Jap-Nanak Kaur Makkar is Assistant Professor at the University of Kentucky.
Currently I am Assistant Professor of English at the University of Kentucky, and formerly ACLS Postdoctoral Fellow (2020-2022) at the same institution. My research examines the relationships between postcolonial fiction and poststructuralism. I have additional research interests in the history of critique, race and ethnicity studies, and Marxist approaches to literature.
I have a B.A. (Hons.) and an M.A. from the University of Toronto, and a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 2018.
My book project, tentatively titled Enigmas of Capital: Literature and Theory in the Late Twentieth Century, explores the entanglement of theory and postcolonial literature by interpreting the role of “enigmas” in the novels of J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi.
A red thread throughout my work? My research examines questions of method, meaning, and aesthetics and politics. I specialize in South African and South Asian literatures, situating these in terms of their material context through an engagement with histories of colonialism and capitalism. Some of my work has been published by or is forthcoming in New Literary History, Modern Fiction Studies, boundary 2 and Contemporary Literature.
‘Recalling This’
Modern Fiction Studies 69.4 (Winter 2023): 707-730
This essay interprets Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story in relation to the history of irony, focusing particularly on the ideas of Paul de Man. By considering Gordimer’s engagement with theory in essays she wrote during the novel’s composition, I argue that she acquired an appreciation for the notion that language mediates one’s relationship to reality; such a principle lets her develop the novel’s ironic conceit. The effect of the novel is to shift attention away from ethical conundrums posed by oppression to problems of representation: an effect that helps us to understand certain features of theory.
This review essay compares two early and two recent texts by N. Katherine Hayles and Mark B.N. Hansen. Considering their recent work in the context of Ruth Leys’s critique of the turn to affect, I argue that Hayles and Hansen use neuroscientific conclusions on a “missing ½ second” to propose theories of technology’s impact. These critics neglect to provide explanations of a social or political kind, a trend that appears to be related to the lesser importance accorded to intention.
More on the Missing Half Second
boundary 2 47.1 (February 2020): 215-238
A Trademark on Irony
Contemporary Literature 59.2 (Summer 2018): 204-231
This essay interprets J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year (2007) in light of several moments in modern legal-aesthetic history. By discussing the positions that proprietors took during the eighteenth-century debates on intellectual property and the late-twentieth-century debates on digital copyright, I show that elements of Diary resonate with their arguments to advance the rights of ownership. I conclude that Coetzee’s career-long avowal of art’s autonomy is based on a formalism that we inherit from a legalistic framework ascribing ownership to expression—a formalism that, when considered alongside a proprietary culture recently energized by an expansion of rights, participates in the dominant trend to defend proprietorship.
My pedagogy focuses on the basic skills of our discipline, historicism and formalism, two approaches held at times to be contradictory. I teach with the aim of conveying their equal significance, ensuring that students view textual materials as an invitation to exercise a critical faculty comprised of both these skills.
At the University of Kentucky, I have taught across the curriculum, developing courses such as “The Immigrant Novel,” “Literature across Borders,” “Postcolonial and Global Theory,” “Introduction to Literature,” and “Global Literature in English.”
I welcome proposals from graduate students who have a shared interest in postcolonial literatures (particularly South African and South Asian diasporic); Marxist theory and criticism; materialist accounts of racialization and uneven development; and the history of the novel.