Passage to Manhattan: Critical Essays on Meena Alexander is a unique compendium of scholarship on South Asian American writer Meena Alexander, who is recognized as one of the most influential and innovative contemporary South Asian American poets. Her poetry, memoirs, and fiction occupy a unique locus at the intersection of postcolonial and US multicultural studies. This anthology examines the importance of her contribution to both fields. It is the first sustained analysis of the entire Alexander oeuvre, employing a diverse array of critical methodologies. Drawing on feminist, Marxist, cultural studies, trauma studies, contemporary poetics, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis, the collection features fifteen chapters and an Afterword, by well-established scholars of postcolonial and Asian American literature like Roshni Rustomji, May Joseph, Anindyo Roy, and Amritjit Singh, as well as by emerging scholars like Ronaldo Wilson, Parvinder Mehta, and Kazim Ali. The contributors offer insights on nearly all of Alexander's major works, and the volume achieves a balance between Alexander's diverse genres, covering the spectrum from early works like Nampally Road to her forthcoming book The Poetics of Dislocation. The essays engage with a variety of debates in postcolonial, feminist, and US multicultural studies, as well as providing many nuanced and detailed readings of Alexander's mutli-layered texts.
About the Author: Lopamudra Basu (PhD, Graduate Center, City University of New York, 2004) has been an Assistant Professor of English at University of Wisconsin-Stout since 2005. Her current research interests include contemporary world literature, transnational feminist theory, US ethnic literatures, and globalization studies. Her recent publications include Mourning and Motherhood: Transforming Loss in Representations of Adivasi Mothers in Mahasweta Devi's Short Stories in Rites of Passage in Postcolonial Women's Writing (New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 2009); The Repetition of Silence: Partition, Rape and Female Labor in Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking India, South Asian Review 28.2 (2007, 5-26); and Crossing Cultures/Crossing Genres: The Reinvention of the Graphic Memoir in Persepolis and Persepolis 2, Nebula: A Journal of Multidisciplinary Scholarship 4.3 (September 2007, 1-19). She has been invited to co-edit a special topic issue of the electronic journal Politics and Culture focusing on the Global South in 2009. Cynthia Ann Leenerts (PhD, George Washington University, 1997) has served as an Assistant Professor of English at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania since 2005. Specializing in Indian, South African, and Black British literatures, she teaches postcolonial literature, Victorian and modern British literatures, literary criticism and theory, the graphic novel, and a variety of general-education literature and writing courses. With George Bozzini, she edited the anthology Literature Without Borders: International Literature in English for Student Writers (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2001) and published Rabindranath Tagore's and Satyajit Ray's 'New Woman': Writing and Rewriting Bimala in Patrick Colm Hogan and Lalita Pandit's Rabindranath Tagore: Universality and Tradition (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003). Among other venues, she has also published in The Literary Criterion, the Committee on South Asian Women's Bulletin, and the South Asian Review, where she now serves as Managing Editor.