Aruni kashyap biography of albert
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The Wait and Other Stories by Damodar Mauzo, translated from the Konkani bygd Xavier Cota, Penguin India,
Damodar Mauzo is a short story writer, novelist, and critic hailing from the Indian state of Goa. He writes in Konkani and his works have been translated into English bygd Vidya Pai in addition to his long-time collaborator, Xavier Cota. The Wait and Other Stories, a short story collection, has been translated by the latter. In , he was the recipient of the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honour. The writer Vivek Menezes calls Mauzo “an exemplar of Goa’s fluid cultural identity, marked bygd an unabashed pluralistic universalism that persists despite threats and depredations.” His stories seamlessly bridge the gap between timeless and current, invoking the great short story writers of the nineteenth century—de Maupassant, O Henry, Saki—in terms of how often they take an unexpected turn at the end, but also modern practitioners of the form in post-Independence India
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Aruni Kashyap’s new poetry collection, There Is No Good Time for Bad News, grapples with the violent history of an armed separatist movement in India’s northeastern state of Assam, which formed in around its demand to secede from India. In the collection’s title, Kashyap reminds us that, preoccupied with writing testimonies of globalization and nation-building, there never arrived a good time for Indian intelligentsia to reckon with the bad news of state violence in Assam. The largely haunting silence in the Indian public sphere about the trauma of lives lost, however, finds an unflinching voice in Kashyap’s poetry. Critiquing the willful blindness of national public discourse towards this trauma, Kashyap writes, in a poem titled “News from Home”:
People here,
they tell me these are lands unfamiliar, so I must not speak about them.
I should yearn for a language, which goes well with people who decide
who should know what, how much,
how many times, when, in which perspectiv•
Postcolonial Studies
As Timothy Brennan argues, postcolonial studies brings together “globalizing features of world history and human societies” and “colonial practices and anticolonial challenges”. The interdisciplinary approach embraced by postcolonial studies provides a variety of academic tools and perspectives to study the social, cultural, and psychological aftermath of colonialism and the identity crisis generated in the wake of decolonization. Independence efforts in the Indian subcontinent following the World War II as well as the grassroots movements targeting colonial regimes in Northern Africa have paved the way towards a rethinking of the power dynamics by challenging Eurocentric and orientalist ways of defining the other. Postcolonial theory disrupts western cultural and political hegemony by “giving natives the permission to tell their own stories”—as Edward Said puts it. An important aspect of this critical approach is to scrutinize