Cultures of Memory in South Asia ― Orality, Literacy and the Problem of Inheritance

Culture of Memory in South Asia reconfigures European representations of India as a paradigmatic extension of a classical reading, which posits the relation between text and context in a determined way. It explores the South Asian cultural response to European “textual” inheritances. The main argument of this work is that the reflective and generative nodes of Indian cultural formations are located in the configurations of memory, the body and idiom (verbal and visual), where the body or the body complex becomes the performative effect and medium of articulated memories. This work advances its arguments by engaging with mnemocultures---cultures of memory---that survive and proliferate in speech and gesture. Drawing on Sanskrit and Telugu reflective sources, this work emphasizes the need to engage with cultural memory and the compositional modes of Indian reflective traditions. This important and original work focuses on the ruptured and stigmatised resources of heterogeneous Indian traditions and calls for critical humanities that move beyond the colonially configured received traditions. Cultures of Memory suggests the possibilities of transcultural critical humanities research and teaching initiatives from the Indian context in today’s academy.

D. Venkat Rao is Professor at the Department of English Literature, School of English Literary Studies, The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Washington, Seattle. Professor Rao pursued his postdoctoral research at the University of Chicago, University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Washington, Seattle, and his doctoral work at the University of Kent, UK. His awards include the Commonwealth Academic Staff Fellowship, Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship (twice), and Senior Fulbright Research Fellowship. In addition to books in English and Telugu, he has published articles in national and international journals. His areas of interest include literary and cultural studies, image studies, comparative thought, translation, and mnemocultures. He has designed several courses interfacing areas of culture, technology and literary and cultural studies, and has taught in India and the USA.