Dr. Pramod K Nayar, Professor in the Department of English, School of Humanities at University of Hyderabad (UoH) spoke on his current research and writing – a book-length study Transnational Identities: Globality in English Literature, from Shakespeare to the Modern on 3rd March 2014 at the Auditorium of the School of Humanities.
In his talk attended by faculty, students and staff of the University, Dr. Nayar said that England’s literary history is a legacy of its transnational linkages, as the book sets out to demonstrate. In the book he states that in every period of English literature we can locate major movements, authors and texts who/that define English identity and nationhood via a negotiation with Arab, Indian, Chinese and other Asian regions and cultures.
Dr. Nayar also argues that, right from the 1550s, the racial-cultural Other was not simply ‘out there’: it was very much constitutive of the English domestic, social and cultural imaginary, life and discourse. While works such as Catherine Hall’s and Antoinette Burton’s have underscored the centrality of the Empire and its peripheries to the making of imperial Victorian England, this book makes a case for seeing the peripheries of the known world central to England’s cultural landscape even before the age of Empire, he adds.
Dr. Nayar teaches courses in Literary Theory, the English Romantics, Postcolonial Literatures 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 He is also the editor of the multivolume Women in Colonial India: Historical Documents and Sources, The New Media and Cybercultures Anthology and The Penguin 1857 Reader.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. Forthcoming books include one on surveillance culture, The Postcolonial Studies Dictionary and the edited Postcolonial Studies Anthology.
Prof. Ramakrishna Ramaswamy, Vice-Chancellor, UoH presided over the lecture.