Dr Maria Ridda
About
My areas of expertise are postcolonial theory, South Asian writing, and Mediterranean studies. My current research compares representations of ‘underworld’ Mumbai and Naples, and investigates the relationship between criminality and conditions of subalternity across the Global South. I also have broader teaching and research interests in contemporary and twentieth-century English, Italian, French and American literature.
Drawing on contemporary South Asian diasporic texts, my first monograph, Imagining Bombay, London, New York and Beyond [6] (Peter Lang, 2015) explores how urban representations of the three cities are shaped by colonialism, postcolonialism and globalisation. It offers an alternative approach to familiar journeys between India and Britain, theoretically informed by an innovative use of Bakhtin’s chronotope model. In addition, I have published articles and essays on South Asian American diasporic literature, Post-liberalisation Indian writing and Bollywood cinema.
My second monograph, Criminality and Power in the Postcolonial City, is under contract with the series Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures, and will be published in 2020. It investigates how the recent rise of transnational criminal organisations challenges conventional representations and imaginings of the postcolonial and world city. Through a comparison of Mumbai and Naples in fictional, non-fictional texts, music, films and documentaries from 2000 to the present, my monograph provides a new theoretical understanding of the postcolonial and global city through the lens of criminality. The comparison of the two cities presents an alternative to Eurocentric modernity in which the ‘Global South’ becomes the subject of thought. This research has also led to an article on Postcolonial Naples published in Interventions [7](2016) and a theoretical piece on the ways in which criminality challenges and endorses the corporatisation of the State (forthcoming in the journal Postcolonial Studies in 2018).