Insurgent Cultures

Moving beyond the normative frames of terrorism and counter-terrorism, this book shows how world literatures from the Global South can be used to examine the multiple modalities of violence that pervade contemporary world politics, such as communalism, factionalism, sectarianism, peasant wars, nationalist struggles, resource wars, and acts of vengeance. The comparative approach of this book enables a theoretical realignment of insurgency from the mobilization of violence for grand, mythic, and ideological causes – as seen through the eyes of the state – to the violence for small causes, namely, the splintered violence conjured under conceptual rubrics such as divine violence, intimate violence, routine violence, everyday violence, inherited violence, and subterranean violence. Analyzing novels, autobiographies, and journalistic accounts from key regions, such as Nigeria, Myanmar (Burma), India, and the Middle East, Insurgent Cultures provides a new understanding of the narratives of violence in the Global South. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Pavan Kumar Malreddy teaches English Literature at Goethe University Frankfurt. He is the author of Orientalism, Terrorism, Indigenism (2015) and coeditor of Writing Brexit (2021), Narratives of War on Terror (2020), Violence in South Asia (2020), and Reworking Postcolonialism (2015). He coedits Kairos: A Journal of Critical Symposium.