Dr. Goutam Karmakar

Goutam Karmakar is a National Research Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the Faculty of Education of the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. His areas of research are South Asian literature and culture, women and gender studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies, and environmental studies. As a postdoctoral fellow, he is working on epistemology and decolonial ecology. He is an editors of the Routledge book series on South Asian literature. Karmakar’s forthcoming and recently published edited volumes are Nation and Narration: Hindi Cinema and the Making and Remaking of National Consciousness (Routledge, forthcoming), Modernist Transitions: Cultural Encounters between British and Bangla Modernist Fiction from 1910s to 1950s (Bloomsbury, 2023), Narratives of Trauma in South Asian Literature (Routledge, 2022), The City Speaks: Urban Spaces in Indian Literature (Routledge, 2022), and Religion in South Asian Anglophone Literature: Traversing Resistance, Margins and Extremism (Routledge, 2021). He has also published articles in over a dozen academic journals.

At the RCC, Karmakar will work on his project on extraction and environmental injustice as well as on a monograph, Ecology, Epistemology, and the Decolonial Turn: The Writings of Amitav Ghosh (under contract with Routledge).

Selected Publications:

• with Rajendra Chetty. “Delinking the Capitalist Episteme: Empathy and the Decolonial Turn in Amitav Ghosh’s Jungle Nama.” Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 35, no. 2 (2023): 105–120.
• with Rajendra Chetty. “Cognitive (In)justice and Decoloniality in Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse.” Journal of Human Values (2023): 1–15.
• with Rajendra Chetty. “Extraction and Environmental Injustices: (De)colonial Practices in Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were.” eTropic 22, no. 2 (2023): 125–47.
• with Rajendra Chetty. “Tackling Environmental and Epistemic Injustice: Decolonial Approaches for Pluriversal Peacebuilding in South Africa.” Peace Review 35, no. 3 (2023): 496–510.
• with Rajendra Chetty. “Episteme and Ecology: Amitav Ghosh’s The Living Mountain and the Decolonial Turn.” South Asian Review (2023): 1–21.
• with Rajendra Chetty. “Epistemic (Dis) Belief and (Dis) Obedience: Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness and the Decolonial Ecological Turn.” Journal of Narrative and Language Studies 11, no. 21 (2023): 24–39.