South Asia and Its Others: Reading the "Exotic"

V.G. Julie Rajan is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies, Rutgers University, U.S.A. Her monographs include, The Phenomenon of Women Suicide Bombers: Narratives of Violence (Routledge, forthcoming), and Femininity, Nation, and Violence: Post-Independence Narratives of Resistance Written by Women Residing in India (forthcoming). Rajan's edited collections include The Home and the World: South Asia in Transition (Cambridge Scholars Publishers, 2006), Violence and Gender in the Globalized World: The Intimate and the Extimate (Ashgate, 2008), and From Word to Canvas: Appropriations of Myth in Women's Aesthetic Production (Cambridge Scholars Publishers, 2009). Atreyee Phukan is Assistant Professor of English at the University of San Diego, U.S.A., where she teaches postcolonial and world literature. Her principal research interests lie in expressions of cultural and racial "hybridity" in literatures of the Caribbean and South Asian diaspora. Phukan's work on these literatures appear in the anthology 19th and 20th Century World Writers (2004) and in the Journal of Caribbean Literatures (January 2008). Phukan's other publications include The Home and the World: South Asia in Transition (Cambridge Scholars Publishers, 2006). She is currently working on a book-length project that examines the historical and cultural place of Indian indentureship in Trinidadian literature.