South Asian Review

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South Asian Review

The South Asian Review is an international scholarly forum for the study of South Asian Languages an
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The journal welcomes analytical and critical articles of 15-25 pages that are double-spaced, prepared in the MLA style, and accompanied by a brief abstract and biographical note. Essay topics must concern South Asian languages and literatures in a broad cultural context. We invite healthy and constructive dialogue on issues pertaining to South Asia, but the thrust of the dialogue must be literatur

e and the sister arts. The journal welcomes critical and analytical essays on any aspect or period of South Asian literature (ancient, precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial). SAR is open to all ideas, positions, and critical and theoretical approaches. Recognizing the linguistic and cultural diversity of the subcontinent, we particularly welcome essays in intercultural, comparative, and interdisciplinary studies in the humanities. The journal is also interested in essays on music, painting, sculpture, architecture, and related fields. The following areas are of special interest to the journal: South Asian Literatures; South Asian Languages; South Asian Studies; South Asian Culture; South Asian Diaspora; Comparative Aesthetic; Literary Theory; Cultural Studies; Colonial Studies; Postcolonial Studies; Comparative Literature; Women’s Studies; Film Studies; and Transcultural Studies. We are funded by the South Asian Literary Association: The South Asian Literary Association, or SALA, promotes knowledge of, and scholarly interest in, the languages, cultures, and literatures of South Asia and the South Asian diaspora. Membership in the Association is open to all individuals and libraries, institutions, and organizations interested in South Asian literature, culture, languages, and philosophy, as well as in comparative studies. SALA is an Allied Organization of the Modern Language Association, and holds its annual meeting concurrently at the MLA Convention host city.

30/08/2024

New issue of South Asian Review is out! Volume 45, number 3 contains essays on Tagore, Arundhati Roy, Amitav Ghosh, Premchand, and other texts, plus books reviews. Congratulations to our authors!

Volume 45, Issue 3 of South Asian Review

24/04/2024

Why publish in South Asian Review? In addition to being indexed by SCOPUS and earning a Q1 CiteScore Best Quartile ranking, South Asian Review reaches more readers every year! 10,000+ in the first three months of 2024 alone. Visit https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/rsoa20 to submit your work today.

26/01/2024

Want your research to be read? Send it to South Asian Review!

22/11/2023

Signed as a response to the Sino-Indian war in 1962, the Defence of India Act facilitated the mass incarceration of Indians having Chinese ethnicity, not even sparing children and pregnant women. R...

27/10/2023

Want your research to be read, downloaded, and cited?

In the last three months, essays from South Asian Review were downloaded 8940 times! (That's up by 4000 downloads from this time last year.)

19/07/2023

Call for Papers: Special Issue on Bangladesh

This special issue aims to bring out a diverse collection of criticism on literary pieces and films (single authors/films or comparative) centering Bangladesh. The literary history of Bangladeshi literature notes that there have been English translations of Bengali works (published in undivided British India) from as early as the 1960s with Syed Waliullah’s Lal Shalu (1948), which the author translated in 1967 as Tree Without Roots. Of course, we cannot forget Rokeya Shawat Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream, which she first wrote in English in 1905 and then translated into Bangla. Within this literary landscape, however, the Partition of 1947 is largely missing. Hasan Azizul Hoque has published some stories, and a few of the current writers are also writing about the Partition. The Language Movement of 1952 also lacks representation in literature, particularly in fiction, other than some nataks and films such as Zahir Raihan’s Zibon theke Neya (Taken from Life) and Munir Chaudhury’s Kabar (The Grave). However, there is a plethora of poems about this time. Between 1952 and 1971, authors like Syad Mujtaba Ali, Ahmed Sharif, Bande Ali Mia, and Akhtaruzzaman Elias made rich contributions. The immediate response to the Liberation War of 1971 was several films such as Ora 11 Jon (1972), Abar Tora Manush Ho (1973), and Aurnodoyer Agnishakkhi (1972). The first novel on the Liberation War of 1971 is Rifle, Roti, and Aurat by Anwar Pasha. Nilima Ibrahim’s Ami Birangano Bolsi accounts for the women’s voices about the atrocities of the Pakistani army. Rizia Rahman’s Rokter Okkhor (1978-translated into English in 2016 as Letters of Blood) is another novel that continues the saga of the survivors of the wartime r**e. Many young writers, primarily diasporic, have been influenced by the trauma of the war and have taken on the responsibility of writing about the history. These writers include Tahmina Anam, Dilruba Ara, and Nadeem Zaman. Then there is Adib Khan, Monica Ali, Zia Haider Rahman, Abeer Hoque, Arif Anwar. Anwar’s 2018 novel The Storm focuses on the deadliest natural disaster, the Bhola cyclone of 1970. Some recent writers are writing about Dhaka as a dystopic place in graphic narratives. Dr. Zafar Iqbal and his sci-fi fiction are making their marks in postcolonial science fiction. In this literary landscape, stories about the struggles of LGBTQIA+ people are not yet prominently visible but are slowly making debut like the cartoon Dhee (2015) and the collection of q***r poetry Roopgonti (2015).

For this special issue, essays can focus on any of the historical moments/years. Topics may include:

social milieu, disillusion, political unrest
religious fundamentalism
women’s issues
migration, exile, and life in the diaspora
environmental issues
LGBTQIA+ issues
science fiction
Writers are encouraged to apply such theories as South Asian/Postcolonial/Muslim feminism, trauma theory, postcolonialism, neo-liberalism, neo-colonization, ecofeminism/ecocriticism, Q***r Theories, and postcolonial science fiction/dystopia.

Contributors should submit a 500-word abstract and a biographical note of 50 words to Umme Al-Wazedi at [email protected] by September 1st.

Invited papers of 5000-7500 words will be due by February 1st, 2024 and will go through double-blind peer review before final acceptance. Inquiries about submission should be sent to [email protected].

19/07/2023

South Asian Review has been listed as a Q1 journal in Scopus!

What does that mean? "Scopus gives the ranking to the journals by considering both the number of citations received by a journal and the prestige of the journal based on where those citations come from....Q1 is occupied by the top 25% of journals in the list." (https://journalrw.org/scopus-journal-ranking/)

We are proud of our authors and the excellent research they publish with us!

11/05/2023

Our latest Provocations forum, " and India," is open access for the next three months. Look for essays by Pallavi Guha, Sonora Jha, Srimati Basu, and Nidhi Shrivastava, with an introduction by Robin E. Field.

10/05/2023

Call for papers: South Asian Review Special Issue on Sri Lanka
“Global Sri Lankan Literature and Culture”

The multivalent historical, political, and cultural events of the last few years have drawn global attention to Sri Lanka. In particular, the citizen-led protest campaign against the backdrop of the country’s worst economic crisis that toppled the ruling Rajapaksa regime in 2022 (known as “Aragalaya”) has been globally celebrated at a time when democracy urgently demands a sustained engagement by the public. Recent work by a new generation of writers with a local and global focus, including Anuk Arudpragasam, V.V. Ganeshananthan, and SJ Sindhu, has galvanized support towards rethinking issues faced by Sri Lanka in the postcolonial period by attending to rifts between the state and its subjects, official narratives and subaltern experiences, history and memories, and the perils and promises of dissent. Shehan Karunatilaka’s 2022 Booker Prize-winning novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida encapsulates the stakes of our time and the power of storytelling to hold the postcolonial state and its global allies accountable. The special issue of South Asian Review intervenes in this dialogue by focusing on the global implications
and impact of contemporary Sri Lankan literature and culture.

In 2012, South Asian Review published a special issue devoted to Sri Lankan Anglophone literature, specifically focusing on politics, human rights, the military conflict and its aftermath, and postcoloniality. While these issues continue to condition the lived experiences of present-day Sri Lankans both on the island and in the diaspora, they have become even more entangled in regional and global geopolitics. During a postwar era that witnessed a surge of new forms of nativist and hypernationalist movements against the Muslim minority, the rise of an ethnocratic regime that exploited these divisions, and the Easter 2019 attacks targeting the Christian community that continue to remain unresolved, writers and artists have been experimenting with new modes of expression to render legible the assemblages of political, capitalist, and cultural forces at play.

We invite submissions that investigate the “global mark” of Sri Lankan literature published both at home and abroad. We are especially interested in the following topics, but welcome a broad range of proposals:

- Representations of the “Aragalaya” and its aftermath
- Interrogations of the economic crisis, neoliberal implications, and IMF interventions
- Trauma narratives (such as The Boat People by Sharon Bala; The Story of a Brief Marriage and A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam; Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan; Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai)
- Attempts at bearing witness to enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings (such as Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje; Twelve Cries from Home: in Search of Sri Lanka’s Disappeared by Minoli Salgado; The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka)
- Explorations of transnationalism through depictions of Sri Lanka’s migrant housemaids, garment industry, and tea industry
- Working class literature
- Resurgent genres such as travel narratives (Ibn Battuta in Sri Lanka by Ameena Hussein; The Line of Lanka by Sunela Jayewardene), memoirs (Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala; In the Shadow of a Sword by Thamizhini), detective fiction, children’s fiction
- Intersections of gender, sexualities, disability (through the work of writers such as Mary Anne Mohanraj, SJ Sindu, Priya Guns, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Nayomi Munaweera)
- Ethnonationalism and minoritarian identities (the work of writers such as Shobasakthi, R. Cheran, and A. Sivanandan)
- The role of international prizes and the Gratiaen Prize (now in its 30th year) in expanding the audience for Sri Lankan literature
- The politics of publishing and promoting Sri Lankan literature at home and globally
- The politics of translation and the significance of translated work in the postwar period (Then There Were No Witnesses by P. Ahilan and Geetha Sukumaran; Speechless is the River by Vivimarie VanderPoorten—translations of Upekala Athukorala’s poems; Sinhala Fiction from Post-War Sri Lanka by Madhubashini Disanayaka Ratnayake; Lakdhas Wikkramasinha by Aparna Halpé and Michael Ondaatje)
- Explorations of human rights discourse in recent writing; responses to anti-terrorism legislation and authoritarianism
- Ecocriticism (Romesh Gunesekera’s Noon Tide Toll)
- Ecological disaster (the Asian tsunami)
- Science fiction
- Migrant experiences (Michelle de Kretser, Channa Wickremesekera, Ru Freeman, Chandani Lokugé)
- Drama (Ruwanthie de Chickera)
- Poetry (Indran Amirthanayagam, Vivimarie VanderPoorten, Sivamohan Sumathy, Ramya Chamalie Jirasinghe)
- Short stories (Ashok Ferrey, Lal Medawattegedara)
- Experimental/multi-modal work

We welcome informal inquiries, and potential contributors should submit a 500-word abstract and a biographical note of 50 words to [email protected] by July 1, 2023.

Invited full papers of 5000-7500 words in length will be due by
December 31, 2023 and will be subject to double-blind peer review for final acceptance.

Dr. Maryse Jayasuriya
University of Texas at El Paso
Co-guest Editor

Dr. Dinidu Karunanayake
Elon University
Co-guest Editor

30/01/2023

We are grateful for our readers!

South Asian Review's essays have been downloaded more than 30,000 times in the past year--an increase of 120% according to Taylor & Francis, our publisher, in the past four years.

Kudos to our fantastic authors whose work has garnered such interest!

01/01/2023

New special issue on disaster coming soon! Read the introduction by Meghan Gorman DaRif, Liam O'Loughlin, and Pallavi Rastogi now.

Published in South Asian Review (Ahead of Print, 2022)

23/11/2022

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02759527.2022.2145745
Sritama Chatterjee's essay on shipbreaking in Bangladesh is open access until the end of 2022. Please read and share!

Ship-breaking is a flourishing industry in Bangladesh where thousands of decommissioned ocean-going vessels from developed nations such as the USA, Britain, and France are broken down at relatively...

27/07/2022

South Asian Review's essays are widely read, as our increase in downloads attests. We look forward to your submissions!

04/05/2022

Our latest issue is out online! Writing About Kashmir (vol 43, issues 1-2) is edited by Nyla Ali Khan. See her editorial (open access) and look through the titles of the essays included.

This issue also includes the Provocations forum: Global South Asian and Black Relationships, edited by Liam O'Loughlin and Pallavi Rastogi.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02759527.2022.2040787

(2022). Special Issue: Writing about Kashmir. South Asian Review: Vol. 43, Writing About Kashmir, pp. 2-5.

14/12/2021

Our latest special issue has been released online! Congratulations to guest editor Shazia Rahman and her contributors to The Environment of South Asia. See the full TOC here:

https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rsoa20/current

Frequency: Yearly ISSN: 0275-9527 eISSN: 2573-9476 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02759527.2021.1985220

27/10/2021

The editorial team of South Asian Review is proud to share the journal's most recent metrics, as seen on the Taylor & Francis page. Our essays are frequently downloaded and our acceptance rate is quite selective. Importantly, we review submissions efficiently as seen by our numbers below.

12/07/2021

Our editorial team is delighted to announce that South Asian Review is now being indexed in Scopus. Scopus-indexed journals are highly regarded worldwide, and we are pleased that our esteemed authors will reap this benefit when publishing with us.

26/04/2021

Here's another article from the Provocations section on 9/11: "Twenty Years Since 9/11: An Activist Filmmaker’s Take" by Mara Ahmed. Read it for free until July!

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02759527.2021.1899522

(2021). Twenty Years Since 9/11: An Activist Filmmaker’s Take. South Asian Review. Ahead of Print.

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The journal welcomes analytical and critical articles of 15-25 pages and accompanied by a brief abstract and biographical note. Essay topics must concern South Asian languages and literatures in a broad cultural context. We invite healthy and constructive dialogue on issues pertaining to South Asia, but the thrust of the dialogue must be literature and the sister arts. The journal welcomes critical and analytical essays on any aspect or period of South Asian literature (ancient, precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial). SAR is open to all ideas, positions, and critical and theoretical approaches. Recognizing the linguistic and cultural diversity of the subcontinent, we particularly welcome essays in intercultural, comparative, and interdisciplinary studies in the humanities. The following areas are of special interest to the journal: South Asian Literatures; South Asian Languages; South Asian Studies; South Asian Culture; South Asian Diaspora; Comparative Aesthetic; Literary Theory; Cultural Studies; Colonial Studies; Postcolonial Studies; Comparative Literature; Women’s Studies; Film Studies; and Transcultural Studies.

Essays should be submitted electronically via our Taylor & Francis online submission site:

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=rsoa20 We are funded by the South Asian Literary Association: The South Asian Literary Association, or SALA, promotes knowledge of, and scholarly interest in, the languages, cultures, and literatures of South Asia and the South Asian diaspora. Membership in the Association is open to all individuals and libraries, institutions, and organizations interested in South Asian literature, culture, languages, and philosophy, as well as in comparative studies. SALA is an Allied Organization of the Modern Language Association, and holds its annual meeting concurrently at the MLA Convention host city.