Claiming the Difference

Claiming the Difference: Identity in Literatures and Cultures is an attempt to unfold representations of identity by a body of selected papers which critically engage the postcolonial world and its attendant issues. The authors appreciate and also evaluate the sense of difference as a key to understanding identities emerging through different literary traditions and cultural systems. Since identity in our times is increasingly believed to be a socio-psychological and culturo-political phenomenon, and likened to a constantly evolving and much-contested space, it appears nuanced with differentia; hence its representations in literatures instead of a universal literature, so also its cultures and peoples, are coefficients of each other. In other words, identity remains an embodied bloom of its culture as well as infolded in the literature that any culture nurtures. The book may be approached to view with a discernment of difference many identities, cultures and literary traditions in the world in which identity is formed and reclaimed.