Presented as part of the Humanities Research Centre Seminar Series

Esteemed by some philosophers as the highest virtue, the delivery of justice demands and rivets attention.  And the opposite is true as well: the perceived miscarriage of justice commands attention, sparking outrage and condemnation.  This seminar will explore the challenges of representing justice within literary fiction, through a focus on Indra Sinha’s novel Animal’s People (2007), which depicts which depicts one of the world’s largest industrial disasters, the 1984 gas leak in Bhopal, India.                                            

Dr Manav Ratti is Associate Professor of English at Salisbury University in the University System of Maryland, USA. He completed his D.Phil. and M.St. at Oxford University, M.Phil.at Cambridge  University, and BA at the University of Toronto. His research interests are wide-ranging and interdisciplinary, including postcolonial and literary theory, global literatures, and South Asian literary and cultural studies. His current project examines the intersections between law and literature, with a special focus on justice and human rights as represented in literature from diverse postcolonial contexts, including Australia, India, and South Africa. He is the author of The Postsecular Imagination: Postcolonialism, Religion, and Literature (Routledge, 2013; paperback 2014), which he presented at the Ottawa International Writers Festival. He has served as a Fulbright Scholar at New York University, Research Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast, British Council Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (New Delhi), and was recently a Research Fellow at Jawaharlal Nehru University. For sample publications, see http://www.manavratti.com.