Apara Nanda Publishes Two Book Chapters this Summer
Professor Apara Nanda continues to research and write about novels that explore complex issues facing our culture today.
She contributed “Teaching Butler in a Course on Colonialism and Science Fiction” to the Modern Language Association’s 2019 Approaches to Teaching the Works of Octavia E. Butler, describing strategies that work well when teaching Butler’s texts. Octavia Butler’s science fiction often explores complex issues such as racism, poverty and what it means to be human. Nanda explains that since “science fiction narratives often deal with alien takeovers of the world,” these “take overs” reflect the “discourses of colonization” and offer unique insights into discussing power dynamics in the novel and in our present society. Nanda hopes that her chapter helps instructors to “recognize the ambiguity at the heart of Butler’s narratives.”
Nanda also contributed a chapter “The Pastiche of Discrepant 'Minoritarian' Voices in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss” to the book New Cosmopolitanism, Race, and Ethnicity: Cultural Perspectives. In her 2006 novel The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai follows the narrative of an undocumented immigrant living in the United States to expose the myth of globalization. Nanda encourages her readers to recognize “the ‘discrepant’ voices” and “inconsistencies in the renderings that immigrants leave behind” to lend new insights to Desai’s novel.