Migrant Epistemologies in Indian Nonfiction of the Long Twentieth Century

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.

• 1. Introduction: Nonfiction Booms and the Migration Turn2. Of the Migrations and Mobilities of Free Men and Rats3. Migrant Minds, Colonial Legacies, Public Intellection4. Migration and Environmental Justice5. The Migrant Female Voices of Nineteenth-Century Bengal6. Visceral Needs and the Need for Others in the Migrant WorldBibliographyIndex

Migrant Epistemologies combines migrant studies, philosophy, ecocriticism, and postcolonial theory to illuminate the role of nonfiction writing in enabling self-cultivation, representing collectivities, and imagining just futures. Through detailed readings of a range of texts by authors from India and beyond, the book offers new perspectives on border-crossing and the possibility of human interconnectedness in the twentieth century.