Launch of 'The Shouting in the Dark' and 'Indian Arrivals'

Friday, 18 September, 2015 - 17:30

WiSER invites you to a celebration of two books by

Elleke Boehmer

The Shouting in the Dark is the story of a conflict to the death between a young woman in 1970s South Africa and her war-damaged immigrant father.  Ben Okri describes it as: ‘A powerful novel of memory, family politics and awakening’. Introduction by Sarah Nuttall (WiSER)

Indian Arrivals 1870-1915 traces the migrant pathways that brought Indian seers, teachers, activists, writers and other travellers to Britain in the late 19th century.  Their many different writings about this transnational journey reflect the paradoxes of the cosmopolitan condition: how the modern world was in many ways more familiar to them than it was strange; how the European city was often modelled on the Indian urban spaces in which they lived. Introduction by Dilip Menon (CISA)

Date:  Thursday, 17th September
Time:  6pm
Venue: WISER Seminar Room, 6th Floor, Richard Ward Building, East Campus

Elleke Boehmer is the Professor of World Literature in English, in the English Faculty at the University of Oxford, and Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College. Her books include Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (1995, 2005), Empire, the National and the Postcolonial, 1890-1920 (2002), and the biography Nelson Mandela (2008), as well as Stories of Women: Gender and narrative in the postcolonial nation (2005). She is the author of four acclaimed novels, including Screens again the Sky (short-listed David Hyam Prize, 1990), Bloodlines (shortlisted SANLAM prize), and Nile Baby (2008), and of the short-story collection Sharmilla and Other Portraits (2010). She edited the British best- seller, Robert Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys (2004), and the anthology Empire Writing (1998), and has co-edited a number of books, including J.M. Coetzee in Writing and Theory (2009), The Indian Postcolonial (2010), The Postcolonial Low Countries (2012) and Terror and the Postcolonial (2010). In 2015 she publishes Indian Arrivals 1870-1915: Networks of Empire, a cultural history, and a novel, The Shouting in the Dark. She was a Man Booker International judge 2013-15.

The event is hosted by WiSER with support from OUP.

RSVP: Najibha.Deshmukh@wits.ac.za

 

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