S286. New Directions in Postcolonial Writing: A Passage Through South Asia

Room 505, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level
Saturday, April 2, 2016
4:30 pm to 5:45 pm

 

This panel of transnational, transdisciplinary writers (in fiction, nonfiction, and criticism) passes through South Asia to reread contemporary American fiction through a postcolonial, diasporic lens in order to explore the ever-shifting seats of imperial power, the reconfiguration or dissolution of the center-margin dynamic—be it in debates of race, class, gender, ethnicity, history, or geography.


Participants

Moderator:

Namrata Poddar holds a PhD in French from University of Pennsylvania, and she was UCLA Mellon Postdoctoral Faculty in Transnational Cultures. She is an MFA candidate in fiction at Bennington College and English department faculty at UCLA. Her critical and creative work have been published worldwide.

Sharbari Zohra Ahmed is the author of The Ocean of Mrs Nagai: Stories. Her fiction has appeared in the Gettysburg Review, Caravan, and the Asian Pacific American Journal among others, and is forthcoming in Wasafiri. She teaches at Norwalk Community College in Norwalk, CT.

V.V. Ganeshananthan's debut novel, Love Marriage, was long-listed for the Orange Prize and named one of Washington Post Book World's Best of 2008. She is on the MFA faculty at the University of Minnesota.

Soniah Kamal's novel An Isolated Incident was shortlisted for the KLF French Fiction Prize. She is a Paul Bowles Fiction Fellow at Georgia State University. Her work is in Scroll.in, Huffington Post, Akashic Thursdaze, Commonwealth Writers, Bengal Lights, Arts ATL, the Normal School, and more.

Nayomi Munaweera's debut novel, Island of a Thousand Mirrors, won the 2013 Commonwealth Prize for Asia. The New York Times called it "incandescent" and Publishers Weekly has compared her voice to that of Michael Ondatjee and Jumpha Lahiri. Munaweera's second novel is forthcoming.

#AWP24

February 7–10, 2024
Kansas City, Missouri

Kansas City Convention Center