Migrant Epistemologies in Indian Nonfiction of the Long Twentieth Century

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.

Manisha Basu is Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is co-editor along with Anastasia Ulanowicz of The Aesthetics and Politics of Global Hunger (2019) and author of The Rhetoric of Hindu India (2016). Basu has also co-edited a special issue of Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies (Reimagining Regimes of Reality, Spring 2020). In addition, her essays have appeared in journals like Boundary 2, Comparative Literature, Ariel, The Comparatist, Victoriographies and Theory and Event. Her continuing research and teaching interests are in Postcolonial Studies, South Asian and African Literatures and Cultures, Critical Theory, Migration Studies and Decoloniality, and Epistemological and Environmental Justices.