Ruvani Ranasinha

South Asian broadcasters in Britain and the BBC: talking to India (1941–1943)

This paper explores the contributions of key diasporic South Asian writers and intellectuals, such as Mulk Raj Anand, to the BBC’s broadcasts to India during the Second World War (1941–1943) when the tensions between nationalism, anti‐fascism and anti‐imperialism were intense. It explores how diasporic South Asian writers in Britain dealt with these tensions. It analyses how their different responses to these tensions found literary expression, and how media and cultural critics responded to these literary texts. It argues that the BBC did not speak with a unitary voice but provided a transcultural contact zone in metropolitan London and in doing so fostered intellectual networks in which diasporic Indian nationalism could be debated and critiqued.

Writing and reading Sri Lanka: Shifting politics of cultural translation, consumption, and the implied reader

This article seeks to explore the politics of diasporic Sri Lankan fiction in relation to global markets and readerships. It argues for a revision of a long-standing notion of the informed reader in the Euro-American tradition in line with the rise of postcolonial literature. It explores the politics of linguistic and cultural “untranslatability” primarily in relation to Romesh Gunesekera’s fiction, and demonstrates how such diasporic novels problematize the nature of readership, as well as the tension between aesthetics and politics in the literary text. It asks to what extent are the differing responses to diasporic, intercultural texts explicable in terms of differing “horizons of expectations” of diverse, multi-levelled readerships? If so, how and why has this changed over the last decade?

Moore-Gilbert on Kureishi

This essay revisits Bart Moore-Gilbert’s monograph Hanif Kureishi first published in 2001. It focuses on how Moore-Gilbert’s previous engagement with discourses of imperialism, alongside his immersion in complex, precise, contemporary cultural histories productively informed his study of Kureishi’s work. It concludes with an exploration of how his work on Kureishi anticipates Moore-Gilbert’s subsequent influential theorizing of postcolonial life-writing.

Sri Lankan Fiction in English 1994–2014

This chapter discusses recent trends in Sri Lankan anglophone fiction of the last two decades; it contextualizes and reviews the fiction of some of the best-known Sri Lankan authors, notably Shyam Selvadurai, alongside others less well-known outside the island, such as Ameena Hussein. Sri Lankan writing is especially marginalized in the canons of postcolonial and contemporary fiction and in the academic study of ‘South Asia’ more generally. It has not reached the international visibility of ‘Indian writing in English’ in part because of its smaller literary output and comparatively nascent anglophone publishing culture. Thus the location and politics of publishing has had considerable impact on Sri Lankan anglophone writing, favouring authors published abroad and marginalizing the distinctive perspectives of local writers, lead to contrasting culturally located reader-responses. Lankan-based reviewers prove far more critical of Lankan texts than their counterparts elsewhere. However, as I’ve argued elsewhere, these distinct readerships have shifted within the last two decades (Ranasinha 2013). The power of the Euro-American reviewer to confer ‘authenticity’ on chosen diasporic writers is now increasingly interrogated, as are texts perceived as manufactured for easy Euro-American consumption. Moreover, geopolitical shifts, the Sri Lankan polity’s move (away from allegiance to the former colonizing power towards the multiple centres, and economic powerhouses China and India) has rendered less significant ‘the stamps of approval from the centre’.