Transcultural Negotiations of Gender ― Studies in (Be)longing

Transcultural Negotiations of Gender probes into how gender is negotiated along the two axes of ‘belonging’ and ‘longing’– the twin desires of being located within a cultural milieu, while yearning for either what has passed by or what is yet to come. It also probes into the category of ‘transculturality’ itself, by examining how not only does it pertain to the coming together of cultures from diverse spatial locations, but how shifts over time and changing performative modes and technological means of articulation, within what may be presumed to be the same culture, can also lead to the ‘transcultural’.

The volume comprises four sections. Part I, ‘(Be)longing in Time’, examines negotiation of gender through transcultural acts of myths, rituals and religious practices being revised and revisited over time. Part II, ‘(Be)longing in Space’, studies how gender is renegotiated when people from different spaces interact, as also when public spaces and domains themselves become sites of such negotiations. In Part III, ‘Performing (Be)longing’, such transcultural negotiations are located in the context of changing modes of performance, considering particularly that gender itself is performative. The final section, ‘Modernity, Technology and (Be)longing’, traces how gender becomes transculturally negotiated in a space like India, with the advent of modernity and its companion technology.

Saugata Bhaduri is Professor at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He has taught, conducted research, and published extensively in the areas of literary and cultural theory, popular culture of both the folk and technologized sort, translation and comparative literature, and gender and sexuality. He has been visiting professor at different institutions in Europe and the Americas, and has been a recipient of grants for collaborative research from major international bodies like Leverhulme Trust, UK Arts Council, UKIERI, Erasmus Mundus, DAAD, BMBF, etc. The collaborative research projects he is currently engaged in are “Performing Gender: Negotiating Space in Civil Society” (in partnership with the University of Wurzburg, Germany), “Polycoloniality in India: Cultural Transactions with Europe from Early Modernity to the 19^th Century” (in partnership with the University of Gottingen, Germany), and “Computer Gaming across Cultures” (in partnership with Bangor University, UK, and West Virginia University, USA).

Indrani Mukherjee is Professor at the Centre of Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Latin American Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She is a second generation Hispanist who wrote the first ever PhD on Latin American Literature from any Spanish department in India. Her academic career spans across 30 years and her publications are in the areas of comparative literature, cultural studies and pedagogy of literature. She is working on two research projects on comparative gender studies from India and Latin America which are funded by the University Grants Commission, India, and the UPE, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. She has been invited by many universities and academic forums in India and abroad to give lectures (including keynote, plenary or other), chair sessions of conferences or even speak as an Indian representative in India-Spain-Latin America World forums. She is a life member of the European Network for Comparative Literary Studies and of the Forum on Contemporary Theory, Baroda (India), which is in academic collaboration with the International Lincoln Center at the Louisiana State University, Shreveport, USA and University of North Texas at Denton, USA.