States of Disconnect : : The China-India Literary Relation in the Twentieth Century / / Adhira Mangalagiri.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Columbia University Press Complete eBook-Package 2023
• VerfasserIn: Mangalagiri, Adhira,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Columbia University Press, , [2023]; ©2023
• Year of Publication: 2023
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource :; 8 b&w figures

In an interconnected world, literature moves through transnational networks, crosses borders, and bridges diverse cultures. In these ways, literature can bring people closer together. Today, as hopes for globalization wane and exclusionary nationalism is on the march, can literature still offer new ways of relating with others? Comparative literature has long been under the spell of circulation, contact, connectivity, and mobility—what if it instead sought out their antitheses?States of Disconnect examines the breakdown of transnationalism through readings of literary texts that express aversion to pairing ideas of China and India. Focusing on practices of comparison, Adhira Mangalagiri considers how these texts articulate the undesirability or impossibility of relating with national others, tracing portrayals of violence, silence, and distance. She proposes the concept of “disconnect”: a crisis of transnationalism perceptible in moments when a connection is severed, interrupted, or disavowed. Despite their apparent insularity, texts of disconnect offer possibilities for relating ethically across national borders while resisting both narrow nationalisms and globalized habits of thought. Reading a variety of largely untranslated twentieth-century Chinese and Hindi short stories, novels, and poems, Mangalagiri develops three new strategies for comparison—friction, ellipses, and contingency—that together comprise a critical vocabulary of disconnect. Foregrounding transnationalism’s discontents, States of Disconnect offers a different path by which literary texts can cultivate a critical sensibility for making sense of a world rife with division.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Note on Transliteration and Translation -- Introduction: States of Disconnect -- ONE Anatomy of Antagonism: The Indian Policeman in Chinese Literature -- TWO Revolution Redux: Agyeya’s China Stories -- THREE Dialogue and Its Discontents: 1950s Cultural Diplomacy Untold -- FOUR Word and World in Crisis: Hindi Texts of 1962 -- FIVE On Correspondence: Lu Xun and Premchand -- Conclusion: A Comparatist’s Guide to Disconnect -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index