Crossing Cultures

Literature written in the English language is now a global phenomenon, extending well beyond the borders of Great Britain and the United States, a phenomenon that is increasingly being reflected in the Department’s curriculum and research. All undergraduate English majors at the University of Virginia must now enroll in ENGL 381, 382 and 383, a three-semester survey course in the history of literature in English that begins in the middle ages and the Renaissance, takes students through the emergence of distinctive American and British literary traditions, and, in the third semester, introduces them to the works of contemporary writers in English working in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Indian subcontinent. Many members of the faculty have been directing their research agendas in the same direction, and a number of recent doctoral dissertations have also recognized this expansion in the boundaries of English literature to embrace writings from around the world. And now the Department is pleased to welcome a new faculty member, Mrinalini Chakravorty, whose teaching and research interests will support, extend, and enhance these efforts.

Mrinalini Chakravorty was born in Kolkata, India, and educated in Oman, India and the United States. She earned her B.A. in English at the University of Colorado at Boulder (1995), and her M.A. (1998) and Ph.D. (2005) at the University of California, Irvine. Her doctoral dissertation, Managing Modernities: Postcolonial Collectives in Twentieth Century Anglophone Literature, examines postcolonial world literature, and includes chapters on Salman Rushdie, Jamaica Kincaid, George Lamming, Chinua Achebe, and Ahdaf Soueif. Within her dissertation, Chakravorty analyzes what she describes as “cultural anxieties about movement and displacement that produce collectives whose very recalcitrance to state border controls conspicuously mark the contested sites of modernity (of labor, sexuality, and race).” More broadly speaking, Chakravorty’s dissertation examines “social, political, and literary intersections of modernity, migration and collectivism in postcolonial literature.” Her particular research and teaching interests are in postcolonial and Anglophone literatures and Marxist criticism, as well as queer and feminist theory.

Chakravorty’s current research interests are built upon a veritable mountain of writers from all over the world — Arab, African, Caribbean, and South Asian writers spanning the globe in a rich web of new English literatures. One might be curious to know who her favorite authors are — the typical question from one voracious reader to another. Her response constructs a list of some writers who are easily recognizable (Roy, Rushdie, Soyinka) alongside others who are less familiar (Mootoo, Selvadurai, Dangarembga). Mrinalini’s reading, research, and teaching puts writers such as Arundhati Roy, George Lamming and Ama Ata Aidoo in dialogue with canonical authors such as Samuel Beckett, James Joyce and E.M. Forster. Chakravorty’s multilingual language background — Bengali, Hindi, Arabic, and French — is but another clue to her extensive academic interests.

After receiving her Ph.D., Chakravorty was an Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, where she taught such courses as “Violence and the Body: Narrative Insurgency” and “Imperial Communities: The Colonial and Postcolonial Novel.” In her classes, Chakravorty considers the multiple ways in which English literature circulates in the Anglophone world today by seeing the work of writers such as Ondaaje, Okri, Salih, and Coetzee in relation to novels of empire such as Robinson Crusoe, Jane Eyre, and Heart of Darkness and contextualizing her lectures with contemporary film and critical theory. Her classes ask her students to think carefully about the relationship between literary studies, minority politics and social representation.

Not only are Chakravorty’s research and teaching interests varied, her teaching experience is also far-reaching. In 2003-2004, Chakravorty worked for a program entitled “Humanities Out There” or H.O.T., which is a program in the Santa Ana Unified School District in Southern California that enables collaborative education between Universities and schools in order to motivate predominantly minority and economically disadvantaged students towards a college education.  

Chakravorty’s publications include “To Undo What the North has Done: Fragments of a Nation and Arab Collectivism in the Fiction of Ahdaf Soueif” in Exploring Identity: Readings in Contemporary Arab Women’s Autobiographical Writings, “Hegel-Marx: The ‘Other’ Logic of Unproductive Labor” in Bad Subjects, and “Disciplinary Intertexts: Arab Women’s Fiction and the Frames of Arab Activism in Literature, History, Politics” in Interdisciplinarity and Social Justice .

From the canonical to the new, Marxism to Feminism, critical theory to film, literature of the global south to north, and high school educational programs to the University of Virginia, Mrinalini Chakravorty brings unique experience and a diverse cultural perspective to the department of English. Her current work at U.Va., a book project entitled Managing Modernities:  Postcolonial Collectives in Twentieth Century Anglophone Literature, examines film and literature from South Asia and the Middle East. This book expands upon her dissertation by analyzing the social, political and literary intersections of modernity, sexuality, and collectivism. Her research and teaching promises to broaden the literary horizons of both students and faculty alike.