Literatures of Liberation: Non-European Universalisms and Democratic Progress

The postcolonial spread of democratic ideals such as freedom and equality has taken place all over the world despite the widespread cultural differences that would seem to inhibit such change. In her new book, Literatures of Liberation: Non-European Universalisms and Democratic Progress, Mukti Lakhi Mangharam questions how these 'universalisms' came to be and suggests that these elements were not solely the result of Europe-based Enlightenment ideals. Instead, they also arose in context-specific forms throughout the world (particularly in the Global South), relatively independently from Enlightenment concepts. These translatable yet distinct cognitive frameworks, or 'contextual universalisms', as she argues, were central to the spread of modern democratic principles in response to the relentless expansion of capital. In this way, she posits that these universalisms reconceptualize democratic ideals not as Western imports into precolonial societies but as regional phenomena tied to local relations of power and resistance. In charting these alternative democratic trajectories, Mangharam examines oft-overlooked regional and vernacular literary forms and provides a fresh approach to current theorizations of postcolonial and world literatures.

Mukti Lakhi Mangharam is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University. She holds an M.Phil in Criticism and Culture from the University of Cambridge and earned her doctoral degree from Cornell University.  Her book, Literatures of Liberation: Non-European Universalisms and Democratic Progress (Ohio State UP, 2017), explores local syncretic universalisms in Indian and South African literatures. The fields she works in include Postcolonial Literature, the literatures of South Africa and South Asia, Human Rights and Literature, Comparative Modernities, and Feminism and Gender Studies. She has published widely in journals including Economic and Political Weekly, Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, Diacritics, ELH, ARIEL, and Safundi.