Migrant Epistemologies in Indian Nonfiction of the Long Twentieth Century

• Theorizes the contact between distinct epistemologies during the migrant experience as crucial for a politics of living in relation to others
• Animates the figure of the nonfiction writer as a public intellectual with an interest in the viability of different worldviews
• Generates a conversation between the new Global South Studies and an older vein of critical humanism from both India and the West
• Traces the interest of contemporary nonfiction in the kinds of stories that emerge in the histories-from-below rubric of Subaltern Studies
• Connects the figure of the migrant to the important task of rendering durable endangered ways of knowing through an epistemologies-from-below approach

Attending to non-fiction texts from India and the Global South, Migrant Epistemologies identifies migratory contact zones as sites on which contrary epistemic stances may co-exist, despite their differences, in a symbiotic ecology. Given the increasing traffic between differentially empowered groups around the world, their distinct cognitive practices must often meet one another head-on. Manisha Basu argues that in the best of such circumstances, migrants and hosts open themselves to unlearning their own dominant worldviews and animating other ways of knowing. Unlike accounts of migration that accentuate the violences involved in the movements of peoples, this book foregrounds relatively peaceable, but still complex, migratory encounters that imagine an epistemologically diverse world resulting in social and environmental justice.