Mita Banerjee Books

Colonizers are driven into a state of panic by the circulation of a 'humble' chapati; a young girl's setting her family's shoes on fire seems comparable to a nuclear attack; a sleepwalker kills two hundred and eighteen turkeys just to be rid of them. Are these events of historical significancei The works of Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, and Bharati Mukherjee seem to suggest that this question might be answered in the affirmative. The anecdote fleshes out what historical facts must elide in their abstraction. This study proposes that the fiction of all three authors can be read through Rushdie's metaphor of the chutneyfication of history. In line with the lighting of shoes and the murder of turkeys, the chutney's presence is a playful, unhistorical one; a presence, however, which Rushdie, Ondaatje, and Mukherjee proceed to turn into an historical agent in its own right, in a fusion of postmodernist and postcolonialist politics. Contrary to the claim that revolutions can be made by bread alone, this study suggests that this postmodernist agency of postcolonial aporia may in fact be self-defeating, and that the rejection of communal resistance which emerges in its wake must be considered in a much more critical light.

This era is characterized by an unprecedented flow of goods, capital, and labor, challenging the boundaries of disciplines and encompassing spaces beyond the nation-state. This volume explores the implications of this opening of national borders for American and Canadian studies. However, caution is warranted; the concept of transnational studies risks overlooking the realities of border policing, especially post-September 11, 2001, and may obscure the nuances of citizenship rights and their absence. The denationalization of North American Studies presents a complex dynamic, highlighting that the nation-state remains relevant while also emphasizing the potential benefits of transcending borders, particularly in minority studies through transnational alliances. Additionally, the volume examines the notion of "Americanness." In a global landscape where U.S. influence pervades politics and culture, there is a danger that other cultural expressions may be perceived as mere imitations, or "virtually American," rather than authentic in their own right. This perspective necessitates a reassessment to foster a more dialogic understanding of what "America" signifies in today's world.

As a discipline, American Studies has certainly been one of the most dynamic fields not only of research but also of teaching. This volume argues that one reason for this dynamism lies in the refusal of American Studies practitioners, both in the U. S. and around the globe, to separate life from art and criticism. Fields such as postmodernism, life writing, ethnic studies, or ecocriticism derive their potential precisely from the politicized interrelation of personal experience and critical practice. To acknowledge this potential, many scholars of American Studies explore the complex ways in which their own location may inform their work. It is from this tension between lived experience and the textualization of this experience that American Studies derives its greatest productivity. This volume sets out to trace some of these issues, highlighting the many ways in which American Studies scholars have been „living American Studies,“ extending their fields beyond the narrow boundaries of traditional academia.

This book explores a remarkable parallelism in American literary and legal histories: the parallel between naturalism and naturalization. At the turn of the twentieth century, with the influx of unprecedented waves of immigration, the judiciary is at a loss to define who is „white“ and who is not. In the courts of law, „whiteness“ becomes a performance of cultural assimilability rather than a biological fact. It is this same cultural code of whiteness, this book argues, around which the literature of naturalism revolves by engaging in naturalization debate of its own.

This book asks a seemingly simple question: How has the creation of new fields such as medical humanities and narrative medicine changed the humanities themselves, and American Studies more specifically? Turning to the genre of life writing, this study sets out to chart spaces in which a dialogue between the humanities and the life sciences can emerge. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, life writing narratives such as Tito Mukhopadhyay’s ‘Beyond the Silence’, Temple Grandin’s ‘Thinking in Pictures’, or Michael J. Fox’s ‘Lucky Man’ show that self-description has often become inseparable from biomedical terminology. Linking life writing narratives to discussions in bioethics and exploring the links between autobiography and brain research, this book sets out to wonder whether the divide between the “two cultures” of the humanities and the life sciences may not itself have become obsolete.

Situated at the intersection between medical humanities, aging studies, autobiographical studies, disability studies and ethic studies, this book explores the fascination of centenarians' autobiographies for humanites research. It can be argued that the growing presence of centenarians' autobiographies on book markets across the globe may by rooted in the public's desire for positive images of aging, in contrast to the image of inevitable decay.

What do Charlie Chan and William Faulkner have in common? This study starts out from the assumption that there may well be a continuity between literature and popular culture in the racialized images they perpetuate. Looking at twentieth century American literature, film, music, and art, this book suggests that strategies of exclusion and of resistance are mutually constitutive. Where a 1920s Western audience yearned for exoticism, Josephine Baker donned a scanty costume of bird feathers and enchanted a white audience by singing to them from within a gilded cage. Looking at African American, Asian American, Chicano/a, and Native American cultural productions as constituting a rainbow coalition, this study seeks to chart out the terrain of a multi-ethnic nation, a nation to which, as El Vez, the Mexican Elvis, asserts, everyone is welcome - even the mainstream itself.

This volume explores the complexity, vibrancy, and contemporaneity of indigenous cultures today. It understands the concept of “Comparative Indigenous Studies” in such a transnational and interdisciplinary sense. It links indigenous communities in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and Asia. Bringing together scholars from the humanities and social sciences, from law, economics, cultural geography, and medicine, this book highlights the ways in which indigenous cultures have resisted, time and again, the myth of their own disappearance.

Reading the foundational texts of the American Renaissance and other nineteenth-century works through the lens of "literary minstrelsy" may initially seem counterintuitive, as it blends popular and literary cultures while emphasizing ethnic differences in these narratives. However, this book proposes a shift in perspective. Are figures like the strolling Indian in Thoreau's *Walden*, the Native physician in *The Scarlet Letter*, or the unkempt Mexican girl in Chopin's *The Awakening* merely incidental? Introducing the concept of "ethnic ventriloquism," the study argues that the commitment to democratic self-renewal in nineteenth-century America may be more reliant on ethnic influences than it appears. The nation's pledge to democracy could represent a white subject adopting an ethnic voice, akin to literary forms of brownface, redface, yellowface, or blackface. This re-examination of American literature seeks to uncover the true owner of the ethnic voice, envisioning a moment where this "real" voice emerges alongside the white ventriloquist. In doing so, it contemplates the logic of national self-definition, suggesting that the ethnic figure may not only be the source but, in a reversal of roles, the mastermind behind the narrative.