How does a city narrate change?
Preeti Singh, assistant professor in Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, asks her students to reflect on this question by taking them on a journey through South Asian literary history threaded through the alleys of its various cities.
"I talk about the city as a protagonist in South Asian literature and how it has shaped literary forms from comics to the novel," she said. "I hope to prompt students to reflect on the affective world of cities — how they register loss, and what they might tell us of our collective longings."
Singh's course is an invitation "to imagine cities before nation-states, the cosmopolitan encounters they make possible and the political futures they open up." She stressed that South Asian cities from Lucknow to Dhaka to Lahore aren't just unique, idiosyncratic spaces but also a site for democratic practice. "Cities have always been at the center of what it means to interact with the state," Singh said.
This enduring interest in urban form and politics informs her current book project on the literary and cultural history of the Indian National Emergency, a 21-month constitutional dictatorship declared by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in the mid-seventies. "I explore how urban modernity and aesthetics were central to authoritarian projects in the latter phases of decolonization in the Global South.
"As literary scholars, we often think of authoritarianism across the binaries of a repressive state and resisting writers," Singh said. “My archival research challenges this understanding by considering why so many writers and artists supported the Emergency during its time." The answer, Singh believes, has its roots in the intersecting moments of decolonization and the global Cold War, which closely informed the politics of literary dissent in postcolonial societies.
Beyond her present project, Preeti also builds on some of her past research. Her interest in urbanity began with her work on graphic novels in India and globally, which repeatedly positioned themselves as urban forms. For her Master in Philosophy thesis at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India, she wrote about urban subjectivities in the Indian graphic novel and the particular publishing and historical contexts in which the form took hold. In her current class, students will read a graphic novel set during the Emergency to consider how the mood of the time is mapped on urban literature.
"The Emergency was momentous in Indian literary history, but what draws me to it is its ability to tell the story of the contemporary moment in India." Since 2014, the Hindu nationalist movement has been on the rise in India and, with it, a lot of the same kinds of censorship and suppression that took place in the 1970s. There has been a spate of political cartoons calling this moment in India a state of “Undeclared Emergency.”
Yet, the emergency declared by Indira Gandhi was one among many constitutional emergencies in India. "I think a lot about this tension between the Emergencies that became exceptional and those that are normalized."
Singh’s Spring 2025 courses draw on and expand on her current research. Students in Cultures of Decolonization will read literary works and watch films from 20th and 21st-century South Asia to reflect on how different groups — including women and those oppressed by the caste system — imagine freedom differently. "Decolonization didn't create a singular meaning of freedom that was the same for everyone," Singh pointed out.
Her second course, 9/11 and the Global Novel, introduces students to novels from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq to consider how they write this moment of crisis differently. "I want students to defamiliarize themselves with terms they have come to take for granted within a global context, particularly in the case of 9/11, how what's considered a uniquely American tragedy had deep reverberations around the world, impacting millions," she said.
Singh was attracted by Duke's strong focus on interdisciplinarity. While her field of research is literary and cultural studies, her work also engages scholarship across disciplines from political science to geography. "I hope to design courses where students can bring their disciplinary training to my classroom and reassess what they know through their engagement with the global humanities."
She is also excited to be involved in the wide-ranging conversations about decolonization across Duke's humanities departments. "Discussions on decolonization require both theoretical grounding and site-specificity,” she said. “They must necessarily be collaborative."
Singh is also looking forward to some lively classroom discussions. "I don't expect students to necessarily have a lot of knowledge about South Asia when they come into my classes," she said, "but I want them to be willing to engage with ideas and be open to debate."