Moving beyond the normative frames of terrorism and counter-terrorism, this book shows how world literatures from the Global South can be used to examine the multiple modalities of violence that pervade contemporary world politics, such as communalism, factionalism, peasant wars, banditry, nationalist struggles, resource wars and acts of vengeance. The comparative approach of this book enables a theoretical realignment of insurgency from the mobilization of violence for grand, mythic, and ideological causes – as seen through the eyes of the state – to the violence for small causes, namely the splintered violence conjured under conceptual rubrics, such as divine violence, intimate violence, routine violence, everyday violence, inherited violence, and subterranean violence. Analyzing novels, autobiographies, journalistic accounts from key regions, such as Nigeria, Myanmar (Burma), India, and the Middle East, Insurgent Cultures provides a new understanding of the narratives of violence in the global south. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

‘Pavan Malreddy is a born storyteller. In this, his latest monograph Insurgent Cultures, he spins an intricate web of tales, each of which offers fascinating insights into the 'splintered violence' of contemporary insurgency texts. Insurgency literatures, he argues, have the potential to 'redraw the coordinates of the world from the vantage point of a peripheral imagination'. Highly imaginative in its turn, Malreddy's book moves deftly between insurgency narratives from India, Nigeria, the Middle East and Burma. Taken together, these narratives, covering a variety of genres, go beyond 'the normative discourses of terrorism [and] the nostalgic parlance of revolution' to trace 'the aesthetic and affective trajectories of the insurrectional sublime'. A major contribution to both postcolonial and World Literature studies, Insurgent Cultures offers compelling evidence that these two fields are more closely interrelated than is often imagined to be the case.’

Graham Huggan - Professor of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Leeds