He states “its arguments are thoroughly articulated and explored and its critical analyses sound and thought-provoking”.

In Postcolonial Text 11.1 Graziano Krätli (Yale University) describes it as “well researched and finely written”. This monograph, which began as Alix Watkins’s PhD, has received outstanding reviews. Her publications include Problematic Identities in Women’s Fiction of the Sri Lankan Diaspora, which was released in 2015 by Brill. SADIRN Member Profile Alexandra WatkinsĪlexandra Watkins is an early career diaspora studies academic who works at Deakin University, Melbourne, as a teacher and researcher in literary studies.Spanish and Latin American studies (in European languages) The Parcel is the masterful new novel from acclaimed author Anosh Irani, and is a savage and beautifully rendered story about community, belonging, and the cheapness of human life.School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics Then, as the land war comes to a head, and with her housemother coming under pressure by the hijra elders to sell their home, Madhu realises she must do something to save herself. Everything is dissolving within and around her. Now forty and with her looks and spirit waning, Madhu struggles with the task she has been given, confronted by memories of her past, of how she was rejected by her family - and by how she longs, secretly, to go back to them. It is here that ‘hijras’ - eunuchs, people of the third sex, 'neither here nor there’ - ply their trade. Madhu’s home is Hijra House, one of the last bastions in the land war slowly consuming the area, as property developers vie for land, desperate to make way for their empty grey monoliths. In the swollen and crumbling red-light district of Kamathipura, at the heart of Bombay, Madhu is given a difficult and potentially lucrative task by her housemother - to prepare a newly arrived ‘parcel’ for its opening. I am reviled and revered, deemed to have been blessed, and cursed, with sacred powers.’ ‘There is a term for me in almost every Indian language.

Ruins rajith savanadasa