Search results for ""Author Tabish Khair""

Acclaimed novelist and academic Tabish Khair argues that literature as a distinct mode of thinking can counteract fundamentalism.Literature is a mode of thinking, stories being one of the oldest thinking ''devices'' known to humankind. The ways in which literature enables us to think are distinctive and necessary, because of the relationships between its material (''language'') and its subject matter (''reality''). Although present in oral literature, these relationships are exposed in their full complexity with the rise of literature as a distinct form of writing. Literature Against Fundamentalism argues that literature enables us to engage with reality in language and language in reality, where both are mutually constitutive, constantly changing, and partly elusive.Tabish Khair defines this mode of engagement as essentially an agnostic one, resistant to simple dogma. Hence, literature can provide an antidote to fundamentalism. Khair argues that reading literature as literature--and n

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". . . brings new insights into the colonial relationship while challenging the unspoken temptation that this was a distinctly European period." —Simon GikandiOther Routes collects important primary work by travel writers from Asia and Africa in English translation. An introduction by Tabish Khair discusses travel literature as a genre, the perception of travel and writing about travel as a European privilege, and the emergence of new writings that show that travel has been a human occupation that crosses time and culture. This original and significant book will interest armchair travelers and others in views of people and places away from the European traveler's gaze.Selections include "The Travels of a Japanese Monk" (c. 838), "Al-Abdari, the Disgruntled Traveller" (c. 1290), "A Korean Official's Account of China" (1488), "The Poetry of Basho's Road" (1689), "Malabari: A Love-Hate Affair with the British" (1890).

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Travel writing is a genre monopolised by Westerners. For centuries the preserve of Europeans who reported on the "exotic", it sought to make sense of other landscapes and cultures, but almost exclusively through a European prism of references. This anthology, stretching from the fifth to the nineteenth centuries, introduces an entirely different tradition of travel writing - the work of travellers from the world beyond Europe. Other Routes collects important primary work by travel writers from Asia and Africa in English translation. Encompassing spiritual journeys, the personal, ethnography, natural history, geography, cartography, navigation, politics, history, religion and diplomacy, it shows that Africans and Asians also travelled the world and left travel writing worth reading. An introduction by Tabish Khair discusses travel literature as a genre, the perception of travel and writing about travel as a European privilege, and the emergence of new writings that show that travel has been a human occupation that crosses time and culture. Selections include The Travels of a Japanese Monk (c. 838), Al-Abdari, The Disgruntled Traveller (c. 1290), A Korean Official's Account of China (1488), The Poetry of Basho's Road (1689), Malabari: A Love-Hate Affair with the British (1890).

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