Sandeep Banerjee
Ph.D. (Syracuse University, USA)
M. Phil., (University of Oxford, UK)
M.A. (Jadavpur University, India)
B.A. Honours (Jadavpur University, India)
Space, nature, and the environment; aesthetics in a global context; imperialism and decolonization; ideology of literary form; global capitalism, uneven development, and theories of transition; cultures of global socialism; literary and social theory, especially historical materialism and postcolonial theory.
Syracuse University
Books
Space, Utopia, and Indian Decolonization: Literary Pre-figurations of the Postcolony. (Routledge, 2019; Pbk, 2021)
Edited Volumes
Partition, Belonging and the Birth of Bangladesh (co-edited with Subho Basu). Routledge. Forthcoming.
Editor, “Death, Disease, and Empire: A Forum on Mike Davis’s Late-Victorian Holocausts.” Global Nineteenth-Century Studies. Forthcoming.
Articles and Book Chapters
Journal Articles
“The Translation of Culture and the Culture of Translation: From Gorky’s Mother to Mahasweta Devi’s Mother of 1084.” Comparative Literature Studies. Forthcoming.
“Colonial Necropolitics.” In “Death, Disease, and Empire: A Forum on Mike Davis’s Late-Victorian Holocausts.” Global Nineteenth-Century Studies. Forthcoming.
“World Literature, the Text, and the Critic: Re-reading The Country and the City, Re-situating Raymond Williams.” Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism 20 (2022): 19-39. By invitation.
“Cognitive Maps of the Semi-Periphery: Two Bengali Novels and the Transition to Colonial Capitalist Modernity.” Modern Fiction Studies 68, no. 1 (2022): 43-63. By invitation.
“Gestures of Refusal: Utopian Longings in Satyajit Ray’s Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne.” Utopian Studies 30, no. 3 (2022): 257-73.
“Beyond the Intimations of Mortality: Chakrabarty, Anthropocene, and the Politics of the Im/Possible.” Mediations 30, no 2. (2017): 1-14.
“Secularising the Sacred, Imagining the Nation-Space: The Himalaya in Bengali Travelogues, 1856-1901” (co-authored with Subho Basu). Modern Asian Studies 49, no. 3 (2015): 609-49.
“‘Why, This is (Not Quite) London!’: The Spectre of Kipling in Contemporary Kolkata.” Critical Imprints 3 (2015): 1-21. By invitation.
“‘Not altogether Unpicturesque’: Samuel Bourne and the Landscaping of the Victorian Himalaya.” Victorian Literature and Culture 42 (2014): 351-68.
Book Chapters
“The Imperial Romance: Colonialism in Ritual Form.” In Cambridge Companion to British Literature and Empire, ed. Auritro Majumder. Cambridge UP. By invitation. Forthcoming.
“Empire, Nation, and the Question of Space” (co-authored with Atreyee Majumder). In Cambridge Critical Concepts: Space and Literary Studies, ed. Elizabeth Evans. Cambridge UP. By invitation. Forthcoming.
“Under the ‘jack-fruit-tree-shade’: Making Sense of Place in the Bengali Lyric.” In Partition, Belonging and the Birth of Bangladesh, eds. Sandeep Banerjee and Subho Basu. Routledge. Forthcoming.
“Introduction: From an Affective to a Political Community” (co-authored with Subho Basu). In Partition, Belonging and the Birth of Bangladesh, eds. Sandeep Banerjee and Subho Basu. Routledge. Forthcoming.
“The City as Nation: Delhi as the Indian Nation in Bengali bhadralok travelogues 1866-1910” (co-authored with Subho Basu). In Cities in South Asia, eds. Crispin Bates and Minoru Mio (Routledge, 2015): 125-42.
“A Brief History of South Asia” (co-authored with Subho Basu et al). In South Asia in the World: An Introduction, ed. Susan S. Wadley, (ME Sharpe, 2015): 22-65.
“Raymond Williams: Materialist Approach to Culture, Literature, Media and Politics.” In Modern Social Thinkers, ed. Pradip Basu (Setu Publishing, 2012): 319-36.
Reference Essay
“British Colonialism and Imperialism” (co-authored with Atreyee Majumder). In Oxford Bibliographies in Hinduism, ed. Tracy Coleman. Oxford UP, 2023. Introduction, commentaries and 115 annotated entries. 11,149 words.
Translations
“‘Whether Flowers Bloom or Not’: Selections from Bengali Poetry.” Harf: A Journal of South Asian Studies 3 (2018): 41-45.
Reviews and Public Scholarship
Book Reviews & Roundtables
Review of States of Disconnect: The China-India Literary Relation in the Twentieth Century by Adhira Mangalagiri. Columbia UP, 2023. Comparative Literature Studies. Forthcoming.
“Requiem for a Dream.” Forum on Insurgent Imaginations: World Literature and the Periphery by Auritro Majumder. Cambridge UP, 2020. Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 9, no. 3 (2022): 399-404.
Review of Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures by Aamir Mufti. Harvard UP, 2018. Ariel 51, no. 1 (2021): 170-73.
“A Saga of Conceptual Difficulties.” Review of Similarity: A Paradigm for Culture Theory, eds. Anil Bhatti and Dorothee Kimmich. Tulika Books, 2018. Economic and Political Weekly. Vol. LVI, nos. 45 & 46 (2021): 34-36.
“Anatomy of a Criticism: Considerations on a ‘More than Global’ Reading Strategy.” In “More than Global?”: A Roundtable Discussion on Thinking Literature Across Continents by Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller. Duke UP, 2016. New Global Studies 13, no.1 (2019): 131-36. By Invitation.
Review of Daniel E. White, From Little London to Little Bengal: Religion, Print & Modernity in Early British India 1793-1835. Johns Hopkins UP, 2013. University of Toronto Quarterly 84, no. 3 (2015): 214-16.
Public Scholarship
“স্বপ্ন হলেও সত্যি: অসম্ভবের রাজনীতি প্রসঙ্গে” [“A Truthful Dream: On the Politics of the Impossible”]. Bangla Journal 27 (2022): 64-72. In Bengali.
“ImagiNation, or the Politics of Nation and Imagination.” Montreal Serai. Vol. 35, no. 3 (2022).
“To Dream, Perchance to Change.” Café Dissensus. Issue 61 (2022).
“Utopianism and its Discontents.” Marx, Asia, and the history of the present. episteme. Issue 3 (2020).
“Epiphany and Exasperation: The National Library.” Kolkata, Book City: Readings, Fragments, Images, eds. Jennie Renton and Sria Chatterjee (Textualities, 2009): 163-72.
Major Grants
- Insight Grant, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Canada (2019-24).
- Research Grant, Gerda Henkel Stiftung, Germany (2018-20; Co-PI)
- Établissement de nouveaux professeurs-chercheurs Grant, Fonds de recherche du Québec (2015-18).
Awards
- Louis Dudek Award for Excellence in Teaching. Department of English Student Association, McGill University, 2017.
Fellowships
- Faculty Fellowship. Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas, McGill University (2016-18).
- Dissertation Fellowship. Humanities Centre, Syracuse University, USA (2012-13).
- University Fellowship. Syracuse University, USA (2011-12; 2007-08).
- British Chevening/ Radhakrishnan Oxford Scholarship (2000-02).
I supervise projects related to my areas of interest.
I am a scholar of postcolonial and world literature with a focus on the literary and cultural worlds of South Asia. My scholarship engages questions related to the social production of space, nature, and the environment; imperialism and decolonization; capitalism; modernity and aesthetics in the global “periphery;” the ideology of literary form; and the cultures of global socialism. Other intellectual interests include comparative literature after globalization, postcolonial theory, and the global intellectual history of Marxist theory.
I am the author of Space, Utopia and Indian Decolonization: Literary Pre-figurations of the Postcolony (Routledge, 2019). It conceives of decolonization as a utopian spatial desire to underscore the centrality of space and representation in prefigurations of a possible postcolony. I am a co-editor of the anthology of essays Partition, Belonging and the Birth of Bangladesh (Routledge, forthcoming). My research has appeared or is forthcoming in, venues such as Comparative Literature Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, Modern Asian Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, Cambridge Companion to British Literature and Empire, and Cambridge Critical Concepts: Space and Literary Studies. I am one of the series editors of the Routledge Series in the Cultures of the Global Cold War and serve on the editorial boards of the journals positions: asia critique, and Mediations.
I am currently completing my second monograph, provisionally titled “Geographies of Enchantment: Placemaking in the Colonial Himalaya.” It examines the changes in the cultural conceptions in the mountains between 1770 and 1950. Conceiving of this transformation as a contested process of placemaking in which both the British and Indians engaged in, the study illuminates a key moment in the colonial production of space and nature in the capitalocene. I am currently translating a Bengali novel into English besides developing a project that will examine the impact of the cold war on the literary, cultural, and theoretical worlds of South Asia.