Stacey Balkan is an Associate Professor of English and environmental humanities at Florida Atlantic University. She is coeditor, with Dr. Swaralipi Nandi, of Oil Fictions: World Literature and our Contemporary Petrosphere. Rogues in the Postcolony: Narrating Extraction and Itinerancy in India is available now from West Virginia University Press.
What do literary narratives have to do with resource extraction? Quite a lot, according to Stacey Balkan. In her book, Rogues in the Postcolony: Narrating Extraction and Itinerancy in India, Balkan challenges developmentalist narratives pushed by industry through an examination of Anglophone Indian picaresque novels, or “rogue” tales. Looking to novels by writers such as Amitav Ghosh, Indra Sinha, and Aravind Adiga, Balkan reveals startling connections between landscape ideology, agricultural improvement, extractive capitalism, and aesthetic expression in British-occupied Bengal, 1980s Bhopal, and the coal-soaked terrain of contemporary Dhanbad.
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted higher education in the United States. Millions of students and faculty have been forced to meet online using digital platforms like Zoom. Literature professor Stacey Balkan argues that Zoom education should not be considered a new normal for the sake of students, faculty, and the planet.
