Professor and Chair of the Department
He/Him
Office Information:
3219C Angell Hall
hours: By Appointment
Womens Literature; Postcolonial Studies; Graduate Faculty; Novel and Narrative; Ecocriticism; Law and Literature; Global and Transnational; Travel; Autobiography Studies; Comparative Literature; English; Theory; Professor
Education/Degree:
Phd, Duke University 1996
Highlighted Work and Publications
Subject to Colonialism
Subject to Colonialism provides a much needed revisionist perspective on the way twentieth-century Africa is viewed and analyzed among scholars. Employing literary, historical, and anthropological techniques, Gaurav Desai attempts to generate a new understanding of issues that permeate discussions of Africa by disrupting the centrality of postcolonial texts and focusing instead on the cultural and intellectual production of colonial Africans. In particular, Desai calls for a reevaluation of the “colonial library”—that set of representations and texts that have collectively “invented...
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Commerce with the Universe
Reading the life narratives and literary texts of South Asians writing in and about East Africa, Gaurav Desai builds a surprising, alternative history of Africa's experience with slavery, migration, colonialism, nationalism, and globalization. Consulting Afrasian texts that are literary and nonfictional, political and private, he broadens the scope of African and South Asian scholarship and inspires a more nuanced understanding of the Indian Ocean's fertile routes of exchange.
Desai shows how the Indian Ocean engendered a number of syncretic identities and shaped the medieval trade routes...
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Postcolonialisms
Bringing together thirty-seven essays that have helped define the study of colonial and postcolonial cultures, this expansive and thoughtfully organized anthology offers an up-to-date and in-depth overview of this rapidly developing field.
Canonical articles, most unexcerpted, explore postcolonialism’s key themes—power and knowledge—while articles by contemporary scholars expand the discipline to include discussions of the discovery of the New World, Native American and indigenous identities in Latin America and the Pacific, settler colonies in Africa and Australia, English colonialism...
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Teaching the African Novel
What is the African novel, and how should it be taught?The twenty-three essays of this volume address these two questions and in the process convey a wealth of information and ideas about the diverse regions, peoples, nations, languages, and writers of the African continent. Topics includeNgũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s favoring of indigenous languages and literary traditions over Europeanthe special place of Marxism in African lettersthe influence of Frantz Fanonwomen writers and the sub-Saharan novelthe Maghrebian novelthe novel and the griot epic in the SahelIslam in the West African novelnovels in Spanish...
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Approaches to Teaching the Works of Amitav Ghosh
The prizewinning author of novels, nonfiction, and hybrid texts, Amitav Ghosh grew up in India and trained as an anthropologist. His works have been translated into over thirty languages. They cross and mix a number of genres, from science fiction to the historical novel, incorporating ethnohistory and travelogue and even recuperating dead languages. His subjects include climate change, postcolonial identities, translocation, migration, oceanic spaces, and the human interface with the environment.
Part 1 of this volume discusses editions of Ghosh’s works and the scholarship on Ghosh. ...
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