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Finding the voice of the Peasant: Agriculture, Neocolonialism and Mulk Raj Anand’s Punjab trilogy

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Jonathan Highfield, Rhode Island School of Design, Rhode Island, USA

 Abstract

Mulk Raj Anand’s Punjab trilogy–The Village (1939), Across the Black Waters (1940), and The Sword and the Sickle (1942)–speaks directly to the destruction of traditional agricultural systems under colonial rule and the absorption of the agricultural goods and human labor of India into a global economic system. The Punjab trilogy traces the life of a character searching for another India, an India free of oppression, misery, and classism. Lalu Singh looks at the situation in the Punjab from an ever-widening orbit, only to recognize that global movements devalue the very people they purport to help. In the end he rejects theory for action, returning to the peasant society he fled as a youth. His decision has resonance in the twenty-first century as formerly colonized regions face the neocolonial onslaught of biopiracy and genetic trait control technologies. Keep Reading

Teaching Literature in the Age of E-Literacy

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Anne Mabry, New Jersey City University Abstract

In this piece of writing the writer deals with the issue of teaching literature and with the use of technology for the purpose of human resource development in the age of internet.

Students in urban high schools across the United States have been struggling to accomplish one milestone that most other students in suburban U.S. high schools take as a rite of passage—graduating from high school.  In the recent report titled “Closing the Graduation Gap,” commissioned by the American’s Promise Alliance, a non-profit group that works to reduce America’s high school dropout rates, the average high school graduation rate in the U.S.’s 50 largest cities was 53 percent, compared with 71 percent in the suburbs.  And the magnitude of the problem doesn’t stop there.  As reported by Sara Rimer of the New York Times just a few months ago, of the 68 percent of high school students nationwide who go to college each year, about one-third begin their freshmen year with skills deficient in writing, reading, and basic computational skills. Keep Reading