Alok Amatya’s Resource Conflict Literature: Reading Indigenous Struggles advances a new model of literary geography. This theoretically sophisticated and methodologically innovative study focuses on a corpus of texts that spotlight local struggles against neocolonial resource exploitation in diverse contexts around the globe. Bringing together works centered on India, the Niger Delta, and the Arabian Peninsula, Amatya analyzes how writers and filmmakers re-map these locations from the perspectives of indigenous minority communities facing displacement, repression, and environmental degradation as a result of resource grabs by multinational mining and oil corporations. His study is centrally concerned with how the literature of resource conflict constructs indigenous minority identities in postcolonial contexts. Beyond literary and film studies readerships, the project will engage scholars, activists, and others interested in the politics of indigeneity, the impact of resource extraction on local populations and environments, and the question of how art and journalism can inspire change. The committee was impressed by the extent to which Amatya’s dissertation proposes a new field of study, rather than simply building on existing ones. Indeed, the significance of his work has already been recognized, as evident in his co-editorship of a special issue of the prestigious journal Modern Fiction Studies on “Literature of Extraction.” |
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