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Podcast: New Books in Literary Studies
Episode: Asif Iqbal, "Bangladesh in Anglophone and Vernacular Literature: Cultural Imaginings of a Postcolonial Nation" (Routledge, 2025)
Description: Bangladesh in Anglophone and Vernacular Literature: Cultural Imaginings of a Postcolonial Nation (Routledge, 2025) illuminates individual and collective imaginings of postcolonial Bangladesh. It explores the emergence of Bangladesh as a nation from a variety of perspectives. The author studies the impact of Muslim nationalism on the subaltern life-worlds of East Bengal during the Partition, religious minorities and their insecurity in East Pakistan, East Pakistan’s political insurgencies, the victims of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, the Indian stake in the 1971 War, and the cosmopolitan interpretations of the war. The literary and cultural texts that inform this project include contemporary Bengali novels, Sout...