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Faculty Bio | |
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Rashmi Sadana
Lecturer; Postdoctorate Fellow
Columbia University
Anthropology |
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Biography
My research focuses on urban cultures and social theories of language, power, and globalization. I am currently turning my 2003 dissertation into a book manuscript, Reading Delhi: Englishwallahs, Hindiwallahs, and the Politics of Language and Literary Production in India. This work is an ethnography of publishers, writers, booksellers, and state officials who make up Delhi’s literary field, and whose work and lives intersect with regional, national, and global literary and linguistic paradigms. It explores the relationship between Hindi and English as two competing national languages and as two axes in a multi-lingual urban consciousness; and it analyzes how questions of cultural authenticity emerge and intersect with shifting parameters of modern Indian subject-formation to create new ethical realms. My new research builds on these themes, examining the relationship between transnational literary practices and the creation of humanitarian narratives; the role of translation as a complex bartering of social and political imaginaries; and the emergence of global ethics at the intersection of literary production and new communication technologies, including the Internet. My teaching interests include ‘global’ literature in English and in translation; the anthropology of language and nation; colonial histories and postcolonial theory; and gender, caste, class, and religion in South Asia.
Representative Publications:
1993. "Making a Space for Women in the Third World: Displacement and Identity in Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days." In Our Feet Walk the Sky. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Press.
2004. "Home and the World." Rev. essay of At Home in Diaspora: South Asian Scholars and the West, edited by Jackie Assayag and Véronique Bénéï. Biblio. Vol. 9, Nos. 11 & 12: 28-29.
2005. Rev. of Blowback: Linguistic Nationalism, Institutional Decay, and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka, by Neil DeVotta. Journal of Asian Studies. Volume 64, No. 2: 494-495.
2007. "A Suitable Text for a Vegetarian Audience: Questions of Authenticity and the Politics of Translation." Public Culture. Vol. 19, No. 2. (In press.)
n.d. Reading Delhi: Englishwallahs, Hindiwallahs, and the Politics of Language and Literary Production in India. Book manuscript in progress.
n.d. The Cambridge Companion to Modern Indian Culture. Cambridge University Press. Co-edited volume in progress.
n.d. "The Indian English Novel at Home and Abroad," in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Indian Culture. Cambridge University Press. Chapter manuscript in progress.
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