Enrichment Lecture (E-Series) Comparative Partitions by Prof. Feroza Jussawalla

The Department of English organised the next in its series of virtual Enrichment Lectures on 14 May 2020. The Speaker was Prof. Feroza Jussawalla from the University of New Mexico, USA, who spoke on ‘Comparative Partitions’.
 
The talk covered a lot of ground in that it was wide-ranging in the manner in which it threw light on how partitions begin with independences, especially as seen in the case of Ireland and India. The Speaker went on to dwell on the political fact of the colonials having cannibalised the colonised on the one hand and the articulation - in literature - of postcoloniality/ freedom and nationalism in the works of some well-known writers such as James Joyce and poets such as William Butler Yeats, on the other.
 
Prof. Jussawalla then talked about the importance of contextualising histories by revisiting older works such as the ones by R.K. Narayan and Raja Rao to examine those as postcolonial texts as also turning to the lesser-explored works on the phenomenon of partition such as the Vietnamese novels for understanding territorial issues within the country, among others.
 
In sum, it was a very engaging session which also saw a few queries and observations being made towards the end by the attendees on the colonialist capitalist empires (resembling oligarchies) of today; militant communism as resistance; the plight of the subaltern; and, precarity in the time of a pandemic.