Nagesh Rao
Assistant Professor
Nagesh Rao studied science at the undergraduate level before working on his M.A. in English Literature at Bangalore University , Bangalore , India . He completed a second M.A. in English at Syracuse University in 1994, and received his Ph.D. in English from Brown University in 2001. Before joining The College of New Jersey, he taught for five years in the English Department at Wake Forest University , North Carolina . His research interests span several interrelated areas, including: postcolonial literature, especially South Asian and sub-Saharan African literature in English; literary and critical theory; Marxism and Marxist theories of imperialism; national liberation movements; theories of globalization; the geopolitics of South Asia ; and the politics of Hindu nationalism (communalism). He teaches courses on Marxism and literature; multicultural literature; postcolonial literature and literary theory.
He has lectured on war and imperialism at the Indian Institute of Technology, University of North Carolina , Appalachian State University, George Washington University and Jadhavpur University ( India ). He has also been active in the U.S. antiwar movement and global justice movement, and helped organize panels and events at the World Social Forum in Mumbai. He is currently editing Exile, a collection of interviews with the Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, to be published by Haymarket Books in 2006, while simultaneously conducting research for his own book, tentatively titled Modes of Resistance: Globalization, Communalism and Contemporary Indian Writers .
Selected publications:
- “The Persistence of Imperialism: Contemporary Debates.” Spec. issue of New Formations. Neil Lazarus and Priyamvada Gopal, eds. Forthcoming, Spring 2006.
- “New Imperialisms, New Imperatives: The Future of Postcolonial Studies.” Postcolonial Text 2.1 (forthcoming, Fall 2005) .
- “Resistance and Representation: Postcolonial Fictions of Nations in Crisis.” Postcolonial Text 1.1 (July 2004).
- “Modernity Redux: Empire and the End(s) of Postmodernism.” Rethinking Modernity. Eds. Santhosh Gupta, Prafulla C. Kar and Parul Dave Mukherji. New Delhi : Pencraft, 2004.
- “Cosmopolitanism, Class and Gender in The Shadow Lines .” South Asian Review 25.1 (2003): 95-115.
- “‘Neocolonialism' or ‘Globalization'? Postcolonial Theory and the Demands of Political Economy.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 1.2 (Spring 2000): 165-84.
- “Communalism, Socialism and Liberation in When Memory Dies. ” A World to Win: Essays in honour of A. Sivanandan . Ed. Colin Prescod and Hazel Waters. Spec. issue of Race and Class 41.1/2 (July-December 1999): 175-88. Reprinted in Tamil Times 19.7 ( 15 July 2000 ) 23-9.
