Reflecting on literature’s capacity to imagine just lives, scholars with backgrounds in literary criticism, creative writing, and translation tackle questions such as: are there genres favored or avoided by writers who think about social justice? Are there stylistic choices, including those related to characterization, narrative reliability, emplotment, voice, and perspective, that are specifically suited to communicate themes of justice? What technologies or multimodal mediums can best support the dissemination of such works about justice at local and global levels? Do the narrative affordances of Large Language Models complicate aesthetic and ethical assumptions about the relationship of literature with justice?

Our first panelist and literary critic, Arnab Dutta Roy, explores how a prominent traditional European genre such as the bildungsroman has transformed, in the hands of postcolonial writers, into one of the most cosmopolitan mediums for communicating global concerns related to justice, anti-colonialism, national and post-national formations of solidarities, and modernity. His project examines a version of the bildungsroman proposed by the Kannada writer UR Ananthamurthy in his 1965 novel Samskara. Ananthamurthy’s bildungsroman, while retaining some structural similarities, departs from European models in fundamental ways. The motif of the hero’s journey, for instance, is flipped. The novel tracks the hero’s affective state–growing discontentment–with his community leading to a sense of communal alienation, thus inverting the European journey-trajectory that typically follows the hero’s movement towards social integration. It also deviates from the generic Western rags-to-riches storyline that compliments that hero’s road to social integration. Instead, it adopts the narrative structure of the niti-shastra, a set of pre-colonial Hindu texts that teach about the wise conduct of life. Such readings not only facilitate fresh ways of understanding the relationship between western and postcolonial models of the bildungsroman, they also shed light on the genre’s continued investment in rethinking modernity.

In the following presentation, translator and creative writer Aruni Kashyap reflects on how the novella contributes to urgent conversations about social change in Northeast India. Longer than a short story but shorter than a novel, the novella is often ignored in contemporary literary criticism. They are typically published in anthologies or tucked away in short story collections: the odd long narrative that is too slender to be published as a book and too long for a magazine. However, novellas have played a major role in generating conversations and prompting affective responses to important social issues, concerns of human rights and injustice in northeastern states of India like Assam. Kashyap discusses writers from Northeast India who recruit the novella to comment on ongoing debates about citizenship, insurgency, state violence and occupation, thereby attesting to the significance of the genre as a potent political tool.

Critic and creative writer Torsa Ghosal, who is our final panelist, considers the challenges involved in writing about justice in the context of emerging digital technologies. Her presentation discusses the impact of artificial intelligence on the genre of immigrant fiction in the US. She approaches fictions co-authored through human-AI interactions as indexing how broad swathes of the online population thinks and feels—an archive of cultural narratives—and instrumentalizes narrative affordances of LLMs, trained on online public discourse, to grasp the “affective economies” (Ahmed 2004), or emotional collectives, forming around critical debates concerned with immigration and displacement. Her project aims to uncover the underpinnings behind the training of transformer models, including but not limited to studying the data corpus and embeddings from open source LLMs.