Suman Gupta
Biographic Data
| ID | 3734553 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Suman Gupta |
| GIVEN NAMES | Suman |
| FAMILY NAME | Gupta |
| SIGNATURE | GUPTA S |
| AFFILIATIONS | The Open University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4722-6077 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 45 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 19 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 43 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Collective Principles and the Formation of the Internet: Cultural Influences and Historical Impacts (Beginnings to 2010)
Brazil: The real dystopia project. Disjunctures, pandemics, and politics under Bolsonaro
Brazil under President Bolsonaro is an extreme case of multiple system failures that bring the country to the brink of collapse. It has a tremendous heuristic potential as a prefiguration of what the “post-pandemic world” could be like. It is “good to think with”. Experimentally, the article submits current events to a disjuncture analysis that gathers various perspectives and fragments into a literary montage
The Logic of "Social Enterprise": The Big Issue Organization and New Labour Policy at the Millennial Juncture
This paper explores the emergence of and policies and practices underpinning ‘social enterprise’ in Britain: that is, the concept that businesses could provide social services and benefits while returning profits to those who have invested in them. This paper argues that, in Britain, the concept was massaged into existence and adopted as a business and policy model at a particular historical juncture, in the later 1990s and early 2000s. The proce…
Resilience” as a policy keyword: Arts Council England and austerity
This article examines how “resilience” appeared and became embedded as a keyword in Arts Council England’s (ACE) policy discourse from 2010, initially in response to the financial crisis in Britain and the government’s call for austerity. The general dynamic of what we call policy keywords here is thereby exemplified, while throwing light on Arts policy making at a specific historical juncture in Britain. Some of the features of such policy keywo…
Political Catchphrases and Contemporary History: A Critique of New Normals
The University as a Political Site: 1968 And Now
This article offers a polemical comparison between conceptualizations of the University in the late 1960s and now. It has two main sections. The first and more substantial of these sections focuses on the left-wing student movements of the 1960s. These were underpinned by an understanding of the University as a political site: that is, an institutional formation and space structured by the ruling order. As such, the University was considered a lo…
Creative Writing Programmes and Patronage
Creative Writing programmes in universities now offer both an education for and employment to literary writers. This papers asks how literary writers apprehend their relatively recently institutionalised position, as university staff and students. The concept of ‘patronage’, it is argued, offers a useful way into reflecting upon such academic institutionalisation. The argument is presented in three parts. The first outlines some of the conceptual…
On the cusp of mediating poverty: Phenomenal Experience and Fear
This paper presents some conceptual observations on how the condition of poverty is brought to public attention and discussed, i.e. on mediations of poverty. It is proposed that such mediation is largely monopolised by those who are not-poor, though attempts to describe the not-poor as a category call for circumspection. As such, mediations are based on preconceptions which are seldom examined carefully. These preconceptions are dubbed phenomenal…
Indian student protests and the nationalist-neoliberal nexus
This article discusses the wider relevance of recent, 2014 and onwards, student protests in Indian higher education institutions, with the global neoliberal reorganisation of the sector in mind. The argument is tracked from specific high-profile junctures of student protests toward their grounding in the national/state level situation and then their ultimate bearing on the prevailing global condition. In particular, this article considers present…
Protests, repression, restructuring: Contemplating Indian higher education in 2018
Special Issue Editors' Afterword. Presents an update on student protests in Indian universities and assesses central government level policy changes in Higher Education funding and management in 2018
On race: 34 Conversations in a Time of Crisis
The rising tide of racial discord in the United States (USA) weighs heavily on this volume. It presents 34 interviews with highly regarded intellectuals whose work has delved concepts of race and t...
Introduction: European crises: contemporary nationalisms and the language of “race
The Introduction begins by outlining the general theme of this special issue, “Race and Crisis”. It then moves to examine populist right-wing politics from 2015. Of the various ways in which the rise of such politics could be charted in this period, here the “success” of anti-immigrant and anti-E.U. parties in national-level elections is the focus. Success is understood in terms of share of the popular vote at national level, and the appeal of th…
Usurping Suicide: The Political Resonances of Individual Deaths
‘Sometimes the depth of an economic crisis can only be fathomed when suicide, that most personal of acts, accrues political meaning and consequence. The authors bring committed insight to political suicides in our time, from Tunisia to Syntagma Square.’
Media Representations of Anti-Austerity Protests in the EU: Grievances, Identities and Agency
A perspectiva da pensativa traça de livro quanto à pesquisa literária e linguística
Trata-se da tradução da conferência de abertura do XXXI Encontro Nacional da ANPOLL, pronunciada pelo Professor Doutor Suman Gupta (Open University) em 29 de julho de 2016 no Centro de Conferências da Universidade Estadual de Campinas. Gupta discute a herança filológica como horizonte das práticas acadêmicas correntes nos estudos literários, suas transformações e possibilidades de renovação
The Cultures of Economic Migration
Cultures of Economic Migration: International Perspectives
Indian Commercial Fiction in English
The means of production for literature in English have seen significant changes in India since the late 1980s. A remarkable proliferation of both independent and international publishers with “Indian English literature” — particularly fiction — lists has taken place. In this regard the current phase of development can be traced back to the independent publisher Ravi Dayal’s (established 1988) success with Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1988) an…
Rules of Bibliographical Sociology’s Method
I should, of course, carry on with the kind of case studies of “uncultured books” which occupy the previous seven chapters. Various areas of contemporary Indian print circulations could repay close attention and analysis. An enticing array of leadership guidebooks, sex manuals, biographies of VIPs (“spiritual” or down-to-earth), astrology readers, almanacs, religious tracts, political pamphlets, children’s story collections, language learning gui…
On the Indian Readers of Hitler’s Mein Kampf
Every once in a while a newsworthy “controversy” appears which has to do with how Adolf Hitler and Nazism feature in Indian political and cultural discourses. Since 2000, these have included the making of the Bombay film Dear Friend Hitler (2011, dir. Rakesh Ranjan Kumar, later renamed Gandhi to Hitler ); Gujarat Chief Minister (Prime Minister of India from 2014) Narendra Modi being compared to Hitler (or Goebbels) after the 2002 Gujarat riots, a…
Indian Vernacular Pulp Fiction in English Translation
Amidst the enormous variety and scale of Indian print productions, a relatively small — indeed miniscule — area attracted inordinate attention in Indian newspapers and magazines around 2010. A smattering of English translations from “pulp fiction” in Indian vernaculars appeared in the market. In vernacular book circuits such works have usually been cheaply and prolifically produced, publicized and packaged to highlight their sensational contents,…
Keywords and Preliminaries
The following seven chapters of this study analyse the social significance of five kinds of English-language books which are produced, circulated and received in India with varying but marked degrees of market success. Their significance is generally played down or entirely neglected by academic researchers, which is itself a matter of some interest here. The first of these, which I call “commercial fiction” in English, has received occasional an…
Framing Group Discussion Guidebooks
The chain of observations that follow in this and the next chapter was set off by a number of books which I had picked up in Delhi in 2012: low-end guidebooks for Group Discussions (GD for those who don’t have the time to say “group discussions”) targeting candidates for junior-level corporate employment and admission to business schools. In typical academic fashion I should now clarify what those books are and justify my interest in them — inter…
Approaching Public Sector “Value Education” Publications
In introducing his The Footnote: A Curious History (1997), Anthony Grafton made the following observation: Once the historian writes with footnotes, historical narrative tells a distinctively modern, double story. Traditional political historians, in the ancient world and in the Renaissance, wrote from within a rhetorical tradition, as statesmen or generals addressing their peers. The histories they produced reflected far more interest in virtue …
Mapping Public Sector “Value Education” Publications
Let me start with some self-reporting publications, which as a category represent the heart of the Government’s business: in this instance, records of “value education” policies and directives. I map the connections between some public sector publications in this area by focusing on one as a sort of focal point, in relation to which others (from before and after) can be placed. This publication also provides a focal point in relation to which oth…
Introduction: European crises: contemporary nationalisms and the language of “race
The Introduction begins by outlining the general theme of this special issue, “Race and Crisis”. It then moves to examine populist right-wing politics from 2015. Of the various ways in which the rise of such politics could be charted in this period, here the “success” of anti-immigrant and anti-E.U. parties in national-level elections is the focus. Success is understood in terms of share of the popular vote at national level, and the appeal of th…
On race: 34 Conversations in a Time of Crisis
The rising tide of racial discord in the United States (USA) weighs heavily on this volume. It presents 34 interviews with highly regarded intellectuals whose work has delved concepts of race and t...
Indian student protests and the nationalist-neoliberal nexus
This article discusses the wider relevance of recent, 2014 and onwards, student protests in Indian higher education institutions, with the global neoliberal reorganisation of the sector in mind. The argument is tracked from specific high-profile junctures of student protests toward their grounding in the national/state level situation and then their ultimate bearing on the prevailing global condition. In particular, this article considers present…
Resilience” as a policy keyword: Arts Council England and austerity
This article examines how “resilience” appeared and became embedded as a keyword in Arts Council England’s (ACE) policy discourse from 2010, initially in response to the financial crisis in Britain and the government’s call for austerity. The general dynamic of what we call policy keywords here is thereby exemplified, while throwing light on Arts policy making at a specific historical juncture in Britain. Some of the features of such policy keywo…
Big issues around a small-scale phenomenon: Vernacular pulp fiction in English translation for Indian readers
This paper explores the implications of the recent appearance of some Indian vernacular pulp fiction texts in English translation for Indian readers. As background, the first of three main sections outlines the current scope of Indian Translation Studies, and also briefly examines recent thinking about the position of English in India. The second section examines the habitual Indian English-readers’ perspective of such pulp fiction in translation…
Sociological Speculations on the Professions of Children's Literature
This essay examines the academic institutionalization and the affiliated professionalization of children's literature. A sociological analysis of this area is attempted, with the larger context of academic enquiry and associated professionalism in our world in mind, and with an awareness of the ideological imperatives implicit therein. Three directions are explored to assess the current position of children's literature. These are: children's lit…
Reinscribing Nation-People in Anthologies of Indian English Poetry
On Literary Biography and Biografiends
HE LITERARY BIOGRAPHY is in the market now. One recognizes that there has been a boom of works of literary biography recently. Given the nature of markets in general, one feels inclined to believe that producers and consumers have reached a certain consensus on what literary biography is or should be. One suspects that the market, with all its research facilities and propaganda controls, might possibly have created or manipulated this consensus. …
Poems
Reinscribing Nation-People in Anthologies of Indian English Poetry
Re-reading Harry Potter
"This is the first extended, text-based analysis of the social and political implications of the Harry Potter phenomenon. The book's arguments are primarily based on close readings of the first four Harry Potter books and the first two films. This study does not assume that the phenomenon concerns children alone, or should be lightly dismissed as a matter of pure entertainment. The amount of money, media coverage and ideological unease involved i…
Re-Reading Harry Potter
The Beginning
Through most of this text-to-world analysis of the Harry Potter books I have suggested that there is an underlying theme that connects up observations about races, servitude, sexual desire, class, advertisements made above; and that this underlying theme would take me back to the preoccupation with unthinkingness with which this essay started. It also leads to a possible explanation of the Harry Potter phenomenon. In this chapter I attempt finall…
Sociological Speculations on the Professions of Children's Literature
This essay examines the academic institutionalization and the affiliated professionalization of children's literature. A sociological analysis of this area is attempted, with the larger context of academic enquiry and associated professionalism in our world in mind, and with an awareness of the ideological imperatives implicit therein. Three directions are explored to assess the current position of children's literature. These are: children's lit…
Conclusion: Questions and Prospects
Beyond textual expressions which chart the entrenchment of social constructionist identity politics in literary studies — and arguably more widely in the humanities and social sciences — lie other relatively intractable, unrecorded, transient, and yet familiarly institutional expressions. The recorded tracings of Theory-‘against Theory’-‘after Theory’ developments, of self-announcements, of textbook and anthology production, of canon debates, con…
The Cultures of Economic Migration: International Perspectives
Contents: Preface Introduction: socio-cultural attitudes to migration and the academic disposition of migration studies, Suman Gupta. Part I Europe: Open borders: the case against immigration controls, Teresa Hayter Economic migrant or hyphenated British? Writing about difference in London's East End, John Eade Outsourcing and migrational anxieties in discourse perspectives, Tope OmonA-yi Economic satisfaction and nostalgic laments: the language …
Social Constructionist Identity Politics and Literary Studies
This study presents a critique of social constructionist identity politics, which is distinguished from specific identity-based political positions, from within and with social constructionist commitm
Writing China
Li Rui, Mo Yan, Yan Lianke and Lin Bai: Four Contemporary Chinese Writers Interviewed
Translated from the Chinese by Xiao Cheng Li Rui, Mo Yan, Yan Lianke and Lin Bai are among the most highly regarded and widely discussed authors of contemporary Chinese literary fiction. They are a
Conceptualising the Art of Communist Times
The relative neglect that art from the communist period of former Eastern Bloc countries suffers now has much to do with the dominant ideologies of the present and the consequent preconceptions and framings that have been retrospectively imposed. This article argues the need for critical analysis of such preconceptions and framings themselves, and of their ideological underpinnings. Three sections take up different modes of retrospective disposal…
Critical Practice in the English Studies Classroom: Observations in Bulgaria
This paper argues that the classroom is a critically salient space for English Studies in ordinarily non-Anglophone contexts, where disciplinary boundaries are negotiated in ways that are redefining the discipline. In other words, in such contexts the classroom is not simply a space where the discipline as it is currently constituted or determined by advanced research and scholarly formations is conveyed, but is a space within which the disciplin…
Contemporary Literature: The Basics
‘Contemporary Literature’ is among the most popular areas of literary study but it can be a difficult one to define. This book equips readers with the necessary tools to take an analytical and systematic approach to contemporary texts. The author provides answers to some of the critical questions in the field: What makes a literary text contemporary? Is it possible to have a canon of contemporary literature? How does a reader’s location affect th…
Big issues around a small-scale phenomenon: Vernacular pulp fiction in English translation for Indian readers
This paper explores the implications of the recent appearance of some Indian vernacular pulp fiction texts in English translation for Indian readers. As background, the first of three main sections outlines the current scope of Indian Translation Studies, and also briefly examines recent thinking about the position of English in India. The second section examines the habitual Indian English-readers’ perspective of such pulp fiction in translation…
Indian Commercial Fiction in English
The means of production for literature in English have seen significant changes in India since the late 1980s. A remarkable proliferation of both independent and international publishers with “Indian English literature” — particularly fiction — lists has taken place. In this regard the current phase of development can be traced back to the independent publisher Ravi Dayal’s (established 1988) success with Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1988) an…
Rules of Bibliographical Sociology’s Method
I should, of course, carry on with the kind of case studies of “uncultured books” which occupy the previous seven chapters. Various areas of contemporary Indian print circulations could repay close attention and analysis. An enticing array of leadership guidebooks, sex manuals, biographies of VIPs (“spiritual” or down-to-earth), astrology readers, almanacs, religious tracts, political pamphlets, children’s story collections, language learning gui…
On the Indian Readers of Hitler’s Mein Kampf
Every once in a while a newsworthy “controversy” appears which has to do with how Adolf Hitler and Nazism feature in Indian political and cultural discourses. Since 2000, these have included the making of the Bombay film Dear Friend Hitler (2011, dir. Rakesh Ranjan Kumar, later renamed Gandhi to Hitler ); Gujarat Chief Minister (Prime Minister of India from 2014) Narendra Modi being compared to Hitler (or Goebbels) after the 2002 Gujarat riots, a…
Indian Vernacular Pulp Fiction in English Translation
Amidst the enormous variety and scale of Indian print productions, a relatively small — indeed miniscule — area attracted inordinate attention in Indian newspapers and magazines around 2010. A smattering of English translations from “pulp fiction” in Indian vernaculars appeared in the market. In vernacular book circuits such works have usually been cheaply and prolifically produced, publicized and packaged to highlight their sensational contents,…
Keywords and Preliminaries
The following seven chapters of this study analyse the social significance of five kinds of English-language books which are produced, circulated and received in India with varying but marked degrees of market success. Their significance is generally played down or entirely neglected by academic researchers, which is itself a matter of some interest here. The first of these, which I call “commercial fiction” in English, has received occasional an…
Framing Group Discussion Guidebooks
The chain of observations that follow in this and the next chapter was set off by a number of books which I had picked up in Delhi in 2012: low-end guidebooks for Group Discussions (GD for those who don’t have the time to say “group discussions”) targeting candidates for junior-level corporate employment and admission to business schools. In typical academic fashion I should now clarify what those books are and justify my interest in them — inter…
Approaching Public Sector “Value Education” Publications
In introducing his The Footnote: A Curious History (1997), Anthony Grafton made the following observation: Once the historian writes with footnotes, historical narrative tells a distinctively modern, double story. Traditional political historians, in the ancient world and in the Renaissance, wrote from within a rhetorical tradition, as statesmen or generals addressing their peers. The histories they produced reflected far more interest in virtue …
Mapping Public Sector “Value Education” Publications
Let me start with some self-reporting publications, which as a category represent the heart of the Government’s business: in this instance, records of “value education” policies and directives. I map the connections between some public sector publications in this area by focusing on one as a sort of focal point, in relation to which others (from before and after) can be placed. This publication also provides a focal point in relation to which oth…
Low-End Group Discussion Guidebooks and Kunjis
In contemplating Group Discussion guidebooks I am a bit undecided about whether these should be regarded as textbooks (i.e. whether guidebooks are a subset of textbooks) or whether these are distinctively guidebooks. Textbooks could be thought of as presenting an existing area of knowledge in an organized fashion, predominantly for the institutional purposes of learning and teaching (for education at some level). The emphasis is on outlining an a…
Sociology (24 works) · Political science (20 works) · History (19 works) · Law (19 works) · Art (16 works) · Politics (15 works) · Literature (13 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Political economy (8 works) · Psychology (8 works)