Approaches to Teaching the Works of Amitav Ghosh
- Editors: Gaurav Desai, John Hawley
- Pages: 254
- Published: 2019
- ISBN: 9781603293976 (Paperback)
The prizewinning author of novels, nonfiction, and hybrid texts, Amitav Ghosh grew up in India and trained as an anthropologist. His works have been translated into over thirty languages. They cross and mix a number of genres, from science fiction to the historical novel, incorporating ethnohistory and travelogue and even recuperating dead languages. His subjects include climate change, postcolonial identities, translocation, migration, oceanic spaces, and the human interface with the environment.
Part 1 of this volume discusses editions of Ghosh’s works and the scholarship on Ghosh. The essays in part 2, “Approaches,” present ideas for teaching his works through considerations of postcolonial feminism, historicity in the novels, environmentalism, language, sociopolitical conflict, genre, intersectional reading, and the ethics of colonized subjecthood. Guidance for teaching Ghosh in different contexts, such as general education, world literature, or single-author classes, is provided.
Kanika Batra
Russell A. Berman
Ned Bertz
Vincent van Bever Donker
Vedita Cowaloosur
Smita Das
Debjani Ganguly
Robbie B. H. Goh
Ambreen Hai
Ben Holgate
Adele Holoch
Alan Johnson
Suchitra Mathur
Arnapurna Rath
Roopika Risam
Sneharika Roy
Albeena Shakil
Yumna Siddiqi
Jonathan Steinwand
Emily Stone
John J. Su
Hilary Thompson
Acknowledgments (vii)
Introduction (1)
PART ONE: MATERIALS
PART TWO: APPROACHES
Contexts and Histories
Ghosh, The Shadow Lines, and the Indian-English Novel (19)
Opium and Indian Ocean Worlds: The Scale of the Historical Novel in Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy (26)
Language in the Ibis Trilogy (38)
Sailing across Antique Seas: Ideas of Historicity in the Writings of Ghosh (46)
Teaching between Ethics and Politics
Complicating Collusion and Resistance: Teaching Ghosh’s The Glass Palace, Intersectional Reading, and the Ethics of Colonized Subjecthood (55)
Citizen-Writer: Teaching Ghosh’s Ethnographies of Conflict (67)
The Tensions of Postcolonial Modernity: Enlightenment Rationality, Migration, and Gender in The Circle of Reason (75)
The Problematic of Fokir’s Death: Exploring the Limits of Postcolonial Feminism (85)
Flood of Fire, Empire, and the Ethics of Literary Memory (94)
Intimate Alterities in Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (99)
Transgressing the Limits: Genres and Forms
The Fiction of Ghosh and the Poetics of Literary Genres (107)
Imagining with Precision: Postcolonial Formalism in The Shadow Lines (114)
Metamorphoses and Transnational Realities in The Circle of Reason (121)
Ghosh in the Great Game: The Shadow Lines as Post-1857 and Post-9/11 Reading (129)
Scenes of Instruction
Narrative Form and Environmental Science: Teaching The Hungry Tide in the Core Curriculum (137)
Teaching Humor in a General Education Classroom with In an Antique Land (146)
Empty-Belly and Full-Stomach Environmentalism in the Introductory Literature Class: Teaching The Hungry Tide in the Anthropocene (152)
The Calcutta Chromosome in a Magical Realism Course (160)
India and Its Diaspora’s “Epic Relationship”: Investigating Ghosh’s Epic Genealogies in a World Literature Course (166)
Teaching Ghosh in an Upper-Level, Single-Author English Course (174)
Torrents of Tweets: Teaching the Ibis Trilogy with Digital Humanities Pedagogy (186)
Savvy, No Savvy: Reading River of Smoke in China (197)
Notes on Contributors (205)
Survey Participants (209)
Works Cited (211)
Index (241)
