Negotiating Culture: Writings from Mizoram

In these phenomenal essays, 14 scholars take stock of the effects and response to identity, and culture studies within Mizo literary narratives. The essays address issues that contextualize the development of subaltern and postcolonial studies and the quest for identity within the Mizo perspective. This book offers a multidisciplinary perspective, with insights from history, memory studies, cultural studies and attempt to locate and situate dynamics that are related to orality, history and narrative.
Linking the concern with identity to popular literature, individualism, and the need to draw borderlines, the essays identify the most important topics in individual and collective identities in the Mizo. The illuminating essays contextualize developments within Mizo intellectual history, and display aspects that relate to the continuing force in the ongoing study of the relationship between literature, ethnography, and ethnic and cultural studies.
From orality, colonial, and postcolonial parameters, the book analyzes the ways in which colonial struggles have continued to contribute to postcolonial discourse in the Mizo, by producing fundamental ideas about the relationship between non-western and western cultures.

Margaret L. Pachuau is a professor at the Department of English and Culture Studies, Mizoram University, India. An alumni of JNU New Delhi, her areas of interest include fiction, creative writing, translation and culture studies. She has completed 2 UGC major research projects, ’Rewriting Identity: A Discourse on Select Mizo Narratives’ and ’Situating Religion and Power in Select Mizo Narratives’, as principal investigator and has coordinated a departmental project under UGC SAP DRS II: ’Situating the Mizo/Zohnahthlak in Mizoram and Manipur: A Study of the Historical and Socio-Cultural Processes of Emergent Identities from Orality to Writing’. Apart from her articles in reputed journals, her works have been published in The Oxford Anthology of Writings from North-East India and Modern Practices in North East India: History, Culture, Representation. She has also edited Lockdown Literature from Mizoram and co-edited the Anthology of English Prose and Poetry. Her translations from Mizo to English have been published in The Heart of the Matter and Handpicked Tales from Mizoram and Folklore from Mizoram. She won the first prize for fiction in translation for The Jackfruit Tree (Lamkhuang) in a competition organised by Muse India, a literary e-journal.