Akshya Saxena Awarded MLA First Book Prize
Akshya Saxena’s Vernacular English has been awarded the MLA First Book Prize!
The prize committee writes of Vernacular English:
A highly original contribution to postcolonial studies and comparative literary studies, Akshya Saxena’s Vernacular English: Reading the Anglophone in Postcolonial Indiaargues that English in India has, since Independence, served as a language of everyday life and local struggle, female empowerment, and Dalit self-representation. Writing with verve and theoretical sophistication, Saxena tracks the circulation and repurposing of English through India’s diverse linguistic contexts and media ecologies; in Bollywood films, protest poems, and bestselling novels; as well as in hashtags, slogans, and even a mother’s voice. Vernacular English fundamentally reassesses our understanding of global English, posing profound questions about the social life of language, as a medium of contested meaning and identity but also of touch and desire, alienation and aspiration.
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