Representing the Indian Emergency: Literature, Form, and the Present
This talk discusses representations of the Indian Emergency in a select number of Indian novels. The Emergency was a 21-month period (from 1975 to 1977) unleashed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s proclamation of a state of emergency across India. The order granted the prime minister the authority to rule by decree and authorized the cancelation of elections and suspension of civil liberties. Andrade’s presentation will explore the role of form in novelistic representations of the Emergency and explore these narratives’ complex efforts to preserve the silenced and waning memory of the Emergency’s human rights violations and suspension of democracy.
Susan Z. Andrade is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Pittsburgh. She earned her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan in 1992. As a Professor in the University of Pittsburgh’s English Department, she offered a broad sweep of courses, ranging from world literature, postcolonial literature, and modernism, and introduced her students to several new novelists from the Global South as well as Anglophone and Francophone Africa. Professor Andrade is the author of The Nation Writ Small: African Fictions and Feminisms,1958-1988 (Duke University Press, 2011) and has published several groundbreaking articles. Professor Andrade’s visit to UW-Madison is sponsored by the Jay & Ruth Halls Visiting Scholar Fund.
