Objects, Place, History: Thinking Literary History for NE Anglophone Literature

Abstract

As a literature evolves it presents critical and historical challenges about how it is formed, what produces it, how it is received and what makes it ‘a literature.’ A literary history is invested with the responsibility of finding answers to such questions, organizing the emergence chronologically and establishing the manifestation of broad connecting compulsions, influences and themes that distinguish it. What would constitute a history for Northeast Anglophone literature that offers an overview and a map of the field, and captures all of those elements that have gone into its making? Would it help to integrate the oral, the traditional cultural, the historical and political and reveal conditions and compulsions of production and reception? This essay reflects on these issues through three sections: one, on general concerns with literary history writing and implications of such ideas for Northeast Anglophone literary history/ies; a second, on the three tropes of the title and their occurrence in the literature as a simultaneity of the written and the oral that this literary history must capture; and a third, on a frame for approaching the region as a precondition for writing such a literary history.

Keywords:

• History
• orality
• place
• objects
• memory
• relationality

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nandana Dutta

Nandana Dutta is Professor of English at Gauhati University. She holds additional charge of the Gauhati University Institute of North East India Studies (GUINEIS) and edits theGUINEIS Journal. She is the author of books likeQuestions of Identity in Assam: Location, Migration, Hybridity(Sage 2012) andCommunities of Women in Assam(Routledge 2015) and essays on various aspects of North East India. She has also published books and articles on her parent discipline, English, the most recent being the edited collection,English Teachers’ Accounts: Essays on the Teacher, the Text and the Indian Classroom(Routledge 2021). Her current interests are in North East India Studies and English in India, with special reference to the development of the discipline in North East India.