Indiascapes. Images and words from globalized India Volume della rivista Anglistica, a.i.o.n. An interdisciplinary journal

Indian culture is playing an increasingly imposing role in shaping new globalised scenarios, contributing dramatically to a radical interrogation of its national, linguistic and geo-political ties. This issue of Anglistica tries to highlight a few of the possible outlines that emerge from the multifarious, variegated, complex cultural background offered by the Subcontinent, in both its domestic and diasporic dimensions. Images and words from globalised India form a landscape in which narrative, history, myth, fiction, the entertainment industry, linguistics, politics and the arts stay side by side, each adding a piece to a tessellated, composite and obviously partial sketch. Indiascapes, to paraphrase Appadurai, is the term we have chosen to represent this current assemblage of languages and perspectives which speak about India’s cultural richness, its complexity and ambiguity, trying to convey the strong appeal it is increasingly exercising upon the de-territorialized world-space of the imaginary. The object of this group of essays could thus be summarized as disparate but convergent reflection upon the vernacular terms of the inscription of modernity on the globalised culture of the largest, most geopolitically important, but also contradictory democracy in the world.