her final book Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag moves, self-ad…
The Stuff that Realisms are Made on
R. K. Narayan's realism has been consistently read either as an expression of an authentic Indianness or as an expression of a deeply universalist consciousness. This essay shifts the terms of the debate to demonstrate that for Narayan, reality is an effect of the relationships of force between different linguistic environments as they interact and consolidate themselves against each other. More specifically, it is the particularities of Narayan'…
A Battle of the Books
A Battle of the Books:Linguistic Antagonisms and the Crisis of Postcolonial Secularism Manisha Basu Introduction In his contribution to a timely collection of essays entitled The Crisis of Secularism in India, Partha Chatterjee identifies a new element in what is increasingly being considered legitimate politics in contemporary South Asian contexts. This is the idea, he writes, "being voiced, not from the extremist fringes but from the very cente…
A Matter of Light and Shade
This essay reads exemplary instances of the fictional work of Indian novelist R. K. Narayan (1906-2001) as expressions of critical anachronism in a world literary marketplace that, despite claiming diversity as a global, even transcendental, value, remains committed to both the uniformity of literature as a conceptual form and the ubiquity of national models of cultural production. Narayan’s fictional world very deftly brings to light a plethora …
The Rhetoric of Hindu India
This book examines the late twentieth-century rise of the urban, right-wing Hindu nationalist ideology known as metropolitan Hindutva. This ideology, the book assesses, aspires to be a pan-Indian, urban form that is home to the emerging, digitally enabled, technocratic middle classes of the nation. Through close analyses of the writings of a range of self-styled public intellectuals, from Arun Shourie and Swapan Dasgupta to Chetan Bhagat and Amis…
Rhetoric of Hindutva
"Examines the rise of the urban right-wing Hindu nationalist ideology in India called Hindutva between 1984 and 2004"
Thick as Thieves
In her 2006 Young Adult novel, The Case of the Missing Marquess, Nancy Springer narrativises Enola Holmes as Sherlock Holmes’ intrepid and extraordinarily intelligent sister, a young woman with the ability to challenge even that great detective's iconic deductive abilities. I suggest that this overtly feminist impulse in rewriting the Victorian world of Conan Doyle is supplemented in Springer's novel with a nod toward the politics of intersection…
Mealies, mothers, and meats
This essay argues that the Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga’s 1988 debut novel, Nervous Conditions stages the twinned tropes of food and motherhood as important material and psychoaffective sites on which colonized subjects navigate questions of desire, identity, and resistance. Employing food regimes theory, “Mealies, Mothers, and Meats” shows that different maternal figures appear in the novel as stewardesses of foodways which are the corporeal ba…
Sociology (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Art (5 works) · History (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Literature (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · History (3 works) · Law (3 works) · Linguistics (3 works)