Book Talk - States of Disconnect: The China-India Literary Relation in the Twentieth Century

Book Talk and Discussion, with Dr. Adhira Mangalagiri (NYU, Comparative Literature) for States of Disconnect: The China-India Literary Relation in the Twentieth Century (Columbia UP, 2023), and winner of the 2025 Anna Balakian Prize for exceptional first monograph awarded by the International Comparative Literature Association.

 

States of Disconnect examines the breakdown of transnationalism through readings of literary texts that express aversion to pairing ideas of China and India. Focusing on practices of comparison, Adhira Mangalagiri considers how these texts articulate the undesirability or impossibility of relating with national others, tracing portrayals of violence, silence, and distance. She proposes the concept of “disconnect”: a crisis of transnationalism perceptible in moments when a connection is severed, interrupted, or disavowed. Despite their apparent insularity, texts of disconnect offer possibilities for relating ethically across national borders while resisting both narrow nationalisms and globalized habits of thought. Reading a variety of largely untranslated twentieth-century Chinese and Hindi short stories, novels, and poems, Mangalagiri develops three new strategies for comparison—friction, ellipses, and contingency—that together comprise a critical vocabulary of disconnect. Foregrounding transnationalism’s discontents, States of Disconnect offers a different path by which literary texts can cultivate a critical sensibility for making sense of a world rife with division.

 

Adhira Mangalagiri is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University (NYU). Her book-in-progress is Stealth Translation at the China-India Border, which studies the politics of translational visibility at the policed territorial and cultural border. Since 2021, she has served as a General Editor of Comparative Critical Studies, the house journal of the British Comparative Literature Association.

 

Co-sponsors: This event is co-sponsored by the Jackman Humanities Institute Working Group, Emerging Interventions in Contemporary China Studies, The Centre for South Asian Studies & Dr. David Chu Program in Asia-Pacific Studies at the Asian Institute, The Centre for Comparative Literature, The East Asian Studies Department at the University of Toronto.