In 1908, traveling from Scotland to South Africa, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi began writing a fiery manifesto. As has been recounted ever since, he wrote with such feverish intensity that he switched to his left hand when his right grew tired. This transnational document, written by a figure who was both a British colonial subject and a member of the diaspora in South Africa, gathers in its sails a restless anticolonial and ambulatory energy that defiantly exceeds the boundedness of the Indian colony. Much as the ship attains a haunting freedom for Frederick Douglass in his autobiography, Gandhi's ship offers one evocative site of what Madhumita Lahiri calls “print internationalism,” a mode of transnational imagination that refuses the boundaries of either imperial might or national feeling. Instead, Gandhi's manifesto does something counterintuitive—it moves between the linguistic registers of Gujarati and English by refusing to translate its title Hind Swaraj for a...
Print Internationalism's Uneasy Adjacencies
KALYAN NADIMINTI is assistant professor of English at Northwestern University. They work on postcolonial and global Anglophone literatures, novel studies, and political theory, with a particular focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century South Asian writing. They are currently writing a monograph that reads the encounter between postcolonial narrative and US empire at the intersections of the Global War on Terror, comparative geographies of detention, and human rights regimes. Their scholarly articles and reviews have been published or are forthcoming in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Humanity Journal, Post45/Contemporaries, Journal of Asian American Studies, Los Angeles Review of Books, and other venues. They hold a PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania.
Kalyan Nadiminti; Print Internationalism's Uneasy Adjacencies. Novel 1 May 2023; 56 (1): 151–156. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-10251389
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