Showcases how a range of migrant experiences are crucial to increasing interdependencies between differentially empowered groups across the world.• Theorizes the contact between distinct epistemologies during the migrant experience as crucial for a politics of living in relation to others.• Animates the figure of the nonfiction writer as a public intellectual with an interest in the viability of different worldviews.• Generates a conversation between the new Global South Studies and an older vein of critical humanism from both India and the West.• Traces the interest of contemporary nonfiction in the kinds of stories that emerge in the histories-from-below rubric of Subaltern Studies.• Connects the figure of the migrant to the important task of rendering durable endangered ways of knowing through an epistemologies-from-below approach.Attending to non-fiction texts from India and the Global South, Migrant Epistemologies identifies migratory contact zones as sites on which contrary epistemic stances may co-exist, despite their differences, in a symbiotic ecology. Given the increasing traffic between differentially empowered groups around the world, their distinct cognitive practices must often meet one another head-on. Manisha Basu argues that in the best of such circumstances, migrants and hosts open themselves to unlearning their own dominant worldviews and animating other ways of knowing. Unlike accounts of migration that accentuate the violences involved in the movements of peoples, this book foregrounds relatively peaceable, but still complex, migratory encounters that imagine an epistemologically diverse world resulting in social and environmental justice.
Manisha Basu
Manisha Basu is Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is co-editor along with Anastasia Ulanowicz of The Aesthetics and Politics of Global Hunger (2019) and author of The Rhetoric of Hindu India (2016). Basu has also co-edited a special issue of Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies (Reimagining Regimes of Reality, Spring 2020). In addition, her essays have appeared in journals like Boundary 2, Comparative Literature, Ariel, The Comparatist, Victoriographies and Theory and Event. Her continuing research and teaching interests are in Postcolonial Studies, South Asian and African Literatures and Cultures, Critical Theory, Migration Studies and Decoloniality, and Epistemological and Environmental Justices.
Editorial Reviews
“Migrant Epistemologies combines migrant studies, philosophy, ecocriticism, and postcolonial theory to illuminate the role of nonfiction writing in enabling self-cultivation, representing collectivities, and imagining just futures. Through detailed readings of a range of texts by authors from India and beyond, the book offers new perspectives on border-crossing and the possibility of human interconnectedness in the twentieth century.”
—Ulka Anjaria, Brandeis University