The Yeats -Tagore friendship and the eventual curious fallout between the two remain a mystery; the focus of this volume is a postcolonial reading of the two writers’ friendship, the critical reception of Tagore in 1912 England, and Tagore’s erasure from Western literary discourse. The essays in this volume take a decolonial turn to critically analyze the two writers in the discourse of power that is a part of their larger story.
The nuances that appear in the pages of this illuminating book explore the meaning of "the politics of friendship" and the sense of intercultural relationship marred by colonialism. The volume re-envisions what the "postcolonial" can mean, be, and do. We can learn from the two major figures and their work and create a new vision of that problematic preposition "post.<
- Professor Mieke Bal, ASCA (Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis).
This volume offers a magnificent illustration of how to retell the story of a cross-cultural literary relationship from a decolonial perspective. Ghosh and Redwine’s edited collection exemplifies the need of the hour: to reassess the value of literary traditions, institutions, and relationships while illuminating the politics of colonialism and racism that compromises them.
- Deepika Bahri, Professor of English, Emory University; Author of Postcolonial Biology.
part 1 Tagore, Yeats, Translation and Appropriation
1 (Un)Translatable Authorship Positioning Yeats’ “Preface” and the Poetry of Tagore Amardeep Singh
2 Translation at the Abbey Theatre in 1913 The World Premier of Rabindranath Tagore’s the Post Office
Barry Sheils
part 2 Representation, Subalternity, and Transnational Collaborations
3 Hybrid Performances Tagore, Yeats, Politics and the Practice of Cosmopolitanism Louise Blakeney Williams
5 Tagore, Yeats and the Poetics of Subalternity
Sirshendu Majumdar
part 3 Performativity, Art: Modernism and Postcolonial
6 Translating from the Peripheries Rabindranath Tagore, William Butler Yeats, Automatism and Late-stage Aesthetics Victor Vargas
7 Meeting the British Yeats, Tagore, and Self Fashioning Elizabeth Brewer Redwine
8 Tagore’s Radical Art and Yeats’ Intermedial Dance-Theatre Reevaluating Eurocentric Modernism Amrita Ghosh
Afterword Tagore and Yeats: A Postcolonial Re-envisioning Joseph Lennon
Index
Anyone interested in postcolonial studies, area studies including South Asia, Irish studies, gender and performance studies, the aesthetics of representation and translation would benefit from this book.