‘In place of a World Literature that venerates ‘a small canon of texts divorced from context,’ Insurgent Imaginations stages the powerful theater of ‘peripheral internationalism.’ With South Asia as focus, it travels through the literary, filmic, theoretical, and non-literary texts of the ‘periphery,’ to re-evaluate the past by way of a rich historical narrative as well as careful close readings. For this reader, the discussion of Mahasweta Devi was particularly enjoyable.’
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak - author of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason
‘An ebullient, richly documented and entirely new story: how ‘world literature’ was the very banner under which third-world rebels and visionaries reimagined the world as a kind of humanist international. An important book, and one based on materials that are almost completely unknown.’
Timothy Brennan - Samuel Russell Chair in the Humanities, University of Minnesota
‘Insurgent Imaginations is a bracing response to anodyne notions of ‘World Literature’ whose inevitable center is Anglo-America. Instead, Majumder develops a powerful theory of ‘peripheral internationalism,’ by showing how twentieth-century Bangla/Bengali literature developed in conversation with literary, cultural, and political movements across the world (the ‘West’ was not ignored, but not granted special privilege). The writers and artists who populate Majumder’s peripheral internationalism derived their creative energies from anticolonial movements, and their art rejected imperialist hierarchies of knowledge. They also went on to develop powerful critiques of the national elites who took power after independence. Theirs is an internationalism insurgent in its sympathies and practices, and devoted to emancipatory change, in Bengal, in India, across the world. These are the values that motivate Majumder’s deeply humanist scholarship and activist cultural commitments too, and make Insurgent Imaginations an important intervention into cultural debates today.’
Suvir Kaul - A.M. Rosenthal Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania
‘Insurgent Imaginations reveals a kaleidoscope of global connections between vastly different national histories and aesthetic forms. It offers a brilliant theory about the making of world literature through a submerged internationalist vernacular between far flung corners of the subaltern colonial world. In so doing, it forces us to see beyond the bland globalism of any world literature yoked exclusively to Anglo- or Euro-centric canons. Majumder’s openly avowed Marxist commitments and very thorough and carefully nuanced arguments about the masked socialist imaginaries of world literary cultures will persuade and excite scholarly discussion. Insurgent Imaginations engages the hot topic of ‘world literature’ that has lately preoccupied the study of literature with such verve and newness as to compel us to rethink what truly counts as ‘world literature.’
Mrinalini Chakravorty - Associate Professor of English, University of Virginia
‘Where … popular accounts have articulated literary histories radiating outward from Europe, Majumder traces the origins of world literature to the explosive trenches of anticolonialism…Even as Majumder returns us to the high noon of ‘peripheral internationalism,’ he frequently reminds us that the sun of anticolonialism has not completely set - this ‘processive struggle’ remains incomplete, and its living legacy remains open for future reassessments and revisions.’
Aditya Bahl
Source: Comparative Literature Studies
‘Insurgent Imaginations will be of use to scholars in a range of disciplines and subfields: film studies, politics, history, Marxism, South Asian literature, to name only the most obvious…Majumder powerfully answers a question that looms over South Asian studies: how to tell a properly universal history of South Asia, without suggesting either that South Asian history is exceptional, or that the South Asian story is an interesting subplot in grander narratives of world history.’
Aruni Mahapatra
Source: South Asian Review
‘Written from a fine-grained materialist and historicized perspective, Auritro Majumder’sInsurgent Imaginations sees solidarity informed by humanism at work in a whole range of writers from the Global South, from Rabindranath Tagore to Mao Zedong and Arundhati Roy … there is throughout an impressive engagement with Latin American cultural theory, especially the work of Brazilian Marxist critic Roberto Schwarz.’
Barnita Bagchi
Source: Journal of Postcolonial Writing
‘Auritro Majumder, in Insurgent Imaginations: World Literature and the Periphery, has undoubtedly accomplished a rare feat … By bringing a wide array of creative and conceptual works…by constantly transversing a staggering list of intertextual references, and finally, by appointing a ‘reading method’ that unravels ‘aesthetics-politics of peripheral internationalism’, the book has remarkably succeeded to ‘reclaim the function of social critique.’
Source: Textual Practice
‘Under the rubrics of ‘world literature’, Majumder argues, thinkers across the Third World/Global South attempted to reimagine and rearticulate the ‘world’ and its ‘literature’. From the vantage of the ‘periphery’, a certain strain of literary activism emerges to account for the effects of uneven capitalist development and the afterlives of imperial rule … Majumder’s redefinition of ‘world literature’ is important, and his vision for expanding its reach is ambitious.’
J. Daniel Elam
Source: Postcolonial Studies
‘Majumder’s highly detailed and rigorous focus on world literature as non-Western, non-metropolitan aesthetic production and political resistance also complicates and deepens the social and intellectual histories of terms and notions normalised and widespread in the Western academy and the public sphere … Insurgent Imaginations is a pioneering achievement that significantly raises the bar in world literature for future understanding and criticism.’
Manav Ratti
Source: Wasafiri
‘Decentering the center, as it were, perhaps manifests in the way the reader is implicitly prompted to connect (or ‘constellate’) the multitudinous dots Majumdar lays out in each chapter, crowded as they are with allusions to various theoretical concepts, historical events, political and economic developments, and figures of artistic and scholarly import.’
Nasia Anam
Source: Contemporary Literature
‘The book’s contribution, in the final analysis, is to our current understandings of World Literature, which has too often in the academy come to signify a collection of disparate non-Western national literatures rather than a heuristic. Insurgent Imaginations seeks to reclaim World Literature from such narrow definitions and position it against fixed groupings of literatures and canons, arguing that it should consist of the intertextual linkages between constituents that are in a constate state of flux.’
Romy Rajan
Source: Mediations
‘Auritro Majumder’s Insurgent Imaginations offers a fresh and provocative reworking of the concept of world literature … If ‘world literature’ is all too often understood through a liberal discourse of post-national globalisation, then this book provides a strikingly different approach - by suggesting that the nation, far from being dead, is instead the grounds from which, paradoxically, a radical, internationalist vision and aesthetics emerge.’
Shakti Jaising
Source: New Formations
