Prof. Pramod K Nayar, Head, Department of English, School of Humanities, University of Hyderabad (UoH) has authored a book titled “Bhopal’s Ecological Gothic Disaster, Precarity, and the Biopolitical Uncanny”.
The book published by Rowman and Littlefield studies the cultural texts—fiction, protest effigies, photographs, films, reportage, eyewitness accounts, campaign posters and reports—produced around the world’s worst industrial disaster: the Bhopal tragedy of 1984. It makes a case for an ecological Gothic, wherein the city, its landscape and its people are Gothicized.
After tracing the history of the disaster as a history of negligence, the book proceeds in later chapters to study the coverage of the events themselves by eyewitnesses and survivors, and the remnants, in various forms, of the disaster – the haunting – within human bodies and nature. Finally, it examines the industrial ruins and the mobilization of protests against Union Carbide.
Dr. Nayar teaches courses in Literary Theory, the English Romantics, Postcolonial Literature’s and Cultural Studies. His interests lie in English colonial writings on India, Human Rights narratives and Cultural Studies, with a consistent publication record in these areas. Among his book-length publications are Frantz Fanon ; Posthumanism ; Colonial Voices: The Discourses of Empire ; Digital Cool ; Writing Wrongs: The Cultural Construction of Human Rights in India ; English Writing and India, 1600-1920: Colonizing Aesthetics ; Postcolonial Literature, among others. He is also the editor of the multi-volume Women in Colonial India: Historical Documents and Sources, The New Media and Cyber cultures Anthology and The Penguin 1857 Reader. His work has appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, South Asian Review, Jl. of Postcolonial Writing, Jl. of Commonwealth Literature, Ariel, Changing English, Jl. of British Studies, Prose Studies, Studies in Travel Writing, Journeys, New Zealand Jl. of English Studies and other international journals.