Insurgent Cultures

Pavan Malreddy teaches English Literature at Goethe University Frankfurt. He is the author of Orientalism, Terrorism, Indigenism (2015) and co-editor of volumes: Narratives of War on Terror (2020),Writing Brexit (2022), Violence in South Asia (2020) Reworking Postcolonialism (2016). He co-edits Kairos: A Journal of Critical Symposium.

• Introduction: towards post-terrorism?; 1. Precarious riches: oil, insurgency, and violence in nigerian literature; 2. Intimate violence: rebels, heroes, and insurgent sovereignties in burmese anglophone literature; 3. Violent solidarities: narrating the maoist insurgency in India; 4. Violent worlds: vernacular agency in middle eastern literature; Epilogue: the moral burden of the insurgent.

'Pavan Malreddy is a born storyteller. In this, his latest monograph Insurgent Cultures, he spins an intricate web of tales, each of which offers fascinating insights into the 'splintered violence' of contemporary insurgency texts. Insurgency literatures, he argues, have the potential to 'redraw the coordinates of the world from the vantage point of a peripheral imagination'. Highly imaginative in its turn, Malreddy's book moves deftly between insurgency narratives from India, Nigeria, the Middle East and Burma. Taken together, these narratives, covering a variety of genres, go beyond 'the normative discourses of terrorism [and] the nostalgic parlance of revolution' to trace 'the aesthetic and affective trajectories of the insurrectional sublime'. A major contribution to both postcolonial and World Literature studies, Insurgent Cultures offers compelling evidence that these two fields are more closely interrelated than is often imagined to be the case.' Graham Huggan, Professor of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Leeds