Books by Leela Prasad

Can a subject be sovereign in a hegemony? Can creativity be reined in by forces of empire? Studying closely the oral narrations and writings of four Indian authors in colonial India, The Audacious Raconteur argues that even the most hegemonic circumstances cannot suppress "e;audacious raconteurs"e;: skilled storytellers who fashion narrative spaces that allow themselves to remain sovereign and beyond subjugation. By drawing attention to the vigorous orality, maverick use of photography, literary ventriloquism, and bilingualism in the narratives of these raconteurs, Leela Prasad shows how the ideological bulwark of colonialism-formed by concepts of colonial modernity, history, science, and native knowledge-is dismantled. Audacious raconteurs wrest back meanings of religion, culture, and history that are closer to their lived understandings. The figure of the audacious raconteur does not only hover in an archive but suffuses everyday life. Underlying these ideas, Prasad's personal interactions with the narrators' descendants give weight to her innovative argument that the audacious raconteur is a necessary ethical and artistic figure in human experience.Thanks to generous funding from Duke University, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellopen.org) and other repositories.

Leela Prasad's riveting book presents everyday stories on subjects such as deities, ascetics, cats, and cooking along with stylized, publicly delivered ethical discourse, and shows that the study of oral narrative and performance is essential to ethical inquiry. Prasad builds on more than a decade of her ethnographic research in the famous Hindu pilgrimage town of Sringeri, Karnataka, in southwestern India, where for centuries a vibrant local culture has flourished alongside a tradition of monastic authority. Oral narratives and the seeing-and-doing orientations that are part of everyday life compel the question: How do individuals imagine the normative, and negotiate and express it, when normative sources are many and diverging? Moral persuasiveness, Prasad suggests, is intimately tied to the aesthetics of narration, and imagination plays a vital role in shaping how people create, refute, or relate to "e;text,"e; "e;moral authority,"e; and "e;community."e; Lived understandings of ethics keep notions of text and practice in flux and raise questions about the constitution of "e;theory"e; itself. Prasad's innovative use of ethnography, poetics, philosophy of language, and narrative and performance studies demonstrates how the moral self, with a capacity for artistic expression, is dynamic and gendered, with a historical presence and a political agency.