Author Meets Critics Roundtable on Leela Prasad's The Audacious Raconteur

This author meets critics panel centers Leela Prasad's 2020 monograph The Audacious Raconteur published by Cornell University Press. By presenting detailed yet always riveting accounts of four fascinating nineteenth century Southern Indian figures and their discursive and literary acts that poach at the hegemony of British colonial power, Prasad theorizes sovereignty as a quality that is not restricted to the modern state or its sites of exception, but that finds expression and sustenance through modes of storytelling that populate and inhabit the thicket of everyday life. Sovereignty represents an aspiration that can never be conclusively colonized, Prasad argues, in this thoroughly interdisciplinary monograph situated at the intersection of literary, religious, and South Asian Studies. This panel engages some pressing themes of sovereignty, narrative, and colonial power highlighted in The Audacious Raconteur.