Manav Ratti | University of Oxford (original) (raw)

Papers by Manav Ratti

Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies, 2022

Review article (online first Dec. 7, 2023) by Asha Sen (University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire) of M... more Review article (online first Dec. 7, 2023) by Asha Sen (University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire) of Manav Ratti's The Postsecular Imagination, Rebekah Cumpsty's Postsecular Poetics, Roger McNamara's Secularism and the Crisis of Minority Identity in Postcolonial Literature, and Sagir Ali, Goutam Karmakar, and Nasima Islam (eds), Religion in South Asian Anglophone Literature.

Salman Rushdie in Context (Cambridge University Press), 2023

What are the wider contexts of how Rushdie deploys and critiques myths and mythologies in his nov... more What are the wider contexts of how Rushdie deploys and critiques myths
and mythologies in his novels? Mythologies from numerous religious, cultural, and national traditions, including Islamic, Hindu, Norse, Greek, Christian, and Persian, among others, have featured in Rushdie’s fiction from the very beginning. Mythologies allow Rushdie to represent in his fictional narratives the politics, intractability, and crises of postcolonial challenges, pressures, and fissures. These diverse challenges include the politics of immigration and the array of discriminations it can spawn, including xenophobia, classism, and racism; the conflicts between secular and religious world-views, including blasphemy, superstition, and censorship; and the very nature of postcolonial nationalism and nation-building, including reflections on diaspora, national belonging, and homelands.

Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory, 2022

Article by Rajgopal Saikumar. Abstract: In this article, I engage with Manav Ratti's book 'The Po... more Article by Rajgopal Saikumar. Abstract: In this article, I engage with Manav Ratti's book 'The Postsecular Imagination: Postcolonialism, Religion, and Literature' (2013) through three frameworks. First, I consider the book within two historical phases, 1989-2014 and post-2014. I argue that reading Ratti's book through the latter phase has implications for the problem of enchantment in populism. Second, although postsecularism is the central concept in his book, I draw attention to how Ratti, subtly, provides a capacious and emancipatory conception of secularism itself that is particularly productive for the post-2014 phase we inhabit. Third, I turn to Dalit literature as a site where rationalism is evoked in a way that is not reductive and bureaucratic in the Weberian sense. Might Ambedkarinspired Dalit texts help us rethink rationality more capaciously?

Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory, 2022

This article presents some features, potentials, limitations, and bibliographies of the intersect... more This article presents some features, potentials, limitations, and bibliographies of the intersection of postcolonialism, postsecularism, and literary studies. It examines literatures, cultures, religions, indigenous beliefs and practices, and political imaginaries from Africa, Europe, and South Asia. The religions discussed include Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism. The article shows how the institutional and discursive emergence of postcolonial postsecularism, including its intersection with literary studies, can draw lessons from similarly contestatory fields of study, such as postcolonial theory, postcolonial feminism, and intersectional feminism. The article includes bibliographies of literary works that address secularism and postsecularism, including their intersection with postcoloniality.

Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory, 2022

Article by Rebekah Cumpsty. Abstract: Manav Ratti's 'The Postsecular Imagination' (2013) situates... more Article by Rebekah Cumpsty. Abstract: Manav Ratti's 'The Postsecular Imagination' (2013) situates secularism and religious discourse within national and colonial contexts. His literary critical approach, which brings postcolonial critiques of nationalism to bear on the literary registration of secularism, has informed my own work in sub-Saharan African fiction. I focus on Ratti's postcolonial analysis of the secular; his conceptualization of the postsecular as an imaginative and recuperative humanist ethic that foregrounds 'powerful modes of living together in spite of the divides of religion and nation' (Ratti 2013, xviii); and finally how the Nigerian writer, Okey Ndibe, engages with the secular, religion, and the nation as flawed, incomplete projects.

Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory, 2022

Article by Stanislaw Obirek. Abstract: This article argues that among Manav Ratti's distinctive t... more Article by Stanislaw Obirek. Abstract: This article argues that among Manav Ratti's distinctive theorizations of postsecularism in his landmark book The Postsecular Imagination (Routledge, 2013) is the concept's function as a hermeneutical key for inspiring critical analyses and insights across both secularism and religion. I juxtapose Ratti's book with some of the proposals for understanding postsecularism in Europe. The difference in understanding postsecularism in the Indian subcontinent and in Europe is related to different historical and cultural experiences, especially with reference to colonial heritage.

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2022

Manoj Das is a leading senior writer within Indian literature, with his novels, short stories, an... more Manoj Das is a leading senior writer within Indian literature, with his novels, short stories, and poems centring on village and rural life, mingling realism and everyday experiences with elements of mystery, mysticism, and the supernatural as he explores the vicissitudes and aspirations of the human condition. As he describes here, Das has been "greatly influenced" by the transition and transformation of India from colonialism to postcolonialism. His writings-with dramatic suspense, magical realism, and a style that with a minimal touch can convey nuances of character, motivation, and emotion-evocatively capture some of the most distinctive aspects of Indian culture, spirituality, arts, and history. His work has been compared with other famed Indian authors, particularly those writing in English (Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan, Raja Rao). In this interview, Das reflects on his life work, including the role of translation (in an Indian context of "transcreation"). Das also shares his candid views on the poetics and politics of "regional language literature" (RLL) and "Indian writing in English" (IWE), an opposition relevant to postcolonial studies in the context of the (national and international) distribution and reception of literature and the wider politics of language. Conducted in the southern Indian city of Puducherry, home to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, this interview presents the influence of philosopher and guru Sri Aurobindo on Das and his work, including Das's most recent scholarship on Sri Aurobindo. Das also discusses the influences on him by the well-known Indian writers Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Fakir Mohan Senapati, and Rabindranath Tagore. This is the first interview with Das published outside of India and in the West.

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2020

This article analyses Aravind Adiga’s Booker prize-winning novel The White Tiger (2008) through t... more This article analyses Aravind Adiga’s Booker prize-winning novel The White Tiger (2008) through the lens of justice: philosophical, legal, and literary. What is justice when its agent is subaltern—disprivileged by both caste and class—and delivers justice to himself? I argue that the fictional representation of class, caste, poverty, and violence can be similar to the structuring and translations of justice. By writing his novel from the perspective of a subaltern character, Adiga joins the call by Dalit critics to reconfigure modernity from the interests of the oppressed and the marginalized. In the process, there can be a rethinking of postcolonial literary criticism from within the postcolonial nation, rather than the established perspective of the postcolonial nation understanding its own colonial oppression. My essay provokes wider insights into the implications for justice and human rights as they are informed and represented by literary fiction, subaltern theory, and deconstructive theory. How can a writer conceive of and represent justice—literary justice—by working within and against philosophical and legal conceptions of justice? The philosophers and theorists I invoke include Drucilla Cornell, Jacques Derrida, Wai Chee Dimock, Emmanuel Levinas, Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, and Robert Young.

ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature. Vol. 35, issue 1-2. pp. 121-139, 2004

Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory, 2013

Arpana Caur is one of India's most eminent visual artists, whose paintings for decades have shape... more Arpana Caur is one of India's most eminent visual artists, whose paintings for decades have shaped national discourse and national consciousness about the lives of Sikhs and women, spirituality, and the environment. This article situates the artwork of Arpana Caur within national and global contexts through topics such as the nature of the aesthetic process for Caur, the relations among affect, activism, and politics in her life and work, and the ways in which Indian art can be supported and made more visible on the Indian and global scales. The article presents the artist's views--the longest and most in-depth she has given to date--on topics central to her work, including Sikhism, Buddhism, Kabir, feminism, human rights, environmentalism, and the nature of time. This piece explores how art can represent the timelessness of spirituality alongside the exigencies of contemporary issues and tragedies, such as communal violence. Central throughout this article is the concept of nation, exploring how an artist can represent nation both aesthetically and politically, and the ways in which nation can be both attractive and challenging.

Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society. Vol. 1, issue 1. pp.57-71, 2015

Postsecularism has emerged in recent years as a set of theoretical interests, orientations, and q... more Postsecularism has emerged in recent years as a set of theoretical interests, orientations, and questions across a range of fields, including political science, history, religious studies, philosophy, and literary studies. My focus in this article is on the possible relations between postsecularism and postcolonialism. I argue that postcolonialism can inflect postsecularism in ways similar to postcolonial literature's relation to western literature, a relation that seeks to uncompare and recompare universalisms, offering perspectives informed by historical and present-day violence. Comparatively speaking, whereas a western postsecularism can entail the rethinking of Christianity, an Indian postsecularism can entail the rethinking of a political formulation, of secularism as a state policy where the state assumes a principled distance from religion.

Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory, 2019

Intersectionality was developed by legal scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in the late 1980s to ... more Intersectionality was developed by legal scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in the late 1980s to broaden legal and epistemological frameworks for peoples at the intersection of multiple oppressions, such as racism and sexism. The theory has since proliferated and grown across many international academic and public contexts. This article examines intersectionality in Crenshaw's original formulation to argue for theoretical and political insights when intersectionality is applied to the multiply minoritized position of Sikhs in the US and India. I argue for six theoretical formations that can illuminate what I term intersectional Sikhism: intragroup solidarity, intergroup alliances, postsecularism, untranslatability, precarity, and intellectual intersectionality.

Postcolonial Text, 2018

Nandita Das is one of India’s most eminent filmmakers and actors, renowned for her work in art ci... more Nandita Das is one of India’s most eminent filmmakers and actors, renowned for her work in art cinema (or parallel cinema, as it is also called in India), and having served twice as a jury member at the Cannes Film Festival. This interview discusses the early influences that shaped Das’ personal and professional commitments to social justice, including a discussion of her debut film, Fire (1996), and her directorial debut film, Firaaq (2008). Das also discusses filmmaking for social change, with reference to her most recent directorial offering, Manto (2018), a biopic of the South Asian writer Saadat Hasan Manto, known for his writings on Partition. The interview ends with Das’ views on #MeToo, comparing its impact across the Indian and American film industries.

The Bloomsbury Introduction to Postcolonial Writing, 2018

The Routledge Handbook of Postsecularity. Ed. Justin Beaumont. NY and London: Routledge, 2018

The concept of the postsecular has a wide range of formulations and applications across highly di... more The concept of the postsecular has a wide range of formulations and applications across highly diverse disciplines and fields of inquiry, such as cinema studies (Bradatan and Ungureanu 2014; Kilbourn 2017; Caruana and Cauchi 2018), feminism (Bracke 2008; Braidotti 2008; Butler 2008; Vasilaki 2016; Deo 2018), geography (Cloke and Beaumont 2013; Williams 2014; Gökariksel and Secor 2015; Della Dora 2018), and religion (De Vries and Sullivan 2006; Gorski et al. 2012; Ni 2016; Areshdize 2017; Mapril et al. 2017; Dillon 2018). With such an expanse of postseculars, how can we understand some of this concept’s features and forms? I offer in this chapter some theoretical framings of the postsecular. These framings are not exhaustive. They address primarily postsecularism as it has been inflected by postcolonial studies and literary studies, with these framings necessarily overlapping with one another. Given the fecundity of postsecularism as both theory and methodology, the framings that follow can resonate across the disciplines, allowing for further theorizations.

Frame: Journal of Literary Studies, 2019

Salman Rushdie's novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) invokes religion and mythology in its r... more Salman Rushdie's novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) invokes religion and mythology in its representation of miracles, wonder, sorcery, revelations, infernos, frontiers, metamorphoses , and other worlds as it narrates the lives-across the United States, India, and Europe-of celebrated rock singers Ormus Cama and Vina Apsara. This article analyzes how Rushdie represents elements of secularism and religion in order to gesture toward and search for inspirational, generative, and creative potentials. I argue how Rushdie's literary representation of secularism and religion is an expression of postcolonial postsecularism, as an imaginative possibility emerging from the historical conditions and contexts-across India and western Europe-of philosophical and political secularism, religious thought and practice, and postcoloniality.

Ex-centric Narratives: Journal of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Media, 2021

This article examines the work of Indian-American poet Meena Alexander (1951-2018), one of postco... more This article examines the work of Indian-American poet Meena Alexander (1951-2018), one of postcolonial India's foremost poets, and argues that Alexander's combination of religion and secularism in her poetry gestures toward postsecular possibilities and conditions, especially as such postsecularism emerges from the worldly crises and violence of the twenty-first century. The secularisms that inform Alexander's work include state secularism in postcolonial India, and political and philosophical secularism in the West, especially in the US. In addition to these senses of secularism, this article explores the secular as worldly, material, and historical, all three of which include the embodiments of gender, race, migration, and dislocation, especially as Alexander describes them in her collection of essays Poetics of Dislocation (2009). How can postcolonial poetry gesture toward, explore, and search for-in highly personal, experimental ways-some sense of affirmative values in the wake of the dissatisfactions and disenchantments of philosophical secularism, while retaining the inclusive, democratic aspirations of political secularism (as non-establishment of religion in the state)? What values and aesthetic forms-however precarious, fragile, and tentative-emerge for the postcolonial, transnational, dislocated poet, values that cannot return to the ideologies of religions that have so fueled violence? These are two issues raised by Alexander's work that this article seeks to answer.

Reading the Abrahamic Faiths: Rethinking Religion and Literature, 2015

Ex-centric Narratives: Journal of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Media, 2021

Introduction by co-editors E. Lydia Roupakia and Eleni Sideri to the special issue "Religion, Mob... more Introduction by co-editors E. Lydia Roupakia and Eleni Sideri to the special issue "Religion, Mobilities and Belongings," of the journal Ex-Centric Narratives: Journal of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Media.

Teaching Human Rights in Literary and Cultural Studies, MLA, 2015

This essay explores the challenges faced in the teaching of human rights within two contexts: 1) ... more This essay explores the challenges faced in the teaching of human rights within two contexts: 1) the sociopolitical framework of a seminar of multinational graduate students, including a majority from China; and 2) the interdisciplinary framework of ‘Translation Studies.’ Drawing on Gayatri Spivak’s work in Outside in the Teaching Machine and my experience of teaching a world literature graduate seminar in Europe, I theorize the role of the ethnic minority lecturer in the academic dissemination of the discourse of human rights through a course unit on literature and political discourse on the civil war in Sri Lanka--and the student responses it elicited on human rights in China.

Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies, 2022

Review article (online first Dec. 7, 2023) by Asha Sen (University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire) of M... more Review article (online first Dec. 7, 2023) by Asha Sen (University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire) of Manav Ratti's The Postsecular Imagination, Rebekah Cumpsty's Postsecular Poetics, Roger McNamara's Secularism and the Crisis of Minority Identity in Postcolonial Literature, and Sagir Ali, Goutam Karmakar, and Nasima Islam (eds), Religion in South Asian Anglophone Literature.

Salman Rushdie in Context (Cambridge University Press), 2023

What are the wider contexts of how Rushdie deploys and critiques myths and mythologies in his nov... more What are the wider contexts of how Rushdie deploys and critiques myths
and mythologies in his novels? Mythologies from numerous religious, cultural, and national traditions, including Islamic, Hindu, Norse, Greek, Christian, and Persian, among others, have featured in Rushdie’s fiction from the very beginning. Mythologies allow Rushdie to represent in his fictional narratives the politics, intractability, and crises of postcolonial challenges, pressures, and fissures. These diverse challenges include the politics of immigration and the array of discriminations it can spawn, including xenophobia, classism, and racism; the conflicts between secular and religious world-views, including blasphemy, superstition, and censorship; and the very nature of postcolonial nationalism and nation-building, including reflections on diaspora, national belonging, and homelands.

Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory, 2022

Article by Rajgopal Saikumar. Abstract: In this article, I engage with Manav Ratti's book 'The Po... more Article by Rajgopal Saikumar. Abstract: In this article, I engage with Manav Ratti's book 'The Postsecular Imagination: Postcolonialism, Religion, and Literature' (2013) through three frameworks. First, I consider the book within two historical phases, 1989-2014 and post-2014. I argue that reading Ratti's book through the latter phase has implications for the problem of enchantment in populism. Second, although postsecularism is the central concept in his book, I draw attention to how Ratti, subtly, provides a capacious and emancipatory conception of secularism itself that is particularly productive for the post-2014 phase we inhabit. Third, I turn to Dalit literature as a site where rationalism is evoked in a way that is not reductive and bureaucratic in the Weberian sense. Might Ambedkarinspired Dalit texts help us rethink rationality more capaciously?

Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory, 2022

This article presents some features, potentials, limitations, and bibliographies of the intersect... more This article presents some features, potentials, limitations, and bibliographies of the intersection of postcolonialism, postsecularism, and literary studies. It examines literatures, cultures, religions, indigenous beliefs and practices, and political imaginaries from Africa, Europe, and South Asia. The religions discussed include Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism. The article shows how the institutional and discursive emergence of postcolonial postsecularism, including its intersection with literary studies, can draw lessons from similarly contestatory fields of study, such as postcolonial theory, postcolonial feminism, and intersectional feminism. The article includes bibliographies of literary works that address secularism and postsecularism, including their intersection with postcoloniality.

Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory, 2022

Article by Rebekah Cumpsty. Abstract: Manav Ratti's 'The Postsecular Imagination' (2013) situates... more Article by Rebekah Cumpsty. Abstract: Manav Ratti's 'The Postsecular Imagination' (2013) situates secularism and religious discourse within national and colonial contexts. His literary critical approach, which brings postcolonial critiques of nationalism to bear on the literary registration of secularism, has informed my own work in sub-Saharan African fiction. I focus on Ratti's postcolonial analysis of the secular; his conceptualization of the postsecular as an imaginative and recuperative humanist ethic that foregrounds 'powerful modes of living together in spite of the divides of religion and nation' (Ratti 2013, xviii); and finally how the Nigerian writer, Okey Ndibe, engages with the secular, religion, and the nation as flawed, incomplete projects.

Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory, 2022

Article by Stanislaw Obirek. Abstract: This article argues that among Manav Ratti's distinctive t... more Article by Stanislaw Obirek. Abstract: This article argues that among Manav Ratti's distinctive theorizations of postsecularism in his landmark book The Postsecular Imagination (Routledge, 2013) is the concept's function as a hermeneutical key for inspiring critical analyses and insights across both secularism and religion. I juxtapose Ratti's book with some of the proposals for understanding postsecularism in Europe. The difference in understanding postsecularism in the Indian subcontinent and in Europe is related to different historical and cultural experiences, especially with reference to colonial heritage.

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2022

Manoj Das is a leading senior writer within Indian literature, with his novels, short stories, an... more Manoj Das is a leading senior writer within Indian literature, with his novels, short stories, and poems centring on village and rural life, mingling realism and everyday experiences with elements of mystery, mysticism, and the supernatural as he explores the vicissitudes and aspirations of the human condition. As he describes here, Das has been "greatly influenced" by the transition and transformation of India from colonialism to postcolonialism. His writings-with dramatic suspense, magical realism, and a style that with a minimal touch can convey nuances of character, motivation, and emotion-evocatively capture some of the most distinctive aspects of Indian culture, spirituality, arts, and history. His work has been compared with other famed Indian authors, particularly those writing in English (Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan, Raja Rao). In this interview, Das reflects on his life work, including the role of translation (in an Indian context of "transcreation"). Das also shares his candid views on the poetics and politics of "regional language literature" (RLL) and "Indian writing in English" (IWE), an opposition relevant to postcolonial studies in the context of the (national and international) distribution and reception of literature and the wider politics of language. Conducted in the southern Indian city of Puducherry, home to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, this interview presents the influence of philosopher and guru Sri Aurobindo on Das and his work, including Das's most recent scholarship on Sri Aurobindo. Das also discusses the influences on him by the well-known Indian writers Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Fakir Mohan Senapati, and Rabindranath Tagore. This is the first interview with Das published outside of India and in the West.

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2020

This article analyses Aravind Adiga’s Booker prize-winning novel The White Tiger (2008) through t... more This article analyses Aravind Adiga’s Booker prize-winning novel The White Tiger (2008) through the lens of justice: philosophical, legal, and literary. What is justice when its agent is subaltern—disprivileged by both caste and class—and delivers justice to himself? I argue that the fictional representation of class, caste, poverty, and violence can be similar to the structuring and translations of justice. By writing his novel from the perspective of a subaltern character, Adiga joins the call by Dalit critics to reconfigure modernity from the interests of the oppressed and the marginalized. In the process, there can be a rethinking of postcolonial literary criticism from within the postcolonial nation, rather than the established perspective of the postcolonial nation understanding its own colonial oppression. My essay provokes wider insights into the implications for justice and human rights as they are informed and represented by literary fiction, subaltern theory, and deconstructive theory. How can a writer conceive of and represent justice—literary justice—by working within and against philosophical and legal conceptions of justice? The philosophers and theorists I invoke include Drucilla Cornell, Jacques Derrida, Wai Chee Dimock, Emmanuel Levinas, Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, and Robert Young.

ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature. Vol. 35, issue 1-2. pp. 121-139, 2004

Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory, 2013

Arpana Caur is one of India's most eminent visual artists, whose paintings for decades have shape... more Arpana Caur is one of India's most eminent visual artists, whose paintings for decades have shaped national discourse and national consciousness about the lives of Sikhs and women, spirituality, and the environment. This article situates the artwork of Arpana Caur within national and global contexts through topics such as the nature of the aesthetic process for Caur, the relations among affect, activism, and politics in her life and work, and the ways in which Indian art can be supported and made more visible on the Indian and global scales. The article presents the artist's views--the longest and most in-depth she has given to date--on topics central to her work, including Sikhism, Buddhism, Kabir, feminism, human rights, environmentalism, and the nature of time. This piece explores how art can represent the timelessness of spirituality alongside the exigencies of contemporary issues and tragedies, such as communal violence. Central throughout this article is the concept of nation, exploring how an artist can represent nation both aesthetically and politically, and the ways in which nation can be both attractive and challenging.

Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society. Vol. 1, issue 1. pp.57-71, 2015

Postsecularism has emerged in recent years as a set of theoretical interests, orientations, and q... more Postsecularism has emerged in recent years as a set of theoretical interests, orientations, and questions across a range of fields, including political science, history, religious studies, philosophy, and literary studies. My focus in this article is on the possible relations between postsecularism and postcolonialism. I argue that postcolonialism can inflect postsecularism in ways similar to postcolonial literature's relation to western literature, a relation that seeks to uncompare and recompare universalisms, offering perspectives informed by historical and present-day violence. Comparatively speaking, whereas a western postsecularism can entail the rethinking of Christianity, an Indian postsecularism can entail the rethinking of a political formulation, of secularism as a state policy where the state assumes a principled distance from religion.

Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory, 2019

Intersectionality was developed by legal scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in the late 1980s to ... more Intersectionality was developed by legal scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in the late 1980s to broaden legal and epistemological frameworks for peoples at the intersection of multiple oppressions, such as racism and sexism. The theory has since proliferated and grown across many international academic and public contexts. This article examines intersectionality in Crenshaw's original formulation to argue for theoretical and political insights when intersectionality is applied to the multiply minoritized position of Sikhs in the US and India. I argue for six theoretical formations that can illuminate what I term intersectional Sikhism: intragroup solidarity, intergroup alliances, postsecularism, untranslatability, precarity, and intellectual intersectionality.

Postcolonial Text, 2018

Nandita Das is one of India’s most eminent filmmakers and actors, renowned for her work in art ci... more Nandita Das is one of India’s most eminent filmmakers and actors, renowned for her work in art cinema (or parallel cinema, as it is also called in India), and having served twice as a jury member at the Cannes Film Festival. This interview discusses the early influences that shaped Das’ personal and professional commitments to social justice, including a discussion of her debut film, Fire (1996), and her directorial debut film, Firaaq (2008). Das also discusses filmmaking for social change, with reference to her most recent directorial offering, Manto (2018), a biopic of the South Asian writer Saadat Hasan Manto, known for his writings on Partition. The interview ends with Das’ views on #MeToo, comparing its impact across the Indian and American film industries.

The Bloomsbury Introduction to Postcolonial Writing, 2018

The Routledge Handbook of Postsecularity. Ed. Justin Beaumont. NY and London: Routledge, 2018

The concept of the postsecular has a wide range of formulations and applications across highly di... more The concept of the postsecular has a wide range of formulations and applications across highly diverse disciplines and fields of inquiry, such as cinema studies (Bradatan and Ungureanu 2014; Kilbourn 2017; Caruana and Cauchi 2018), feminism (Bracke 2008; Braidotti 2008; Butler 2008; Vasilaki 2016; Deo 2018), geography (Cloke and Beaumont 2013; Williams 2014; Gökariksel and Secor 2015; Della Dora 2018), and religion (De Vries and Sullivan 2006; Gorski et al. 2012; Ni 2016; Areshdize 2017; Mapril et al. 2017; Dillon 2018). With such an expanse of postseculars, how can we understand some of this concept’s features and forms? I offer in this chapter some theoretical framings of the postsecular. These framings are not exhaustive. They address primarily postsecularism as it has been inflected by postcolonial studies and literary studies, with these framings necessarily overlapping with one another. Given the fecundity of postsecularism as both theory and methodology, the framings that follow can resonate across the disciplines, allowing for further theorizations.

Frame: Journal of Literary Studies, 2019

Salman Rushdie's novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) invokes religion and mythology in its r... more Salman Rushdie's novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) invokes religion and mythology in its representation of miracles, wonder, sorcery, revelations, infernos, frontiers, metamorphoses , and other worlds as it narrates the lives-across the United States, India, and Europe-of celebrated rock singers Ormus Cama and Vina Apsara. This article analyzes how Rushdie represents elements of secularism and religion in order to gesture toward and search for inspirational, generative, and creative potentials. I argue how Rushdie's literary representation of secularism and religion is an expression of postcolonial postsecularism, as an imaginative possibility emerging from the historical conditions and contexts-across India and western Europe-of philosophical and political secularism, religious thought and practice, and postcoloniality.

Ex-centric Narratives: Journal of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Media, 2021

This article examines the work of Indian-American poet Meena Alexander (1951-2018), one of postco... more This article examines the work of Indian-American poet Meena Alexander (1951-2018), one of postcolonial India's foremost poets, and argues that Alexander's combination of religion and secularism in her poetry gestures toward postsecular possibilities and conditions, especially as such postsecularism emerges from the worldly crises and violence of the twenty-first century. The secularisms that inform Alexander's work include state secularism in postcolonial India, and political and philosophical secularism in the West, especially in the US. In addition to these senses of secularism, this article explores the secular as worldly, material, and historical, all three of which include the embodiments of gender, race, migration, and dislocation, especially as Alexander describes them in her collection of essays Poetics of Dislocation (2009). How can postcolonial poetry gesture toward, explore, and search for-in highly personal, experimental ways-some sense of affirmative values in the wake of the dissatisfactions and disenchantments of philosophical secularism, while retaining the inclusive, democratic aspirations of political secularism (as non-establishment of religion in the state)? What values and aesthetic forms-however precarious, fragile, and tentative-emerge for the postcolonial, transnational, dislocated poet, values that cannot return to the ideologies of religions that have so fueled violence? These are two issues raised by Alexander's work that this article seeks to answer.

Reading the Abrahamic Faiths: Rethinking Religion and Literature, 2015

Ex-centric Narratives: Journal of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Media, 2021

Introduction by co-editors E. Lydia Roupakia and Eleni Sideri to the special issue "Religion, Mob... more Introduction by co-editors E. Lydia Roupakia and Eleni Sideri to the special issue "Religion, Mobilities and Belongings," of the journal Ex-Centric Narratives: Journal of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Media.

Teaching Human Rights in Literary and Cultural Studies, MLA, 2015

This essay explores the challenges faced in the teaching of human rights within two contexts: 1) ... more This essay explores the challenges faced in the teaching of human rights within two contexts: 1) the sociopolitical framework of a seminar of multinational graduate students, including a majority from China; and 2) the interdisciplinary framework of ‘Translation Studies.’ Drawing on Gayatri Spivak’s work in Outside in the Teaching Machine and my experience of teaching a world literature graduate seminar in Europe, I theorize the role of the ethnic minority lecturer in the academic dissemination of the discourse of human rights through a course unit on literature and political discourse on the civil war in Sri Lanka--and the student responses it elicited on human rights in China.

London and NY: Routledge, 2013

Religion can foster inspiration and creativity, but it can also be linked with violence, civil wa... more Religion can foster inspiration and creativity, but it can also be linked with violence, civil war, partition, majoritarianism, and communalism, especially in the framework of the modern nation-state. Given these crises, how can the need for ethics, faith, awe, wonder, and enchantment that religion fulfils find expression and significance in a newly secular context? The Postsecular Imagination presents postsecularism as an affirmational political possibility emerging through the potential and limits of both secular and religious thought. Manav Ratti analyzes the novels of Salman Rushdie and Michael Ondaatje, in addition to key works by Shauna Singh Baldwin, Mahasweta Devi, Amitav Ghosh, and Allan Sealy as they engage with a variety of religious formations—animism, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism—found in South Asia. Ratti shows the dynamic risk, courage, and experimentation animating the radical imagination of these postsecular works. Tackling the most provocative contemporary debates in secularism and religion, The Postsecular Imagination will be important for readers interested in culture, literature, theory, and politics.

Entangled Religions, 2015

Postcolonial Studies, 2016

Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2015

Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2007