«How does one reckon with the conditions of comparison in the act of comparison? Reading twentieth-century Chinese and Hindi texts side by side or against each other, this book offers a fascinating account of literary relations between China and India with invaluable insights on rupture, repulsion, and crisis of understanding. A bold experiment in method.»
Lydia Liu, Columbia University
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«How does one reckon with the conditions of comparison in the act of comparison? Reading twentieth-century Chinese and Hindi texts side by side or against each other, this book offers a fascinating account of literary relations between China and India with invaluable insights on rupture, repulsion, and crisis of understanding. A bold experiment in method.»
Lydia Liu, Columbia University
«This deeply inspiring and important book explores the gray zones of literary relations. States of Disconnect subjects the easy pair of India and China to stringent scrutiny and in the process offers a new vocabulary and critical tools for comparative literature in a world full of tension and strife.»
Francesca Orsini, SOAS, University of London
«States of Disconnect offers a novel approach by exploring how conditions of war, diplomatic breakdown, and international friction factor non-comparability into cross-cultural interpretation and genres of transnational literacy. Mangalagiri puts the brakes on forms of borderless criticism that homogenize distinct knowledge worlds and globalize literary learning without sufficient attention to the politics of difference.»
Emily Apter, New York University
«[This] book makes a significant contribution to the field of comparative literature, literary studies, and social
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history by analysing moments of trans-national crisis.»
«Daring to step into a territory where few humanist scholars of China-India relations have tread, Mangalagiri focuses on the ‘disconnect’ and negativity that characterizes a great deal of this relationship in the modern literary realm. She demonstrates persuasively that the first step in literature is to confront and understand the disconnect and imagine the ethical possibilities of the relationship from this fuller understanding.»
Prasenjit Duara, Duke University
«In States of Disconnect, Mangalagiri portrays how China and India encountered each other against the global background of war and peace, imperialism and nationalism, and, above all, transculturation and its disavowal. Working against the grain of conventional modernity studies, States of Disconnect probes the ways in which circulation falls short and connectivity stumbles, as well as the options of alternative modernities arising therefrom.»
David Der-wei Wang, Harvard University
«States of Disconnect is a pioneering work of scholarship. It shifts the gaze to cultural production and emphasizes the ways in which the acts of writing and reading in both countries, and the views each developed of the other in these cultural practices, did not necessarily follow the prevailing political vicissitudes of the transnational relationship.»
Laura Brueck, author of Writing Resistance: The Rhetorical Imagination of Hindi Dalit Literature<
«States of Disconnect aims at no less than reshaping the paradigm of comparison and supplying a critical vocabulary for a new ethics of transnational relation.»
MCLC Resource Center
«Deeply serious in its disciplinary-cum-ethical commitments and confident in the possibilities afforded by critical reading [. . .], States of Disconnect is ultimately as inspiring as it is generative.»
Critical Inquiry
«A genuinely robust and innovative approach to not just comparative literature as a discipline but also to the study of transnational solidarity and its potential.»
Himal Southasian
«Mangalagiri’s constellation of India and China, moreover, is not simply empirically novel but also a significant counter to the 'unthinking Eurocentrism' that has dominated comparative literature since its inception.»
Comparative Literature Studies