Lisa Lau's Outputs (5)

The precarious lives of India’s Others: The creativity of precarity in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2019)
Journal Article
Mendes, A., & Lau, L. (2019). The precarious lives of India’s Others: The creativity of precarity in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 1 - 13. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2019.1683758

This article traces the agency of Arundhati Roy’s precariat in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. In her novel, Roy focuses on how those in the most precarious of social positions manage to retain a toehold within the system by defiant creativity, lat... Read More about The precarious lives of India’s Others: The creativity of precarity in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.

Urban redevelopment, the new logics of expulsion, and individual precarity in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Aquarius and Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower (2019)
Journal Article
Mendes, A., & Lau, L. (2019). Urban redevelopment, the new logics of expulsion, and individual precarity in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Aquarius and Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower. cultural geographies, 147447401987165 - 147447401987165. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474019871653

Drawing on Kleber Mendonça Filho’s film Aquarius (2016) and Aravind Adiga’s novel Last Man in Tower (2011), this article is concerned with the impact on individuals and communities of forms of impersonal, systemic violence resulting from neoliberal a... Read More about Urban redevelopment, the new logics of expulsion, and individual precarity in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Aquarius and Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower.

A postcolonial framing of international commercial gestational surrogacy in India: Re-orientalisms and power differentials in Meera Syal’s The House of Hidden Mothers (2019)
Journal Article
Mendes, A., & Lau, L. (2019). A postcolonial framing of international commercial gestational surrogacy in India: Re-orientalisms and power differentials in Meera Syal’s The House of Hidden Mothers. Interventions, 318-336. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2018.1558094

The branding and marketing of post-millennial India as a global service provider has been relentless. Indian cities have now been de-exoticized from their previous association to elephants, snake-charmers, and slums, and are now being marketed as the... Read More about A postcolonial framing of international commercial gestational surrogacy in India: Re-orientalisms and power differentials in Meera Syal’s The House of Hidden Mothers.

Romancing the other: Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2019)
Journal Article
Lau. (2019). Romancing the other: Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Journal of Commonwealth Literature, https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989418820701

Arundhati Roy’s second and latest novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness — which took her ten years to write — is crammed full of misfits and outsiders, the flotsam and jetsam of India’s complex, stratified society. The novel is inhabited by cohorts... Read More about Romancing the other: Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.

Hospitality and Re-Orientalist Thresholds: Amit Chaudhuri Writes Back to India (2019)
Journal Article
Lau. (2019). Hospitality and Re-Orientalist Thresholds: Amit Chaudhuri Writes Back to India. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2018.1517638

In times of heightened, no-longer-linear migratory flows, when migrations oscillate and even double back on their own routes, this article interrogates the unwritten social contract of hospitality between host and guest. Taking as a case study Amit C... Read More about Hospitality and Re-Orientalist Thresholds: Amit Chaudhuri Writes Back to India.