Ulka Anjaria

"The Unfinished Bridge: Realism and Futurity in India" is a study of contemporary literature and popular culture in India, and its relation to what many are calling today’s “neoliberal” age. Although it is tempting to read new trends in literature and film as merely reflecting the embourgeoisement of the Indian public sphere, this project shows how literature and cultural production since around 2000 is in fact engaged with social concerns, even as works largely eschew traditional paradigms for narrativizing these concerns, such as socialism or class warfare. What we see instead is a collective struggle to forge a vocabulary with which to represent political injustice outside of these deterministic narratives – a struggle that generates new and often surprising aesthetic forms.