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Arnab Roy and Paul Ugor eds., "The Postcolonial Bildungsroman: Narratives of Youth, Representational Politics, and Aesthetic Reinventions" (U Alberta Press, 2025)
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Hello everyone, this is Gargi and today I have with me Dr. Arnab Datta Roy, who is an Assistant professor of English at Florida Gulf Coast University. His research lies at the intersection of postcolonialism, human rights theory and modern South Asian literature and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as the Journal of Global Post Colonial Studies, South Asian Vogue, Comparatives, Genre, New Literary History and others. He is the co editor of two books on post colonial buildings, Roman, which we are going to Discuss today, the first of which was published in 2025 this year with university of Alberta Press called the Post Colonial Buildings Narratives of Youth Representation, Politics and Ascetic Reinventions and the Next is forthcoming in January next year, the Postcolonial Building Romance and the Character of Plays with University of Nebraska Press. In addition, he has co edited a special issue of the Journal of World Literature called Constructing the Other, Narrative Empathy and Ethics of Border Crossing in World Literature. Additionally, he is also working on a monograph titled Universalisms in South Asian Literature that draws on interdisciplinary work in post Colombian theory human rights to analyze literary responses to colonialism from South Asia. At the Florida Gulf Coast University, he teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses on world literature and post colonial theory hello Dr. Roy, how are you doing today?
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D
I'm doing great. Thank you for having me here. I'd say that it feels a little strange to be on the other side of the screen because I'm usually the one hosting similar podcasts and I'm thrilled and also a little nervous about being a guest. So thank you so much for having me.
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C
I hope this conversation takes at least some of the nervousness away and I'm going to jump straight into the book. I want to know first the genesis of this book. Was there a particular moment or a set of questions that sparked this edited process?
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D
Thank you so much for that question. And yes there was. The idea of this topic came to me when I was writing my dissertation. This was almost like I'm thinking this was in 2016, 2017 when I was writing a section on how modern South Asian writers employ pre colonial literary topes to represent and explore themes of coming of age and growing up in post colonial India. And I was amazed to see how similar writing styles and thematic tropes also feature in the European Bildungsroman. So it was at that point when I decided to take up a kind of a comparative project after I graduated. So fast forward to say 2020 when I co organized with a friend a panel on the post colonial Bildungsroman at the American Comparative Literature Association Conference. And it was during this conference when I decided that we would go forward with a book project on the topic. It did not work out with my friend who I originally planned to work on this project with because we had different commitments, different timelines. So we parted ways there in relation to the project. But I did reach out to Dr. Paul Uger who is my co editor to work on this together because of his vast experience and prominence in areas of post colonial literature and childhood studies, but also because of his vast experience in academic publishing. Compared to somebody like me who was a newly graduated like scholar, Paul's addition to the team at this early phase and his guidance his valuable contributions turned out to be the magic formula that was needed for the transition of this project from the level of ideas to practical execution. Both Paul and I worked on this project through very hard times, including Covid, including Hurricane Ian that hit my hometown in Florida in 2022. So, I mean, it was mainly Paul's friendship, his support, his passionate investment in this project that ensured its complete, its successful completion.
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C
To come to the title of the book itself, Post Colonial fiction is. When we read, for example, a Google Scholar or post colonial fiction, we see analysis through themes rather than genres of itself. What drew you to take genre itself of Buildings from Roman Buildings from. As your analytical framework?
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D
That's a very interesting question. It was never really a conscious decision on our part to privilege genre over theme. In fact, I've always felt that paying attention to genre does not take away the focus from theme at all. It actually helps us see themes more clearly. Right. We became interested in the Bildungsroman because it is such a rich and flexible genre. It brings together so many interconnected themes. Coming of age, education, self discovery, the motif of journeying or pilgrimage, and I'm thinking both literal and metaphorical journeys, the tensions of tradition and modernity. These themes don't really exist in isolation. They are constantly overlapping, echoing, reshaping each other, one another, depending on the specific cultural historical context in which they are produced. So through the study of this genre, what we aim to do was to see how these themes appear together, how they interact, evolve across diverse contexts, and what kind of work they. What kind of work they have performed in teasing out broader concerns related to identity, belonging, colonialism, dispossession, et cetera, and.
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C
Bildung Simmer itself is deeply rooted in European literary tradition. The word comes from German. And so my question is, how did it come to be taken up in post colonial context? And why do you think the writers found this genre so adaptable to an entirely new reality of South Asia?
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D
The genre has always been very adaptable and flexible. So, I mean, it might help for me in answering this question, it might help if I just go over its history since its conception. So the genre can be traced back to the works of a small number of German idealists from the late 18th century, including Christoph Martin Wieland, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Gottfield Keller, who imagined it to reflect certain ideals of German romanticism. So in their framing, the Bildungsroman aimed at achieving some kind of a harmonious, even idealistic union between an unruly self and the outer world of social norms. Right. So the Bildungsroman would ideally, like, trace out a journey where the self would eventually integrate with society. In the 19th century, this genre expanded beyond Germany, and its popularity spread across the Euro American world. And writers such as Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Kipling took up the genre and made it more ironic, highlighting how difficult it can be to grow up in a rapidly modernizing world. 20th century onward, the genre became truly global, expanding beyond these Euro American boundaries and spreading across the colonized or the colonized or previously colonized societies in the global South. And in this global stage, the genre underwent a radical transformation, and there was almost a whole scale dismantling of some of its core features. Writers from colonized or formerly colonized societies found in the genre a powerful medium of thinking about both individual and national self formation within a postcolonial context. On the one hand, the form lent itself to imagining a nation's journey towards freedom, self determination, modernity. But at the same time, on the other hand, it exposed the limits of such aspirations. In societies marked by colonial domination, racial inequality, and many other forms of disenfranchisement, the idea of a smooth and linear coming of age became untenable. Post colonial authors instead turned the genre inside out, using it to dramatize failed, deferred, or fractured forms of development, and to question the very universality of coming of age that was so much ingrained in the previous European models.
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C
And I want to take a quote from the book here and this you write in the introduction, you describe this 18th century genre as, and I'm quoting from here, resurrected by post colonial writers as one of the most cosmopolitan mediums for addressing global ideas. Cosmopolitan is a very contested term in post colonial writing, right? It's a Greek term, and then it becomes a colonial term for the. The metropole and as opposed to the lands of empire. I want to understand from you how you use it here. Do you see cosmopolitanism as an encounter between the European and the non European, or something more broader than that?
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D
That's an excellent question. Thank you. I would say we have used this term in both senses, right? A traditional sense and a non traditional sense. On the one level, the term gestures the genre's historical entanglement with globalizing processes of colonialism and capitalism of the form itself is disseminated through imperial networks. Its postcolonial reappropriation is therefore inseparable from that colonial history. In this sense, the genre participates in a cosmopolitanism of encounters, right? So within this cosmopolitan encounter, the genre gestures a kind of a writing back to European traditions, exposing and reworking the colonial foundations of both the novel form and the humanistic ideals that kind of serve as the foundations of those novel ideas? Right. But on the other hand, we use cosmopolitan in a more broader and inclusive manner, because the impulse to narrate coming of age stories is not exclusively European, as virtually every culture beyond Europe have stories about growth, coming of age, transformations, initiations. So postcolonial writers often draw not only on European narrative conventions, but also on local, indigenous and vernacular traditions that also feature similar themes of coming of age and growing up. So cosmopolitanism in this case then also gestures to the space where global and local imaginaries kind of intersect, producing new forms of worldliness that are not merely derivative of European ideas, but are deeply plural and decentered.
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C
Developing on what you just said, is there a meaningful discussion, in your view, between Islam, buildings, Raman and a novel that is simply featuring a child protagonist or someone who is, for example, learning out in the world, right, from being immature to mature in the colonial and post colonial? Is there a distinction to be made or do you think this is. This is not something fruitful enough to discuss food chain and say so?
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D
Youth and childhood does play a very vital role in the genre. Franco Moretti, the scholar, has famously called youth as modernity's ascents. And in this sense youth certainly is a central component of the Bildungsroman model. Yet I would say that it is not alone, it is not the only component of the genre, right? And we feel that what makes Bildungsroman distinction is not merely the presence of a young protagonist, but the process of formation, the building that unfolds over time. So the narrative must take a trajectory of development, transformation and self discovery, however incomplete or ironic the journey is. So I would goes so far as to say that in many versions of the post colonial Bildungsroman, youth takes a backstage and in some cases youth is even abandoned. But the genre does not abandon the trope of coming of age that still remains a central part of its structure and meaning. So, for instance, in a novel like Samskara by writer you are Ananta Murthy. The protagonist is not a child, but a 40 years old man who undergoes a profound process of unreal learning and moral awakening. Ultimately, he associates himself from the corruption and hypocrisy of his community. His journey is not one of youthful discovery, but of an ethical reformation and spiritual rebirth, demonstrating how Bildung in postcolonial context can occur at any stage of life, often involving disrupting inherited systems of knowledge and belief rather than assimilating into them. Right. So in many cases, even within postcolonial Bildungsroman, youth still plays a major role. Right. We are still concerned about thinking how children grow up in a world that is kind of marked by genocide, by colonialism, by dispossession. But at the same time, youth takes a backstage and the process of coming of age becomes more important, irrespective of the age of the protagonist. I hope that makes sense.
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C
This is the first time I heard someone say Sansar. It's probably a bilance Ravana. Very interesting. But I do agree. I mean, I do. You do have a point there. Yeah, it's interesting to look at it.
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D
I know, I know. I mean, if Samskara doesn't seem like a Bildungsroman, but it has many of those tropes, Right? Like it has the trope of rethinking education, it has the trope of pilgrimage. It has the trope of journeying and becoming unbecoming something. Right. So if you look at those tropes, you'll see it has kind of a similar pattern. It can be. One can argue that the broader genre of the Bildungs Roman is expressed through it in very unconventional ways.
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C
And this leads to my next question, because you mentioned tropes, which makes this whole genre so much wider than the traditionally. I traditionally understood it through my study. So there are a vast range of issues that this post colonial. But as a post colonial genre, it can encompass. When you were editing this book, how did you decide what text? Same question to focus. How did you do this? Let's say, then drawing boundaries around a very vast set of issues, let's say that can.
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D
It was an immensely difficult process because the genre has kind of been produced all across the world. So it's nearly impossible to represent all of those traditions of writings. Right. We tried to do a lot. When we started this project a year in, we were. It was a project that had more than 30 chapters. And then when we were sending out proposal to different presses, no one press would accept a manuscript with 30 chapters. So one friend recommended that we split the project into two parts, which was really a great advice. And we did that. So now there are two projects coming out of this broader. Like two books coming out of this broader project. Right. One is with University of Alberta, the post colonial Buildings Roman. And in this volume we are historicizing the genre and its kind of continuities and discontinuities with the original European models and the other project that comes out in a few months with University of Nebraska Press, where we theorize the genre and its situatedness in space and time. But I feel that it's worth saying what this project, this book, does and doesn't do. Right? We don't claim to have invented the genre of the post colonial buildings Roman, nor we are the first ones to identify it as such. Right? In fact, there has existed a robust and diverse tradition of postcolonial buildings Roman across the world since at least the late 19th century or the early 20th century. Many scholars, including several contributors to this volume, such as Erica Hoagland, Firoza Jusavala, Jose Fernandez Vazquez, have been mapping these traditions since at least the 1990s. Right. So what this volume does is it organizes and synthesizes a field of study that has long remained hyper specialized de centered, scattered across regional and linguistic boundaries. We highlight both the shared concerns and distinct inflections of the Bildnungsroman as it has emerged in different postcolonial contexts from South Asia to Africa, from the Philippines to Vietnam. We also attempt to theorize some of the formal and conceptual distinctions within the genre. Right? What differentiates a national Bildungsroman from a diasporic one? Right. How do we historicize a queer Bildungsroman? Or what is an ecological Bildungsroman? These are some of the concerns that have guided our project. At the same time, we are aware of the project's limitations. While the volume engages a wide range of global traditions, it remains a work in progress. We do not, for instance, include we have not been able to include essays on indigenous Bildunsroman. Right. Or on the Buldungsroman from the Palestinian literary tradition, both of which have robust traditions of the genre. So there are significant gaps. But our hope is that this collection provides a shared vocabulary and a critical framework that will enable future scholars to extend the conversation into regions and traditions that remain unrepresented.
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C
Do you think this genre still has critical or political potential today? Or you think it has it has been reduced to a literary form which has social commentary but. But not like what. What it was in 19th century, where it was about early confrontation or political discourses in the.
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D
That's a great question. And in my view, the genre has immense political potential and value today, and I would say in. In more significant and consequential ways than how it was like years ago or like centuries ago. Because in our present moment, which is shaped by migration, precarity, ecological crisis, and new forms of Inequality, the question of what it means to come of age and find one's place in this world has acquired so much urgency. Right. So contemporary writers are in fact using this genre to rethink not just how individual grow up, but how individuals grow alongside broader collectives, alongside planetary forms of development. Right. We're not just talking about human growth, we are talking about like ecological growth. We're talking about non human growth that is happening alongside. So a writer of the post colonial Bildungsroman is not just concerned with individual growth, but precisely how individual growth is connected with these other kinds of developments within which that individual growth is taking place. So the genre's political power lies precisely in its ability to register the tensions between aspirations and limitations and constraints. Right. Between the desire for freedom and the structures, colonial, capitalist, patriarchal, that limit those freedoms. Far from being a purely literary exercise, then, the genre continues to serve as a diagnostic tool, revealing how personal narratives of growth are entangled with broader social, political and environmental systems.
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C
What do you hope the readers of this book take away?
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D
I mean, there are a few hopes, of course, but thank you so much for the question. I hope readers would think about the legacy of the genre. They would take away a nuanced understanding of what's unique about the post colonial buildings, Roman, how it is connected with older forms of the genre, but at the same time how it signals a departure as well. Right. I want readers to understand that writers of the post colonial Bildungsroman don't simply imitate older models. Even when they base their composition on older models. They completely reimagine the genre, turning it on its head to address what it means to grow up in today's complex and globalized worlds. On the other hand, I want them to remember that a number of writers from the global south don't engage the Western tradition at all. Instead, they draw on local and cross cultural traditions of initiation and self discovery, offer entirely novel ways of thinking about growth and transformation. And again, going back to the last question that you asked me, I want readers to think about the genre's tremendous political and ethical potential, how it continues to offer a powerful framework for exploring how individuals and communities negotiate identity, freedom and justice within a fundamentally unjust and unequal world.
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C
Yeah, thank you for those takeaways. Maybe before we end, we can talk a little bit about your next project, the monograph that you are working on. What is it about?
- [31:39]
D
Thank you for that question. So I'm going back to my dissertation and thinking about turning that into a monograph now, so it makes sense that you asked me this question because we started kind of with this question, right, about how this project came out in the first place. So yeah, I am currently working on my monograph which is titled Universalisms in Indian Literatures, in which I examine two things. How conceptual cultural aesthetic patterns appear across linguistically and culturally diverse literatures produced in India but also in global south in general, and how these patterns, let's call them universals, are often deployed by writers, activists and artists in thinking about questions of identity politics ethics in our contemporary world. So yes, this book will include a discussion on the Bildungsroman, particularly in the chapter on cultural universalisms. I I examine how the post colonial utilization of the Bildungsroman genre underscores a commitment to the idea of cultural universalism, or the view, in scholar Patrick Com Hogan's words, in the view that cultures are not in principle tied to any particular ethnic or racial group, but are the common property of all people. Indeed, by taking the genre out of a strictly European frame of history and reference and placing it within a global tradition of writing, post colonial writers of the genre reaffirm its universality, emphasizing that stories about coming of age are not exclusively tied to European culture, but are rather common across the world.
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C
Thank you so Manoj for taking the time out and talking to us. I hope you have a nice day ahead because it's still the morning there.
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D
Gargi, it was an absolute pleasure and I'm very grateful that you found time to speak with me about this book and it was an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much.
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A
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Brad, you're on mute.
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