Home and the World: South Asia in Transition

Helen Asquine Fazio, who earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, also holds an M.A. in Art History, specializing in Himalayan, South, and East Asia. Fazio has curated five recent exhibitions of contemporary art of South Asia and traditional Tibetan and Nepalese art. She is an editor of Language, Mysticism and Iconography: Exploring the Cultural Interface Between East and South Asia, which is forthcoming from Cambridge Scholars Press, and the Visual and Performing Arts Editor of Catamaran Magazine.

Atreyee Phukan is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at U of San Diego. Her main research interests lie in the political significance of cultural and racial hybridity in post-colonial anglophone Caribbean literature. She has also worked on South Asian literature, which appears in the anthology 19th and 20th Century World Writers (2004) and is co-editing a collection of essays entitled, Reading the “Exotic”: South Asia and Its Others.

V.G. Julie Rajan’s doctoral research focused on women’s resistance narratives written by Pakistani and Indian women post-1947. Rajan has published widely in the areas of South Asia, women and gender studies, literature, terrorism and resistance, and modernism, and is currently writing a book on women suicide bombers globally. Rajan is currently editing several anthologies including Reading the “Exotic”: South Asia and Its Others and Language, Mysticism and Iconography: Exploring the Cultural Interface Between East and South Asia.

Shreerekha Subramanian is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University and is writing her dissertation on comparative notions of violence in French-Caribbean, African American, and Hindi literature. She recently published the essay, “Blood, Memory, and Nation: Massacre and Mourning in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones” in the anthology, The Masters and the Slaves: Plantation Relations and Mestizaje in American Imaginaries (New Directions in Latino American Culture), 2005.