Hi! Exited to be here! My presentation - what a novel thing to say about a Twitter thread - is titled 'Literary Histories, Digital Futures', and I will be talking about the potential of spatial humanities for literary historiography in India. (1) #DHARTITwitterConf
I come here as a scholar of print/the history of the book/cultures of reading, primarily trained in depts. of English. My interest in the spatial humanities rests on a recognition that our English depts didn’t quite announce a ‘spatial turn’, despite the (2) #DHARTITwitterConf
abiding influence of Michel Focault and Raymond Williams in undergraduate/postgraduate classrooms. It rests, also, on a recognition that the entrenchment of New Historical/Cultural Materialist methods in our English depts accompanied the ‘rise’ of (3) #DHARTITwitterConf
postcolonial studies and literary theory, leading to exciting developments in the studies of literatures of hitherto marginalized/oppressed groups, as well as studies of literatures other than British. Papers on ‘Indian literature’ (English/in translation) (4) #DHARTITwitterConf
entrenched themselves in syllabi. Eventually, many depts discarded the study of ‘history of literature’ altogether, while others retained old-fashioned papers designed to introduce Indian students to the ‘history’ of British literature. (5) #DHARTITwitterConf
Questions abt literary historiography increasingly fell by the wayside, or was picked up, on occasion, by depts of history. Revisiting some of the questions abt literary historiography in India, I argue, poses some interesting challenges (6) #DHARTITwitterConf
for digital humanists. Early literary historiography in India, of course - modeled on English literature courses - was ‘fitted into’ a sequence of ancient/medieval/modern, with Sanskrit as the parent language. This ‘fitting in’ (7) #DHARTITwitterConf
faced intense questioning in the scholarship of a diverse body of scholars (whose works, now, form the ‘staple’ of undergraduate/postgraduate syllabi), questioning the “theoretical unity or coherence” (Ahmad) of an ‘Indian’ literature (8) #DHARTITwitterConf
and proposing models for the study of the same. These models strain against the narrowing down of the complexity of India’s literary cultures/histories & strive to capture the fluidity of India’s literary cultures in a textual critical form. (9) #DHARTITwitterConf
From Sujit Mukherjee’s ‘globe of Indian Literature’ ‘circumscribed by parallels of longitude in forms of [the] separate histories’ of various Indian languages, to Aijaz Ahmad’s emphasis on the ‘forms of belief and utterance’ (10) #DHARTITwitterConf
that have ‘travelled through and across linguistic ensembles’, metaphors of travel, cartography, geography abound in these theorizations literary historiography in India. In these metaphors of space lie a dormant interest in (11) #DHARTITwitterConf
physical or geographical space, and its impact on cultural production across India’s literary cultures. Without succumbing to geographical determinism, it is important to consider the potential for such spatial thinking (12) #DHARTITwitterConf
in the age of GIS and deep mapping. This poses its own share of problems, not in the least because even as international spatial humanities begins to ‘look beyond’ GIS, GIS training in India remains a domain envisioned for/by non-humanists. (13) #DHARTITwitterConf
For instance, a four week online ‘Introduction to Geographic Information Systems’ course, offered by NPTEL’s SWAYAM (with Prof. AK Saraf as instructor), states that its intended audience is decidedly a non-humanistic one. (13) #DHARTITwitterConf 
Tools such as ArcGIS storymaps offer a fun experience with mapping - it has a premium package for developers, but has a versatile free software that has served as a good exploratory platform for me (sample attached) in terms of conceptualizing (14) #DHARTITwitterConf
the spatial dimensions of certain aspects of my forays into literary historiography. I am honestly chuffed by the fact that so many of us are talking about spatial aspects today, and the potential for the same. I hope to explore more of the same (15) #DHARTITwitterConf
in my future projects, as well as in the classroom - something I have not done, yet. As a scholar of print and readership, I see again immense potential for spatial thinking in the study of circulation and proliferation of print/labour/materials. (16) #DHARTITwitterConf
Meanwhile, thank you for listening, and thank you, @dh_dharti! I hope, when we meet again, I will be in a position to talk abt the histories we’ve mapped and the strides that we’ve made in thinking spatially in literary historiography in India. (17) #DHARTITwitterConf
@threadreaderapp unroll, please
