"Mohanty has assembled an innovative volume of essays situated at the intersection of at least three multi-disciplinary fields: postcolonial and subaltern theory; comparative literary analysis, especially with a South Asian and transnational focus; and the study of "alternative" and "indigenous" modernities. Contributors emphasize the strategies of resistance that are encoded in third world literary texts; comparative literary analysis, across cultures and regions - both within the "Global South" and beyond; the forms of indigenous modernity that preceded the colonial encounter, and thus provide alternatives to the modernity that was imposed through the colonial encounter with Europe; feminist perspectives in traditional and contemporary literature; and "realist" theoretical analyses of the epistemic implications of literary forms. This definitive new work grounds the political insights of postcolonial and subaltern theory in close textual analysis, and rather than make general pronouncements about "alternative modernities," it looks at their specifically textual (literary and cultural) manifestations"-- Provided by publisher.