skip to content

Home

Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics

 

Dr Ashwiny O. Kistnareddy

Dr Ashwiny O. Kistnareddy
Position(s): 
Affiliated Lecturer, MMLL
Bye-Fellow in French and Director of Studies, Lucy Cavendish College
Department/Section: 
French
Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages & Linguistics
Contact details: 
Location: 

Lucy Cavendish College Lady Margaret Road Cambridge CB3 0BU United Kingdom

About: 

Ashwiny O. Kistnareddy is Affiliated lecturer in the MMLL faculty, director of studies and bye-fellow at Lucy Cavendish College. She completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge. Her PhD project, ‘Masculinities in Immigrant Women’s Writing in France and Canada’ was recently published under the title Migrant Masculinities in Women’s Writing: (In)hospitality, Community, Vulnerability (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), and discussed postcolonial texts (Senegal, Cameroon, Mauritius, Algeria, Vietnam) through the lens of Derridean hospitality, Fanonian racial affect, Nancian community and Spivak’s and Cixous’s notions of speaking and writing. Her first monograph, Locating Hybridity: Creole, Identities and Body Politics in the Novels of Ananda Devi (2015) discussed the postcolonial notion of hybridity and its applications in the texts of Devi, while drawing on a range of theories including Foucault’s notion of madness and Rabelaisian grotesque, while engaging with Fanon’s and other critical race theorists discussions of identity and skin colour. Her latest monograph looks at Francophone Vietnamese diasporic texts and their engagement with notions of exile, homelessness, race, gendered affect, haunting and food and foodways as they rebuild community. She is currently working on a project comparing childhood refugee experiences.

Teaching interests: 
  • 20th and 21st century French and Francophone Studies
  • Race
  • Gender
  • Comparative studies
  • Critical Theory
Research interests: 
  • Francophone Literature and Culture
  • Race
  • Gender
  • Migration
  • Postcolonial studies
  • Comparative studies (Franco-Anglo-Hispanophone)
  • Refugee Studies
  • childhood studies.
Recent research projects: 

Refugee Children as a Critical Site of Intervention (Rwanda, Cote d’Ivoire, Haiti, Syria, Latin America, Ukraine)

Contemporary Vietnamese Francophone literature

Contemporary Women’s Writing from Sub-Saharan, North Africa, Indian Ocean, Vietnam and China

Published works: 

Monographs

(2022) Refugee Afterlives: Homelessness, Hauntings and Hunger (Liverpool University Press, Liverpool)

(2021) Migrant Masculinities in Women’s Writing: (In)Hospitality, Community and Vulnerability (Palgrave Macmillan, Cham)

(2015) Locating Hybridity: Creole, Identities and Body Politics. (Peter Lang, Bern)

 

Edited Volume

(2022) (co-edited with Alice Roullière) Catching Up with Time: Belatedness and Anachronies in Francophone Literature and Culture (Peter Lang, Bern)

 

Chapters in Peer reviewed Edited Volumes/ Peer-reviewed Journal Articles

(2021c) ‘“Chez moi pas chez moi”: Home(lessness) in Kim Thúy’s Narratives’ in Forum for Modern Language Studies (Journal), 1-17, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqab045.

(2021b) ‘Elsewhere Home: Hospitality, Affect and Language in Chen’s Lettres chinoises and Thúy’s Vi’ in Quebec Studies (Journal), 71, 91-110.

(2021a) ‘“Nothing Ever Dies”: Memory and Marginal Children’s voices in Rwandan and Vietnamese Refugee Writing’ in Journal of the British Academy, 9 (s3), 157-172.

(2020b) ‘Dire l’indicible: Children, Trauma and Post-war Silences in Kim Thúy’s Ru  and Grace Ly’s Jeune fille modèle’ in International Journal of Francophone Studies, 23 (1&2), 99–117

(2020a) ‘Disrupting Homogeneous Nation-space: The Black Male Body and the Migrant Woman Writer’s Gaze (Léonora Miano and Fatou Diome)’ in L’Esprit Créateur (Journal), 60 (2), 41-54.

(2019) ‘Le pays, c’était comme la femme d’un autre’: Reconceptualising African Migrant Masculinity in Fatou Diome’s Le Ventre de l’Atlantique  and Léonora Miano’s Tels des astres éteints’, Special Issue of Itinéraires (Journal) on La renaissance littéraire africaine en débat 2019, 1 [Online].

(2015b) ‘Victimes ou bourreaux? : Ecrire les hommes dans Le Sari vert, Blue Bay Palace et  Les Hommes qui me parlent ‘ Interculturel Francophonie (Journal), 28, 135-156.

(2015a) ‘The Twice-displaced: Mapping Alternative Diasporic Identities in Works by Ananda Devi and Nathacha Appanah’. Journal of South Asian Diaspora Studies, 7(2), 167-181.

(2014) ‘Les Voix de la Coolitude: Entre harmonie et dissonances (Maryse Condé, Shiva Naipaul et Ananda Devi)’, Les Cahiers du GRELCEF (Journal), 5, 19-36.

(2013b) ‘Rebelles, prostituées et meurtrières dans les romans d’Ananda Devi’, in Rebelles et criminelles chez les écrivaines d’expression française, edited by Colette Trout and Frédérique Chevillot, Rodopi, Boston, 115-128.

(2013a) ‘The Human-Animal in Ananda Devi’s Texts: Towards an Ethics of Hybridity?’ in Women’s Writing in Twentieth Century France, edited by Gill Rye and Amaleena Damlé, University of Wales Press, 127-140.

(2012) ‘Almost White but not Quite: A Comparative Reading of Ferblanc's Hybridity in Ananda Devi's Soupir’ Comparative Critical Studies (Journal) Volume 9, pp 319-332.

(2011b) ‘Interrogating Identity: Psychological Dislocations in the Novels of Ananda Devi’, Dalhousie French Studies (Journal), 94, 27-38.

(2011a) ‘Représenter l’altérité: le corps grotesque dans l’oeuvre Romanesque d’Ananda Devi’ in Ecrivaines mauriciennes au féminin: Penser l’altérité, edited by Srilata Ravi and Véronique Bragard, L’Harmattan, Paris, 179-193.

(2010) ‘L’ex-il/île ou l’île intérieure: l’île Maurice dans l’oeuvre romanesque d’Ananda Devi’, Palabres: Revue d’études francophones (Journal), edited by Eileen Lohka and Selom Gbanou, XI (2), 93-110.

 

Book Reviews:

(2021f) ‘Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire’ in Modern & Contemporary France.

(2021e) ‘Salman Rushdie and the Genesis of Secrecy’ in C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings

(2021d) ‘Trauma and Transformation in African Literature’ Journal of Postcolonial Writing

(2021c) ‘Literary Cultures and Twenty-First-Century Childhoods’ in Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

(2021b) ‘Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France’ in Immigrants & Minorities: Historical Studies in Ethnicity, Migration and Diaspora.

(2021a) ‘Equivocal City’in British Journal of Canadian Studies.

(2020d) ‘World Literature, Non-Synchronism, and the Politics of Time’ in Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

(2020c) ‘Poetics and Politics of Shame in English Literature’ in Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

(2020b) ‘Reading India Now’ C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings.

(2020a) ‘South African Writing in Transition’ C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings.

(2017) ‘Intimate Empires: Bodies, Race and Gender in the Modern World’ Modern & Contemporary France.