Writing Disaster in South Asian Literature and Culture

This book examines disaster events (both man-made and natural) as represented in South Asian literature and culture. It attempts to locate the intricate ways in which disaster representation in literature and culture evince a core of conditional empathy and cosmopolitan imagination that are already dictated by statist regimes of power. Writing Disaster in South Asian Literature and Culture: The Limits of Empathy and Cosmopolitan Imagination looks at the myriad ways in which disaster events (both man-made and natural) are perceived and represented in South Asian literature and culture. This book explores the affective mechanisms of empathy and imaginary identification which are conditioned and reiterated by biopolitical statist regimes of power to preempt and coopt any radical agential or cognitive intervention which might be evinced by the event of the disaster. The contributors also examine South Asian disasters vis-a-vis the registers of ecological crises, migration events, civil and liberation wars, and pandemics to understand the multifarious ways in which such ‘disasters’ are used as tropes to peddle certain structures of interpellation in the collective consciousness.