About

Pranav Jani is an associate professor of English with a focus in postcolonial studies and critical ethnic studies. His research and teaching interests lie in the literatures, cultures, and history of colonized and formerly colonized people, including those in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Ireland, as well as people of color in the United States. He specializes in South Asia and the South Asian diaspora, Marxist theories of nationalism and colonialism, and the intertwined legacies of colonialism, settler colonialism, and slavery. Jani authored the book Decentering Rushdie, published by The Ohio State University Press in 2010, which analyzes the emergence of Salman Rushdie and other postmodern writers in light of the failings of decolonization. His current book manuscript, provisionally titled Marxism, Nationalism and the 1857 Rebellion in British India, investigates the impact of the historic uprising on Indian political and cultural imagination from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first. He is the Director of the South Asian Studies Initiative (SASI), a working group of the Humanities Institute, and is affiliated with multiple departments and centers including the Department of African American and African Studies, the Asian American Studies Program, the Department of Comparative Studies, The Middle East Studies Center, and the Mershon Center for International Security Studies. Jani has been active as an advisor for several Ohio State student groups, including Students for Justice in Palestine. He has received the Dr. Marlene B. Longenecker English Faculty Teaching and Leadership Award and has served on the Executive Committee of the South Asian Literary Association. Jani is frequently invited as a speaker by campus groups across the country, as well as by high school teachers and community organizations in Columbus. He is actively involved in social justice organizing, writing on topics such as racism, elections, campus politics, history, and culture at his Medium blog. Currently, he serves on the Board of the Ohio State chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Philosophy
• Gender studies
• Literature
• Engineering
• Aesthetics
• Media studies
• Epistemology
• Art
• History
• Psychology
• Criminology

Selected publications

• Academia, Activism, and Popular Consciousness: A Response to <i>Freedom Inc.</i>

  The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry · 2024 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Psychology

  Abstract Mukti Mangharam’s Freedom Inc.: Gendered Capitalism in New Indian Literature and Culture , conducts a though investigation into the culture and ideology of neoliberal capitalism being produced in India today. But Mangharam’s approach is not to dismiss but to take seriously the appeal of individualism and entrepreneurism among its target audience: ordinary people looking for a way out of the material crises that neoliberalism has produced. In this response to Freedom Inc ., Pranav Jani recognizes the empathetic and democratic impulse in Mangharam’s method and narrative style and finds a parallel in his own work as a scholar and organizer. How can scholars and activists concerned with the voice of the people recognize the fundamental heterogeneity of popular consciousness, neither romanticizing struggle nor foreclosing the possibility of reform, or even revolutionary change?

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Elites, Subalterns, and the Postcolonial Nation

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • History

  Abstract Indian novels in English, exploding onto the world stage in the 1980s and 1990s in the midst of neoliberal expansion and postcolonial crises, occupied a contradictory space. Written mostly by writers from elite backgrounds and addressing a global audience, the novels benefited from the expansion of markets, the circulation of English writing, and a new interest in postcolonial writing. At the same time, writing in the aftermath of the Emergency, they raised criticisms of the postcolonial nation and its authoritarianism, of rising sectarianism, and of social hierarchies. Examining four major works of the period—Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Nayantara Sahgal’s Rich Like Us, Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, and Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance—this chapter draws out the different narrative strategies and perspectives through which writers examined elite subjectivity and subaltern suffering while mobilizing their cultural capital to critique the nation.

  PublisherDOI

• Staying in our lanes: Desi childhoods, Gandhi statues, and the hard work of solidarity

  South Asian Popular Culture · 2021 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  A South Asian scholar and activist looks back into his various childhood affiliations with the symbol of Gandhi and reflects on the recent call to remove Gandhi statues from activists. Asking questions about political activism, community, and affective affiliation, this personal essay reflects on the difficult work of solidarity and the particular place of diasporic Desis within the struggles for racial and social justice.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Revolutionary Nationalism and Global Horizons

  2018-09-13

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  One of Benita Parry's core contributions to Marxist scholarship in postcolonial studies is undoubtedly her robust defence of anti-colonial struggle and liberation theory. The notion that anti-colonial nationalisms are inherently reactionary, nativist, and elitist has gained the status of a foundational truth in postcolonial literary studies and related fields. The impact of the Bolshevik revolution and its aftermath is clearly discernable in this manifesto: the terms &quot;national liberation,&quot; &quot;imperialism,&quot; and &quot;comrades&quot; leap off the page in a decade that saw the global proliferation of Communist Parties and Communist-affiliated formations like the League Against Imperialism, bringing together a much wider group of anti-imperialists and nationalists. To check the extension of British imperialism which is the cradle of imperialism and capitalism of the world, it should be the sacred duty of every human being to fight the fight of China and India.&quot; In the global and highly differentiated system of capitalism, resistance will always be multi-faceted and &quot;impure.&quot;.

  PublisherDOI

• Marxism, Mediation, Historiography: Writing About 1857

  Critical Sociology · 2016-04-27

  article1st authorCorresponding

  What are the methods and goals of radical history? How can Marxist historiography, charged with producing radical histories, contend with the postmodernist challenge that knowledge is always mediated, that only fragments are recoverable, not totalities? Working through concepts and methods associated with postcolonial literary studies and subaltern studies, the article analyzes a document in the British colonial archives from the time of the 1857 Revolt in India that challenges both nationalist and imperialist histories of its most famous rebel: Lakshmibai, queen of Jhansi. Understanding mediation and the limits of knowledge – the fissures and conflicts among colonial officials, the ambiguity of the queen’s intentions – are crucial to understanding this file, and the 1857 Revolt itself. But Marxist historiography must also link that text – mediated and complex as it is – to the world outside of the archive, and seek explanatory frameworks and adequate truths in the effort to produce radical histories.

  PublisherDOI

• Guest-Editors' Column

  South Asian Review · 2015-12-01

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• A Home of One’s Own: Gender, Family, and Nation in Indian-American Literature and Film

  2014-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Democracy, Fundamentalism, and Empire: Rushdie and the Politics of Free Speech

  South Asian Review · 2014-01-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  (2014). Democracy, Fundamentalism, and Empire: Rushdie and the Politics of Free Speech. South Asian Review: Vol. 35, Salman Rushdie, pp. 75-93.

  PublisherDOI

• Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire by Saikat Majumdar (review)

  James Joyce quarterly · 2013-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire by Saikat Majumdar Pranav Jani (bio) PROSE OF THE WORLD: MODERNISM AND THE BANALITY OF EMPIRE, by Saikat Majumdar. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. 221 pp. $40.00 cloth, $28.00 paper. Saikat Majumdar’s Prose of the World is an erudite, wide-ranging, and innovative study of Anglophone world literature that opens up an array of fundamental theoretical and methodological questions in literary studies. Majumdar links together two early-twentieth-century modernist writers, James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield, with late-twentieth/early-twenty-first-century postcolonial writers, Zoë Wicomb and Amit Chaudhuri, through their portrayals of banality, boredom, and the everyday in order to make larger claims about narrative, historiography, and empire.1 Working across the fields of modernist studies and postcolonial studies, Majumdar effectively demonstrates the value of transnational and comparative literary criticism that, nevertheless, is attentive to the specific local and national contexts that shape writers, their works, and their reception. My use of the word “national” here is slightly ironic; Prose of the World intelligently reveals the material force that nations and nation-states bring to bear upon writing and criticism even though the nation, as a category, is the book’s perpetual antagonist. As the introduction shows, Prose of the World is firmly grounded in the rich scholarship on boredom and the everyday in modernist studies, arguing that “banality” and the failure of epiphany and transcendence are, paradoxically, the source of literary modernism’s tremendous energy. But banality, for Majumdar, is not just an idiosyncratic theme: it is produced by the fractures and contradictions of (capitalist) modernity—whose tensions are especially manifested in the work of writers shaped by colonial spaces (Joyce in Ireland, Mansfield in New Zealand). Banality registers the infinite displacement of desire for modernity and progress, the gap between the periphery and the center; it functions as the “index of the differential distribution of global power and resources” and is thus a radical critique of the status quo (27). The banal and the everyday stand in opposition to the spectacular, the eventful, and the dramatic—elements that are thought to be central to narrative and history but, in fact, do the work of modernity by suppressing the individual, the fragmentary, the contingent, the rebellious. Majumdar then creatively applies and extends the examination of banality in literary modernism to discussions about subalternity in postcolonial theory and historiography, where “subaltern” represents not only a marginalized identity (peasants, the poor, women) but that which is absent from the grand narratives of both imperialism and nationalism. Prose in the World finds the literary counterpart to Joyce and Mansfield in writers like Wicomb (South Africa) and Chaudhuri [End Page 227] (India)—although, in the latter case, the writer represents not the driving force of Anglophone postcolonial literature but a minoritarian trend that focuses on the ordinary and the uneventful against “the deafening noise of the national narrative of decolonization, independence, and development” (36). Prose of the World, in this manner, is very aware of the unevenness in its comparison of the modernist and postcolonial articulations of banality, pointing to the presence of this transnational thread but avoiding a rigid determinism in which the banal experience of modernity necessarily produces an aesthetics of banality. The four central chapters of Prose of the World move chronologically from modernist to postcolonial, with each one taking up an individual author and providing a more nuanced sense of the shifts within the author’s career and her or his relation to the colonial periphery. Furthermore, each author’s work is read in relation to concepts and ideas in a variety of disciplines (including ethnography, history, and literary criticism) such that the theoretical compatibility of the literary work with other sets of ideas gets highlighted. Literature can now be read as one among many ways to investigate the problem of relating the ordinary to the extraordinary in understanding how modern life works. The effect of this organization and methodology, as the book moves from Joyce and Mansfield to Wicomb and Chaudhuri, is to introduce us to growing, multifaceted, and eclectic archives of theories and meditations on modernity that develop alongside...

  PublisherDOI

• Bihar, California, and the US Midwest: the early radicalization of Jayaprakash Narayan

  Postcolonial Studies · 2013-06-01 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  (2013). Bihar, California, and the US Midwest: the early radicalization of Jayaprakash Narayan. Postcolonial Studies: Vol. 16, Reading Revolutionaries - Texts, Acts, and Afterlives of Political Action in Late Colonial South Asia, pp. 155-168.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Crystal Bartolovich

  3 shared

• E. San Juan

  San Juan Bautista School of Medicine

  1 shared

• Priyamvada Gopal

  1 shared

• August H. Nimtz

  1 shared

• Giovanni Arrighi

  New Mexico State University

  1 shared

• Timothy A Brennan

  The University of Texas at Austin

  1 shared

• Benita Parry

  University of Warwick

  1 shared

• Helen Scott

  Edge Hill University

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Dr. Marlene B. Longenecker English Faculty Teaching and Lead…