Rajeswari Sunder Rajan
Schaffner Distinguished Visiting Professor
We were honored to welcome Professor Rajeswari Sunder Rajan to campus as the Schaffner Distinguished Visiting Professor in Spring 2022. Professor Sunder Rajan presented two public lectures relating to a forthcoming book on the ‘new’ Indian novel in English, the fiction that appeared in the wake of the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981).
Whiteness Envy
Postcolonial Rivalry, Nation and Gender
The first lecture, “Whiteness Envy: Postcolonial Rivalry, Nation and Gender,” concerned the postcolonial version of the “colonial encounter” in four Anglophone novels of the 1980s and early 1990s, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Amitav Ghosh’s Shadow Lines, Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August, and Rukun Advani’s Beethoven among the Cows. ‘Whiteness envy’ is the residue of the ruling class Indian’s engagement with colonialism in the form of ‘legacies of Empire’.
Inheriting the Nation
Fathers, Sons (and Daughters), and the Anxiety of Influence
The second lecture, “Inheriting the Nation: Fathers, Sons (and Daughters), and the Anxiety of Influence,” explored narratives of Indians writing in English in the late twentieth century in which one can discern the lineaments of a psychobiography that places their protagonists in a defining relationship with their immediate ancestors.
New Directions in Postcolonial Studies
Professor Sunder Rajan also taught a seminar, “New Directions in Postcolonial Studies,” to a group of graduate students from diverse programs and departments. The culmination of this seminar was a dynamic panel discussion hosted by the Nicholson Center featuring new voices in Postcolonial Studies – Hadji Bakara, Upasana Dutta, Kaneesha Parsard, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, and Jini Kim Watson – debating possible futures for the field.