Migrant Epistemologies in Indian Nonfiction of the Long Twentieth Century - by Manisha Basu (Hardcover)

About the Book

Showcases how a range of migrant experiences are crucial to increasing interdependencies between differentially empowered groups across the world.

Book Synopsis

Attending to non-fiction texts from India and the Global South, Migrant Epistemologies identifies migratory contact zones as sites on which contrary epistemic stances may co-exist, despite their differences, in a symbiotic ecology. Given the increasing traffic between differentially empowered groups around the world, their distinct cognitive practices must often meet one another head-on. Manisha Basu argues that in the best of such circumstances, migrants and hosts open themselves to unlearning their own dominant worldviews and animating other ways of knowing. Unlike accounts of migration that accentuate the violences involved in the movements of peoples, this book foregrounds relatively peaceable, but still complex, migratory encounters that imagine an epistemologically diverse world resulting in social and environmental justice.

Review Quotes

Migrant Epistemologies combines migrant studies, philosophy, ecocriticism, and postcolonial theory to illuminate the role of nonfiction writing in enabling self-cultivation, representing collectivities, and imagining just futures. Through detailed readings of a range of texts by authors from India and beyond, the book offers new perspectives on border-crossing and the possibility of human interconnectedness in the twentieth century.--Ulka Anjaria, Brandeis University