The eighteenth century novel was seen as a genre par excellence embodying the interplay between distant suffering, technology , and humanitarian witnessing.  For novel studies today, the charge of this formulation has multiplied beyond measure in the current era of saturated visualisation of geopolitical carnage because of the technologoes of prosecution and witness converge.

Proliferating para-novelistic genres such as blogs, electronic epistles and docu-visual digital narratives by human rights organisations have critically transformed the nature and moral purchase of the contemporary novel.

Professor Ganguly

Professor Ganguly is Director of the Humanities Research Centre and Associate Professor of English at the Australian National University.  She works in the areas of postcolonial, comparative and world literatures.  Her other areas of research include the language worlds in South Asia, dalit life narratives, South Asian diasporic fiction, cultural histories of mixed race, and the globalisation of the Bollywood phenomena.

Debjani's books include Caste, Colonialism and Countermodernity (Routledge, 2005), Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public Intellectual (ed.) (Mebourne University Press 2007), and Rethinking Gandhi and Nonviolent Relationality: Global Persepctives (ed.) (Routledge 2007).  She is currently completing a monograph for Duke University Press entitled The World after 1989 as well as preparing an essay on the world novel for the forthcoming The Cambridge Companion to the Postcolonial Novel.

» Professor Ganguly's profile

Enquiries: administration.rsha@anu.edu.au