Roanne L. Kantor is Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University. Her book, South Asian Writers, Latin American Literature, and the Rise of Global English was published in 2022 in the Studies in World Literature Series at Cambridge University Press. It was awarded the ACLA Helen Tartar First Book Subvention Prize in 2021 and short-listed for the Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize in the Indian Humanities. Her translations have been honored by the Susan Sontag prize for Translation and performed at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego.
SHC Project
Figures of Suspicion: Anthropology, Literature, and the Voice of the Local in Global Anglophone Fiction
Figures of Suspicion explores some of the core anxieties that animate the contemporary study of Anglophone literatures and their worldwide circulation. These suspicions, I argue, are articulated as figures – rhetorical devices that toggle between symbolic and literal meanings. The core figures of the book’s title are, respectively, a person, a place, and a thing. The persons are Indian authors and filmmakers who validate their representations of social life in a particular region through a relatively earnest commitment to ethnographic “fieldwork.” This puts them at odds with the canonical postcolonial invocation of anthropology as a cipher for negative values like inauthenticity, social distance, and complicity. The place is the Indian state of Bihar, a location that is as immediately familiar and freighted with stereotypes for a “local” Indian and diasporic audience as it is completely meaningless for the greater part of the “global” Anglophone reading community. This differential legibility, too, conflicts with a core assumption that literary writing either orients exclusively to readership in the Global North, or intransigently refuses such an audience in favor of local obscurity. Ultimately, both the figuration of person and the figuration of place are held together through a third figure: voice. Voice animates the heart of debates about representation: the central but ungraspable concept of speech in Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak”; the slippage between sensuous utterance and literary style in anthropology’s reflexive turn; and the eruption of “Bihari” (Bhojpuri, Maithili, Santhali) words and accents in the text and media of more dominant languages.
Kantor's first book: South Asian Writers, Latin American Literature, and the Rise of Global English; Discussion of the book on New Books Network. The edited volume where some preliminary work on figures was published: Indian Sound Cultures, Indian Sound Citizenship.
