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Sangeeta Ray

Photo of woman with chin-length black hair and multicolored shirt on blurred background

Director, Center for Literary and Comparative Studies, English
Professor of English and Comparative Literature, English
Affiliate Professor, The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

3014059647

Research Expertise

African American/African Diaspora
Comparative Literature
Postcolonialism

Curriculum Vitae

Sangeeta Ray is professor of English and Comparative Literature. She teaches anglophone postcolonial literature, South Asian literature, literature from the black diaspora, and Asian American literature. Her work is always attuned to questions of gender and sexuality. Her current interests include environmental studies as well the field of refugee studies. She is primarily a literary scholar engaged in questions of form and genre, postcolonial reading practices and the relationship between aesthetics, ethics and politics. She has published two books, Engendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives (Duke UP 2000) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: In other Words (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). She has co-edited the Companion To Postcolonial Studies (Blackwell, 2000) and the 3 volume Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016). Her book, Form Fitted: Postcolonial Aesthetics, Ethics, Politics is forthcoming. She is currently working on a book on South Asian refugee literature in Bengali, English, Hindi and in translation. She has published widely in key journals, given many talks nationally and internationally. She is the recipient of several grants and serves on the editorial boards of important journals in the field. She has served as President of a few divisions in the MLA as well as on various committees for the MLA and ACLA. She has been a past President of the Cultural Studies Association and has served two terms on the supervisory Board of the English Institute. She was President of ACLA from April 2020-April 2021. At the University she has, in the past, been the Director of the Asian American Studies Certificate Program, Director of the Cultures of the Americas, College Park Scholars Program as well as the Director of Graduate Studies in the English department.

Research Expertise

Postcolonial
South Asian Literature
Black Diaspora
Multi-ethnic Literature
Comparative literature
Anglophone world literature

Publications

"Knowing and Not Knowing: Gossip, News, and Rumors in Two Novels about Assam""

"Knowing and Not Knowing: Gossip, News, and Rumors in Two Novels about Assam"" was published in the Comparative Literature Journal, Vol 74:3 2022

English

Author/Lead: Sangeeta Ray
Dates:

This article articulates how an epistemology of ignorance structures the postcolonial metropolitan critic’s knowledge about a particular fraught state in India, Assam. Using the term agnotology, coined by Robert Proctor, rather than agniology, it examines two novels, Missing by Bengali writer Sumana Roy and The House with a Thousand Stories by Assamese novelist and poet Aruni Kashyap, to show that, despite their crucial differences in form, style, and narration, both novels use a locally inflected English language to tell stories about how rumor and gossip destroy families and communities living in the shadow of insurgencies and state violence. The Anglophone metropolitan postcolonial critic’s often-shallow knowledge about a region, its literature and deep politics, and their many rationalizations about why it is so, dovetails with the manner in which lies, exaggerated and fake news, shape and produce what counts as knowledge in these Indian Anglophone novels. Both works evoke the failure of a poetics and politics of familial and extrafamilial relations to underline how death and the disappearance of women from families, from society, and from the news enable a comparison of the inventive engagements with gender to understand the relationship of ignorance to truth.

South Asian "Refugee" Fiction and Film: The Poetics and Aesthetics of Suffering

In progress.

English

Author/Lead: Sangeeta Ray
Dates:

South Asian "Refugee" Fiction and Film:  The Poetics and Aesthetics of Suffering.

In progress.

Form Fitted: Postcolonial Aesthetics, Ethics, Politics

Forthcoming.

English

Author/Lead: Sangeeta Ray
Dates:

Form Fitted: Postcolonial Aesthetics, Ethics, Politics.

Forthcoming.

“Bombs and Bomb Makers: Realism, The Association of Small Bombs and the post-9/11 novel”

From Studies in the Novel. Volume 53, Number 1, Spring 2021.

English

Author/Lead: Sangeeta Ray
Dates:

Special issue on Post-9 11 fiction.

Special Issue: The Postcolonial Novel, Post-9/11 Part Two

GUEST EDITOR: Gaurav Desai

pp. 20-35

The English Institute Conference on “Truth Telling"

Special Issue of ELH

English

Author/Lead: Sangeeta Ray
Dates:

Coeditor, Special Issue of ELH, The English Institute Conference on “Truth Telling.”  87:2 (2020).

“Postcolonially Speaking?"

A trenchant critique of Post Critique Methodologies. Special Issue on “What Is and Isn’t Changing” From MLQ (Modern Language Quarterly).

English

Author/Lead: Sangeeta Ray
Dates:
MLQ Sangeeta Ray

Has postcolonial literary criticism been affected by the postcritical antihistoricist turn? The short answer is no. It is hard to imagine what an antihistoricist postcolonial literary criticism might look like, since any investment in the term postcolonial assumes a simultaneous commitment to history and politics. While the term from its inception has been subject to criticism, it continues to hold its own despite more recent terms like global and world. While they may signal a post-postcolonial turn, a term initially used by Erin O’Connor (2003) to critique postcolonial analyses of Victorian novels, the use of and engagement with the postcolonial still provide a methodological challenge to modes of criticism advanced under the global and the world. Postcolonial literary criticism remains attuned to questions of aesthetics and ethics.

Find the Volume 81 Issue 4 here

“Introduction to ‘Truth Telling'"

From ELH

English

Author/Lead: Sangeeta Ray
Dates:

“Introduction to ‘Truth Telling,’” ELH,  87: 2 (2020) 293-299.

“Captivating Genres"

This essay is part of a symposium on Yogita Goyal’s Runaway Genres.

English

Author/Lead: Sangeeta Ray
Dates:

From Humanity Journal. Read the essay here

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: In Other Words

This book introduces and discusses the works of leading feminist postcolonialist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, by exploring the key concepts and themes to emerge from them.

English

Author/Lead: Sangeeta Ray
Dates:
  • The book focuses on the key themes to emerge from Spivak’s work, such as ethics, literature, feminism, pedagogy, postcoloniality, violence, and war.
  • Assesses Spivak’s often contentious relationship with feminist and postcolonial studies
  • Considers the significance of her work for other fields, such as ethnography, history, cultural studies and philosophy.

Read More about Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: In Other Words

Companion to Postcolonial Studies

This volume examines the tumultuous changes that have occurred and are still occurring in the aftermath of European colonization of the globe from 1492 to 1947.

English

Author/Lead: Sangeeta Ray
Dates:
  • Ranges widely over the major themes, regions, theories and practices of postcolonial study
  • Presents original essays by the leading proponents of postcolonial study in the Americas, Europe, India, Africa, East and West Asia
  • Provides clear introductions to the major social and political movements underlying colonization and decolonization, accessible histories of the literature and culture, and separate regions affected by European colonization
  • Features introductory essays on the major thinkers and intellectual schools that have informed strategies of national liberation worldwide
  • Offers an incisive summary of the long history and theory of modern European colonization in local detail and global scale

Oxford: Blackwell, 2000 (paperback 2004).

Read More about Companion to Postcolonial Studies

Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies

Brings together the most wide-ranging and up-to-date scholarship ever assembled on the colonial, postcolonial and neo-colonial condition, covering the period from 1492 to the present.

English

Author/Lead: Sangeeta Ray
Dates:
Comprises nearly 400 authoritative yet accessible entries on canonical writers, key texts, genres, literary debates, colonized regions, and related terminology

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En-Gendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives

En-Gendering India offers an innovative interpretation of the role that gender played in defining the Indian state during both the colonial and postcolonial eras.

English

Author/Lead: Sangeeta Ray
Dates:
Focusing on both British and Indian literary texts—primarily novels—produced between 1857 and 1947, Sangeeta Ray examines representations of "native" Indian women and shows how these representations were deployed to advance notions of Indian self-rule as well as to defend British imperialism.

Read More about En-Gendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives