An independent, global cultural studies scholar specialising in post-millennial Indian literary and visual cultures, Dr E. Dawson Varughese works at the intersection of world literature, visual studies and cultural studies, drawing on ethnographic research paradigms to conduct her fieldwork. She explores the encoding of modernity in popular cultures, literary and visual, and is interested in how new modes of storying society enmesh with the post-millennial moment. She is a Snr Fellow at Manipal Centre for Humanities, MAHE, Manipal, India where she lives part of the year.  

E. Dawson Varughese can be reached via the Contact page or by emailing edawsonvarughese@gmail.com

See here for her first monograph: Beyond The Postcolonial: World Englishes Literature (2012, Palgrave) and for her second, Reading New India: post-millennial Indian fiction in English (2013, Bloomsbury) which was launched at the Jaipur Literature Festival. In June 2015, Indian Writing in English and Issues of Visual Representation was published by Palgrave (co-authord with Lisa Lau) and in 2016 her third book was published by Routledge entitled Genre Fiction of New India: post-millennial receptions of ‘weird’ narratives. In 2017 her fourth book was published with Palgrave Visuality and Identity in Post-millennial Indian Graphic Narratives .

Positioning the question of ‘beyond’.

In consideration of how Empire has viewed and represented ‘the Other’ in the past and inspired by the work of Fanon and Saïd, E. Dawson Vaughese’s fieldwork recognises the need to explore ‘the Other’ in new ways, ways which look to further decentre and ways which explore emerging Anglophone writing ‘on the ground’.

Put simply, this is the act of ‘listening’ rather than ‘telling’ and this is at the heart of her fieldwork – ethnographic, empirical research tools are employed in order to listen. Although the fieldwork sits within a postmodernist critique as it affirms and venerates the personal, the experience of the individual and that individual’s creative work, the research conversely looks to create new knowledge in a systematic way through the employment of empirical research methods. This approach aligns itself with the work of anthropological scholars such as Spiro (1992 in Marcus, G. Rereading Cultural Anthropology).

The fieldwork is interested to go beyond what Bhabha penned in the early 1990s:

Postcolonial criticism bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social authenticity within the modern world order. (Bhabha, 1992 in Greenblatt & Gunn Redrawing The Boundaries).

The fieldwork is interested in ‘representing’ from an empirically-informed position, looking at the present (and the future) rather than rereading the past.

Recent and forthcoming by E. Dawson Varughese:

Published in 2016 – a monograph with Routledge: Genre Fiction of New India: post-millennial receptions of ‘weird’ narratives.

Published in 2017 – Visuality and Identity in Post-millennial Indian Graphic Narratives

See ‘latest news’ for more recent publications