Journal of Postcolonial Writing

Vernacular city-narratives from postcolonial South Asia

This special issue seeks to address the complex intersections between postcolonial city-narratives and vernacular language communities in modern South Asia. We aim to contribute to the growing critical interest in the vernacular literatures of South Asia, which can be termed “the vernacular turn,” redefining the boundaries of disciplines such as Postcolonial Studies, Comparative Literature, and World Literature (Shankar 2012; Gupta et al. 2020; Raveendran 2023). The objective is to examine and foreground the role of vernacular literary traditions as well as the interactions between their distinct linguistic regionalities in unsettling the dominant imaginaries of the postcolonial city. For this special issue, the vernacular primarily refers to the South Asian languages and their cultures, which remain underrepresented in critical disciplines dominated by the hegemony of elite English-speaking publics. However, considering its ambivalent realities and historical connections with neo/colonialism, the vernacular should not be articulated as neatly detached from the influence of English or other Euro-American cultural forces (Harder, Zaidi, and Tschacher 2024; Zaidi and Harder 2024; Saxena 2022). Rather than reinforcing rigid forms of regionalism, our understanding of the vernacular considers South Asian languages as dynamic contact zones for negotiation and translation, enabling localized articulations of modernity and cosmopolitanism.

Therefore, vernacular city-narratives can be defined as the set of representations and practices of navigating the modern city, which are deeply embedded in the proliferation of vernacular cultures and literatures, often in tension with and in survival against the hegemonic forces of English and the global cultural economy shaped by neo/colonial powers. While the canon of South Asian city literature in English is well-established, it remains limited in its capacity to represent the fractal, prismatic perspectives of South Asian cities. The vernacular turn in reading South Asian urbanity moves beyond the dominance of the novel form, opening up critical discussions that engage with a diverse range of non-canonical genres and alternative archival sources. Therefore, it is imperative to engage with postcolonial urbanism in South Asia through a vernacular perspective to access a critical archive of authors, texts, and cultural practices across nationalities, caste, class, and gender. This special issue attempts to collate diverse critical discussions on the repositories of vernacular urban narratives, which will contribute to envisioning the South Asian postcolonial city as multilingual, multicultural, and translational.

A few topics that the special issue may address are:

• Globalization and the vernacular in the South Asian city
• Vernacular narratives and the “world-class” city in South Asia
• South Asian city and vernacular literatures
• South Asian city and print cultures in the vernacular
• South Asian city and non-canonical genres in the vernacular
• Hybrid narratives and English as vernacular in the South Asian city