Home and the World: South Asia in Transition, by Helen Asquine Fazio, V.G. Julie Rajan, Atreyee Phukan, and Shreerekha Subramaniam Home and the World: South Asia in Transition appears at a crucial, pivotal time for South Asia as it interacts on the global plane. For in this new millennium, South Asia is rising even as it roils with internal contradictions and reacts to external pressures. India, as the most economically developed country, enjoys a soaring economy, while partisan politics and the old demons of poverty and caste continue to erode and stymie internally. Pakistan, twenty years after the fall of the dictator Zia-ul-Haq, has come of age and is beginning its cultural renaissance, and yet fundamentalist factions continue to retard advances for women and full participation in the global economy. South Asians live in virtually every nation on the earth, and new world ideas about national selfhood and identity shuttle between regressive, nostalgic impulses and progressive cause investment as immigrant money fuels both conservative insurrection and 21st century development. Gathering together essays by significant scholars, writers, diplomats, artists, curators, and activists, this volume addresses varied and divergent perspectives on nationalism, gender, diaspora and translation, art and untouchability. Provocative and au courant, Home and the World: South Asia in Transition is an accessible, lively, and essential reference volume for scholars of interdisciplinary humanities, political science and diplomacy as well as an informed general readership seeking to understand the global phenomenon of South Asia.
About the Author: Helen Asquine Fazio, who earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, also holds an M.A. in Art History, specializing in Himalayan, South, and East Asia. Fazio has curated five recent exhibitions of contemporary art of South Asia and traditional Tibetan and Nepalese art. She is an editor of Language, Mysticism and Iconography: Exploring the Cultural Interface Between East and South Asia, which is forthcoming from Cambridge Scholars Press, and the Visual and Performing Arts Editor of Catamaran Magazine. Atreyee Phukan is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at U of San Diego. Her main research interests lie in the political significance of cultural and racial hybridity in post-colonial anglophone Caribbean literature. She has also worked on South Asian literature, which appears in the anthology 19th and 20th Century World Writers (2004) and is co-editing a collection of essays entitled, Reading the Exotic: South Asia and Its Others. V.G. Julie Rajan's doctoral research focused on women's resistance narratives written by Pakistani and Indian women post-1947. Rajan has published widely in the areas of South Asia, women and gender studies, literature, terrorism and resistance, and modernism, and is currently writing a book on women suicide bombers globally. Rajan is currently editing several anthologies including Reading the Exotic: South Asia and Its Others and Language, Mysticism and Iconography: Exploring the Cultural Interface Between East and South Asia. Shreerekha Subramanian is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University and is writing her dissertation on comparative notions of violence in French-Caribbean, African American, and Hindi literature. She recently published the essay, Blood, Memory, and Nation: Massacre and Mourning in Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones in the anthology, The Masters and the Slaves: Plantation Relations and Mestizaje in American Imaginaries (New Directions in Latino American Culture), 2005.