South Asian Review is honored to present this special issue, “Participation Anxiety,” guest edited by Professor R. Radhakrishnan. The issue grew out of an article that Dr. Radhakrishnan contributed to a prior special issue of the journal in 2017, “New Directions in South Asian Literary Studies.” In that earlier article, Dr. Radhakrishnan wrote eloquently of the ambivalence he feels as a South Asianist: “The area where I have been floundering and producing work over the last thirty plus years has been conjunctural and intersectional as an expression of an ongoing and chronic ‘between-ness’” (38.3, 2017, 26). In this special issue, he invited contributors to consider a series of questions: “Who are the South Asian scholars? Where do they come from, and where do they belong? What is the relationship between who they are and what they do? Is this relationship umbilical, natal, filiative, affiliative, representational, post-representational, ontological, epistemological, methodological?” Five scholars – Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, Ketu Katrak, Marian Aguiar, Nasser Mufti, and Anandi Rao – approach these questions from very different perspectives and take us readers deeper into examining participation anxiety from multiple perspectives.
I am an accidental South Asianist myself. I began with doctoral work in Victorian and Modernist British literature and wandered into postcolonial studies as it was beginning to find a firm footing as a “field” in English departments. Because I work at a university that emphasizes teaching, I had the freedom to pursue scholarly inquiry along meandering paths that took me into exploring Anglophone literary hegemony in India, South Asian diasporic culture in United States, South Asian/postcolonial feminism, and partition studies. Never could I have predicted that I would serve as Editor for a journal like this one and yet it is in the South Asian Literary Association (the organization that hosts this journal) that I have found my scholarly community. Dr. Radhakrishnan’s writing, especially his book Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location (1996), has been deeply influential in my own work.
In this special issue, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan’s essay questions an assumption made that academics in interdisciplinary programs like South Asian Studies must have a disciplinary home elsewhere in a discipline like English or History. She maps a generational difference in how scholars like herself have moved from ethnic studies into disciplines and seeks in her essay “to trouble the privilege of these movements, while putting pressure on assumptions about the vantage such movements do and do not actually afford.” Marianne Aguiar like Srinivasan examines the anxieties of interdiscplinarity and argues that “critics have shown how the structures of the academy limit or direct interdisciplinary efforts, and the ways these connections impact the allocation of the university’s intellectual, labor, and material resources.” Anandi Rao speaks of an archival journey into Shakespeare translations and the discovery of an Indian woman translator to examine the place of translated texts in the archive and her own role as a scholar exploring Hindi translation within the context of contemporary Hindutva politics. Ketu Katrak takes us into choreography and the work of the late great Astad Deboo among others to examine exclusions by the Indian state and the performance of exclusions in the work of contemporary diasporic dancers. Nasser Mufti reads V.S. Naipaul, who embodies anxieties about his South Asian identity in his works on India, via Edward Said’s notion of “voyage in” or “hybrid cultural work.” Taken together, these essays offer provocative questions about interdiscplinarity, participation anxiety, and South Asian Studies.
I am grateful to Dr. Radhakrishnan for guest editing this special issue. I cherish his friendship, generosity, flexibility, and kindness as we worked through this project together. I also thank each of the contributors for their work and timely response to our numerous queries. Once again, our peer reviewers did wonderful work under difficult conditions. Journals like ours owe these scholars much for our ability to sustain academic scholarship. As always, Robin Field, Managing Editor, has been my comrade in this work—her steady support is invaluable.