Bio-bibliographical notices

1 Simone A. James Alexander, PhD is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Africana & Diaspora Studies, at Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey where she also teaches courses on African-American literature, Caribbean literature, and women writers. Her book Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women was published by the University of Missouri Press, 2001. In addition, she has published articles and book chapters on Kamau Braithwaite, Maryse Condé, Paule Marshall, and Jamaica Kincaid. She is also the recipient of several fellowships in support of her research. She has also authored ‘Walking on Thin Ice: The Il/legitimacy of Race and Racial Issues in the Classroom’ that appeared in The Teacher’s Body: Embodiment, Identity, and Authority in the Academy (SUNY Press, 2003), and Caribbean Women Writers and Activism: Amy Jacques Garvey, Claudia Jones, and Audre Lorde.

2Forthcoming in African-American Review is her article titled ‘M/Othering the Nation: Women’s Bodies as Nationalist Trope’ in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory; and ‘Gendered Resistance: Folklore as Poetic and Political Tool in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory’ in a special issue of Black Praxis. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled Migrating Bodies: Women Writers Narrating Diasporic Subjects.

3 Savitri Ashok is currently an Associate Professor in English at Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, Tennessee. She has a Ph.D. from Middle Tennessee State University. Her dissertation area is Postcolonial theory and fiction. In addition to two Master’s degrees in English from India (Madurai Kamaraj University) and the U.S. (Southern Illinois University), Dr. Ashok also has a Diploma in Women’s Development Studies, from AIACHE, New Delhi, India. From August 1990 to 1996, Dr. Ashok served as professor on invitation in the SITA (South India Term Abroad) Program and taught a course on “Social Issues in Indian Literature” to American students from Amherst, Dickinson, Smith, Bowdoin and Whittier colleges and George Washington University (participating schools in the SITA program), spending a semester in Madurai, India. In addition to her teaching experience in India and America for a little over 25 years, Dr. Ashok also did a six-month stint as Editorial Advisor and Columnist for the newspaper Morning News, Manipal, India. Publications in the newspaper include original articles on Women’s issues, Book-reviews, and a weekly column titled Tales from Mahabharatha. Her essay on ‘Battering Ram, Bruised Nation: Postcolonial Nationalism and the Forsaken Promise of Secularism’ was published in the 2009 Special issue of South Asia Review.

4 Véronique Bragard est chargée de cours à l’Université catholique de Louvain. Elle a obtenu un M.A. de University of Warwick, son doctorat à l’Université catholique de Louvain, et a bénéficié d’une bourse de la BAEF pour un séjour post-doctoral à University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Son ouvrage Transoceanic Dialogues: Coolitude in Caribbean and Indian Ocean Literatures (Peter Lang, 2008) étudie les questions d’interculturalité dans les littératures des Antilles et Mascareignes. Véronique Bragard a publié des articles sur les écrits des femmes des Antilles et des Mascareignes ainsi que sur l’œuvre poétique de Khal Torabully dans diverses revues en anglais (Journal of Caribbean Literatures, Kunapipi, International Journal of Francophone Studies) et en français (Notre Librairie, Missives, Women in French Studies). Ses domaines de recherches actuels incluent les littératures postcoloniales comparées, la migration dans la littérature et la bande dessinée et les imaginaires apocalyptiques post 11 septembre.

5 Florence Cabaret, who is a Lecturer at the Université de Rouen, wrote a PhD on Salman Rushdie’s novels and the question of the pragmatic status of fictional discourses. She is currently working on Indian literatures in English and she has contributed two articles to the question of film adaptation in relation to postcolonial issues: one was dedicated to Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice and focused on the way Jane Austen’s world is both indianized and globalized in the film. The other paper was dedicated to Tim Supple’s BBC adaptation of Twelfth Night and raised the issue of colour-blindness in the choice of actors, taking into account the encounter with Shakespeare’s text, with a TV audience getting used to seeing black actors in various kinds of programs, and with a world context in which illegal immigrants are a hot issue for Great Britain.

6 Claude Chastagner is Professor at Paul-Valéry University, Montpellier, France. His research focuses on Anglo-American popular music. He is currently working of the musical production of various diasporic communities in the United States.

7 Sophie Croisy is Maître de conférences in English at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines near Paris. She is the head of the language center at the UVSQ UFR de Sciences. She got her doctoral degree from the University of Florida in 2006. Her dissertation is entitled ‘Other Cultures of Trauma: Meta-metropolitan Narratives and Identities.’ She is a member of two research groups: ‘Suds d’Amériques’ at the University of Versailles, and the ‘CRELANS’ at the University of Evry Val d’Essonne. Her research activities focus on two main domains: trauma studies on the one hand and professional-based fiction on the other.

8 Selwyn R. Cudjoe is Professor of Africana Studies at Wellesley College. He has also taught at Harvard, Cornell, Brown, Ohio and Fordham universities. He has been a recipient of several National Endowment for the Humanities Awards that are awarded by the United States Federal government and an American Council of Learned Society Fellowship. He was also the Marion Butler McLean Professor of the History of Ideas at Wellesley College and a Senior Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.

9Professor Cudjoe is the author of several books including Resistance and Caribbean Literature (1980); V. S. Naipaul: A Materialist Reading (1988); and Beyond Boundaries: The Intellectual Tradition of Trinidad and Tobago in the Nineteenth Century (2003) and Caribbean Visionary: A.R.F. Webber and the Making of the Guyanese Nation (2009). He is also the editor of Caribbean Women Writers (1990); C. L. R. James: His Intellectual Legacies (1995) and Eric E. Williams Speaks: Essays on Colonialism and Independence (1993).

10He has also written for several publications including the New York Times; the Washington Post; Boston Globe; Harvard Educational Review; International Herald Tribune; New Left Review; Baltimore Sun and the Amsterdam News. He was also a columnist for the Trinidad Guardian and the Trinidad Express.

11Professor Cudjoe is a director of the Central Bank of Trinidad and Tobago and a member of a Cabinet-appointed Round Table Discussion on Race Relations.

12Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru is Reader in English at the University of Bucharest, Romania. She recently completed a second PhD on contemporary Indian fiction in English at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK, where she was also an Associate Tutor (2000-2007). She is currently researching the area of intersection between diasporic postcolonial and postcommunist literatures. Her other fields of interest include African American Studies, Gender and Media Studies, contemporary Catalan literature. She has published widely on contemporary literatures in English (with a focus on contemporary Indian fiction in English, mainly Vikram Chandra), postmodernism, women’s literature, ethnic studies and postcolonialism. Her latest books are: Women’s Voices in Post-Communist Eastern Europe, a co-edited two-volume collection of essays (Bucharest: University of Bucharest Press, 2005 and 2006), Identity Performance in Contemporary Non-WASP American Fiction (Bucharest: University of Bucharest Press, 2008) and Performance and Performativity in Contemporary Indian Fiction in English (Amsterdam: Rodopi, forthcoming).

13 Chun Fu received his PhD degree from National Taiwan University in 2003. His Politics of Return: Stranger in the Wor (l) ds in the Works of V.S. Naipaul will be published by Edwin Mellen in 2010. His publications and research interests focus mainly on Indian diaspora writers in English, such as V. S. Naipaul, M. G. Vassanji, Amitav Ghosh, Rohinton Mistry, Jhumpa Lahiri and Tahmima Anam. He is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Foreign Languages & Literature, National I-lan University, Taiwan.

14 Maria Garcia, Maître de conférences de littérature et de cinéma francophones à l’Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, a publié de nombreuses études sur les rapports fiction-savoir et le fonctionnement des genres (autofiction, ethnofiction). Codirectrice de l’équipe LITPOST, elle étudie les littératures de l’océan Indien et prépare un livre sur l’œuvre d’Ananda Devi. Ses travaux récents portent sur les formes de circulation et de fabrication d’exotisme et d’authenticité dans les littératures et les cinémas postcoloniaux. Elle a traduit en collaboration Aux États-Unis d’Afrique d’Abdourahman Waberi (à paraître en espagnol).

15 Louise Harrington is pursuing PhD studies at The School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her thesis is entitled: “Conflicted places and thirdspaces: the landscape of Partition in South Asian literature and film.” Previously she studied for a BA at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, focusing on Hinduism and the works of R.K. Narayan in her final year. She went on to complete an MA in Comparative Literature at SOAS, publishing her thesis on railways and South Asian literature. Her research interests lie in South Asian and Irish literature and film with regard to Partition, geography, and theories of space and place.

16 Sabine Lauret is an allocataire-monitrice at Paris III - Sorbonne Nouvelle. She is currently working on a PhD on Amitav Ghosh under the joint supervision of Professors Marta Dvorak (Sorbonne Nouvelle) and Chitra Krishnan (University of Madras). Her doctoral dissertation focuses on narrative voices and language. Her first article, on Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, in which she questions the notion of archaeological narrative, was published in the Spring 2009 issue of Commonwealth, Essays and Studies.

17 Valérie Magdelaine-Andrianjafitrimo est maître de conférences en littératures françaises et francophones à l’Université de La Réunion et membre du laboratoire LCF, UMR 8143 du CNRS. Auteure d’une thèse intitulée Les romans de la diaspora indienne à Trinidad et dans les Antilles françaises: mythe ou réalité d’une ethnicité littéraire? soutenue en 1999, elle s’est spécialisée depuis dans les littératures d’expression française de l’Océan Indien et des Antilles. Auteure et directrice de nombreux ouvrages et articles sur les problématiques de la francophonie, de la question des DOM et de la postcolonialité, sur les littératures de La Réunion et Maurice, elle poursuit par ailleurs sa réflexion sur les relations des littératures insulaires et de l’Inde, notamment à travers l’ouvrage Draupadi, tissages et textures (K’A, 2008) ou des articles parus dans Études créoles, Synergie-Inde, ainsi que dans d’autres ouvrages collectifs.

18 Binita Mehta is Associate Professor and Chair of the French Department at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York, USA, where she teaches courses in the French language and French and Francophone literature, culture, and film. Her book Widows, Pariahs, and Bayadères: India as Spectacle was by published by Bucknell University Press in 2002. She has published articles and chapters in books on French literature and film and on South Asian literature and film. Her most recent publication is a book chapter, “Comment peut-on être français? Imagining Alternative Identities/Futures in Coline Serreau’s Chaos (2001) and Julie Bertucelli’s Depuis qu’Otar est parti (2003)” in France at the Flicks: Trends in Contemporary French Popular Cinema, eds. Darren Waldron and Isabelle Vanderschelden, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007.

19 Vijay Mishra is Professor of English Literature at Murdoch University. He holds doctorates from the Australian National University and from Oxford University. Among his publications are: Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind (with Bob Hodge) (Allen and Unwin, 1991), The Gothic Sublime (State University of New York Press, 1994), Devotional Poetics and the Indian Sublime (SUNY, 1998), Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire (Routledge, 2002) and The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary (Routledge, 2007). He is currently working on a project entitled “Rushdie Annotated”. He plays the Indian harmonium, is a Beatles fan, and reads Sanskrit.

20 Myriam Moïse did her undergraduate studies at Université des Antilles-Guyane in Martinique and her B.A. Hns in English and Caribbean Studies at London Metropolitan University. She then completed her Masters degree in English at Paris III, Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle. She is currently a third-year PhD student in Postcolonial Literatures at Paris III- Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle in co-supervision with the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, in Trinidad. She has done work in Women’s Studies, specifically on Caribbean women’s achievements in Britain and on Black British women writers. She is now engaged in her PhD research project, a comparative literary analysis on women writers of the Caribbean Diaspora in Britain, Canada and the USA.

21 Pia Mukherji has a Ph. D on British Modernism from The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research interests and publications are in the areas of modern British fiction and the South Asian colonial archive, and her essay “Inconsequential Lives: The Voyage Out and Anglo-Indian fictions of Voyaging and Domesticity” has recently been published in New Readings in the Literature of British India c.1780—1947 by Ibidem Press. She has taught seminar courses on modernism, postcolonial writing and film studies at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA, Mary Mount Manhattan College and the City College in New York. Most recently, she has been a lecturer in English at Tufts University, Medford, MA.

22 Catherine Pesso-Miquel studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Fontenay-aux-Roses, France, and was for ten years a Senior Lecturer at the Sorbonne University. She is currently a Professor of English Literature at the University of Lyon, France. Her research focuses on the contemporary novel and on travel literature, exploring questions of narratology, intertextuality, and postcolonialism, and problematics linked to identity and feminism. She has published books and articles on American novelists (Willa Cather and Paul Auster), British novelists (Graham Swift in particular) and Indo-Anglian authors. She has lately published two monographies, one on Salman Rushdie (2007) and the other on Anita Desai (2008).

23 Zeenat Saleh has been teaching English and Film at the Université de Franche-Comté Besançon. She is the founding secretary of the SERCIA (English Society for Research on Anglophone Cinema). Her research in Anglophone cinema has focused on notions of identity and otherness. She has published numerous articles on the artist and his model, food and Art in film, and is currently editing an issue for CinémAction on the cinemas of India to be published by 2010.

24 Clem Seecharan is Professor of Caribbean History and Head of Caribbean Studies, London Metropolitan University. His books include ‘Tiger in the Stars: The Anatomy of Indian Achievement in British Guiana, 1919-29; Sweetening ‘Bitter Sugar’: Jock Campbell, the Booker Reformer in British Guiana, 1934-66 (winner of the Elsa Goveia Prize, 2005, awarded by the Association of Caribbean Historians); Muscular Learning: Cricket and Education in the Making of the British West Indies at the End of the 19th Century; From Ranji to Rohan: Cricket and Indian Identity in Colonial Guyana, 1890s-1960s and Mother India’s Shadow over El Dorado: Indo-Guyanese Politics and Identity, 1890s-1930s (forthcoming, 2011). His next book is on the anti-communist crusade of the United Force and the Catholic Church in British Guiana in the early 1960s.

25Kerstin W. Shands is Professor of English at Södertörn in Stockholm, Sweden, where she is currently teaching full-time. She holds a doctorate in English from Uppsala University (Escaping the Castle of Patriarchy: Patterns of Development in the Novels of Gail Godwin, 1990). In 2006, she organized an international postcolonial conference at her university in Stockholm. Among her publications are The Repair of the World: The Novels of Marge Piercy (1994) and Embracing Space: Spatial Metaphors in Feminist Discourse (1999) (both of these books published in the United States by Greenwood Press); Collusion and Resistance: Women Writing in English (2002), Notions of America: Swedish Perspectives (2004), and Neither East Nor West: Postcolonial Essays on Literature, Culture and Religion (2008), the last three anthologies published in the English Studies series of Södertörn University). She has been a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University, New York, at the University of Kansas at Lawrence, and at Utkal University in India. Kerstin Shands is a member of the Editorial Board of Contemporary Women’s Writing, Oxford.

26 Laurel Steele’S academic work revolves around Urdu literature and issues of identity. She was awarded a doctorate from the University of Chicago in June 2005 for Relocating the Postcolonial Self: Place, Metaphor, Memory and the Urdu Poetry of Mustafa Zaidi (1930-1970). The thesis examines the many influences and literary decisions an Urdu poet confronted during the break-up of the British Indian Empire. The research was funded by a Fulbright—Hays grant. Earlier, she published the subsequently much-cited ‘Hali and his Muqaddamah: The Creation of a Literary Attitude in Nineteenth-Century India’ in the Annual of Urdu Studies, 1981. Most recently, she delivered ‘Patriotic Pakistanis, Exiled Poets, or Unwelcome Refugees? How Pakistan Rewrote the Creative Landscape of Urdu Literature’ at the Modern Language Association in 2007. She has taught at the University of California, Davis, and the University of Chicago. She is a diplomat in the United States Foreign Service, most recently posted to Afghanistan.

27 Alexis Tadie is professor of English literature, University of Paris-Sorbonne. He has published on eighteenth-century literature and philosophy, as well as on Indian literature in English. He was the Director of the Maison Française at Oxford for six years, until 2008.

28 Pascal Zinck holds a PhD from Paris IV-La Sorbonne. He is an Associate Professor of English at the Universities of Lille 3 and Paris 10-Nanterre. He specialises in postmodernism as well as postcolonial and multicultural critical theory with an emphasis on South Asian and Japanese diasporic fiction, memory and trauma studies. He has spoken at contemporary literature conferences in Europe and Australia and has published widely on Kazuo Ishiguro with essays in the volume France-Japon: regards croisés, (Peter Lang, 2007) and diasporic fiction (Cambridge Scholars, 2008).

29His current research focuses on terror, war, ethnicity and memory in the works of native or expatriate Sri Lankan writers such as Michael Ondaatje, Ambalavener Sivanandan, Romesh Gunesekera, Jean Arasanayagam, and David Blacker.