Companion to the much-acclaimed Dalit Literatures in India, this book examines questions of aesthetics and literary representation in a wide range of Dalit literary texts. It looks at how Dalit literature invokes the rich and complex legacy of oral, folk and performative traditions of communities.
"This book makes a critically important contribution to the growing, but still impoverished, field of Dalit literary studies in two key ways. First, the editors and contributors to Dalit Text refuse an engagement with Dalit literature's politics in lieu of its aesthetics, and in so doing, rightfully reject the all-too-common sociological approach to Dalit literature that blinds us to the meaningful employment of innovative narrative strategies that has been at the core of Dalit literary production from its earliest stages. Second, the book makes a commitment to highlighting several new voices of Dalit literature and literary criticism, voices that will emerge for the first time in an edited volume that will have extensive transnational reach. Such a political commitment to representing a diversity of voices - in several different languages - from within Dalit literary and scholarly circles in India and its diaspora will play a critical role in contributing to the growth and sophistication of the field of Dalit literary studies. This volume is desperately needed, and most welcome." - Laura Brueck, Associate Professor of South Asian Languages and Cultures, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL USA
"This contribution to the extant body of scholarship on Dalits, now a recognized area of academic attention world-wide, forcefully intensifies the field and begins to widen it. Necessary reading for anyone interested in justice in its various forms. This book goes a long way to study newer aspects of Dalit studies."- Aniket Jaaware, Professor, English Department, Shiv Nadar University, Delhi, India
"A profound inquiry into the relation between the category 'Dalit' on the one hand and artistic and literary practice on the other, this landmark volume brings together writers, critics and translators to engage the force of Dalit writing in several Indian languages. The result of an international collaboration, this volume crucially brings questions of translation and universalization to the very untranslatability of the term 'Dalit.'" -- Simona Sawhney, Associate Professor, Humanities & Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India
