Published Work

Books/Special Issues

Offering a fresh comparative lens, this volume demonstrates how postcolonial writers have transformed the Bildungsroman from an eighteenth-century European genre meant to explore local themes around childhood development into one of the most cosmopolitan literary mediums for communicating overlapping concerns about global modernity. Chapters examine identity, sexuality, human rights, the climate crisis, neoliberal globalization, and a host of other issues in work from a wide range of postcolonial locations across Asia, Europe, Africa, the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand. Forging productive engagements between narratology and genre theory, the volume documents the aesthetic and thematic shifts that have accompanied the Bildungsroman over time, particularly in the context of anticolonial, liberationist, and self-determination struggles from the mid-twentieth century onwards in the Global South. With essays from multiple continents, The Postcolonial Bildungsroman makes a crucial intervention to the existing scholarship on this influential genre and a unique contribution to the study of world literature.

In recent decades authors from across the world have adopted and adapted the bildungsroman literary genre to reflect on coming of age in postcolonial spaces and places. The Postcolonial Bildungsroman and the Character of Place emphasizes matters of space, place, and environment—concepts intrinsically linked to the bildungsroman’s processes of meaning-making and critique.

From Latin America to South Asia to Africa, the contributors focus on three distinct but interrelated themes: ecology, cultural geography, and mediascapes. They consider aesthetic formations that address the themes of spatiality, youth, individual and collective experiences of social stagnation or growth, the unique challenges faced by certain global subjects on account of the places they inhabit, and whether or not futurity is guaranteed for them. This unique collection delves into myriad features of the postcolonial bildungsroman, enlarging our theoretical understanding of the genre as well as of media and literature in the postcolonial world.

The special issue Constructing the Other: Narrative Empathy and the Ethics of Border-Crossing in World Literature intervenes in the current scholarship on narrative empathyin two specific ways: first, by contesting the mainstream position that empathy is exclusively colonial or ethnocentric, our collection asserts that empathy can play a positive role in shaping anticolonial resistance, global south solidarities, and collective efforts against oppression; second, by offering visibility to narrative strategies and aesthetic modes of empathy practiced globally by creative writers to ethically rethink otherness and alterity in literature. Some of the concerns highlighted in the different chapters include how do creative writers deploy narrative strategies to ethically imagine otherness and border-crossing? How can border-crossing empathy allow us to dismantle colonial, hegemonic, and other forms of representational violence? How can narrative empathy allow us to move beyond anthropocentric limitations in imagining nonhuman planetary consciousness? How can writers encounter their own prejudices in crafting ethical and empathetic border-crossing strategies? How can the teaching of empathy enrich student encounters with narratives of difference? How can empathy produce new forms of ethicality and inter-subjective alliance in war-torn and conflicted regions? Are there particular literary tools and strategies that can be consistently identified across different texts as a vehicle for empathy? And finally, how do writers and scholars engage empathy as a criterion for evaluating literature?

Peer Reviewed Journal Articles

Emancipating Universalism: A Critique of Caste, Identity, and Resistance in Yashica Dutt’s Coming Out as Dalit (Forthcoming in 2026 with New Literary History)

“Constructing the Other: Narrative Empathy and the Ethics of Border-Crossing in World Literature: An Introduction“, co-written with Dr. Shailen Mishra. Journal of World Literature. 10. 3 ( September 2025)

“From Modernizing Tradition to Traditionalizing Modernity: U.R. Ananthamurthy’s Samskara as Postcolonial Bildungsroman.” Genre (2024) 57 (2): 143–168.

“Finding the Empathetic Genre: A Critique of Love and Heroism in Mirza Waheed’s The Book of Gold Leaves.” Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies. December 2021.

“Ethical Universals in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies: A Posthumanist Critique of Universal Human Rights.” Humanities 5.3 (2016): 64. 

 “Deconstructing Universalism: Rabindranath Tagore’s Vision of Humanity.”South Asian Review. 36.2. Regular(2015): 177-94. 

Book Chapters

The Postcolonial Bildungsroman and the Character of Place: An Introduction, co-written with Dr. Paul Ugor and Dr. Simone Maria Puleo (Forthcoming with University of Nebraska Press, Frontiers of Narrative series, January 2026)

The Postcolonial Bildungsroman; Narratives of Youth, Representational Politics and
Aesthetic Reinventions: An Introduction, co-written with Dr. Paul Ugor ( University of Alberta Press, September 2025)

Scholarly Review Essays

Review of The World in a Grain of Sand: Postcolonial Literature and Radical Universalism, by Nivedita Majumdar. The Comparatist, vol. 47, 2023, p. 408-413. 

“The South Asian American Canon.” American Book Review, vol. 42 no. 3, 2021, p. 7-8.

Ethical Universals and Postcolonialism. Literary Universals Project (2017)

Published Interviews

Amitav Ghosh. Co-interviewed with Shailen Mishra. Constructing the Other: Narrative Empathy and the Ethics of Border-Crossing in World Literature, co-edited with Dr. Shailen Mishra (forthcoming with Brill Press, 2026)

Daisy Rockwell. Co-interviewed with Shailen Mishra. Constructing the Other: Narrative Empathy and the Ethics of Border-Crossing in World Literature, co-edited with Dr. Shailen Mishra (forthcoming with Brill Press, 2026)

Susan Muaddi Darraj. Co-interviewed with Shailen Mishra. Constructing the Other: Narrative Empathy and the Ethics of Border-Crossing in World Literature, co-edited with Dr. Shailen Mishra (forthcoming with Brill Press, 2026)

Memory, Identity, Representation: A Conversation with Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author of The Sympathizer. Co-interviewed with Yarran Hominh and Minh Nguyen, Special Issue on Identity and Solidarity in APA Studies on Asian and Asian American Philosophers and Philosophies, November 2023  

Forthcoming Books

Constructing the Other: Narrative Empathy and the Ethics of Border-Crossing in World Literature, co-edited with Dr. Shailen Mishra (Extended Volume, Forthcoming with Brill)

For my full CV, please feel free to reach out at adroy272 [at] gmail [dot] com