Re-Markings, a biannual journal of English Letters aims at
providing a healthy forum for scholarly and authoritative views
on broad socio-political and cultural issues of human import as
evidenced in literature, art, television, cinema and journalism with
special emphasis on New Literatures in English including translations
and creative excursions

Dr. Nibir K. Ghosh

Multicultural America : Conversations With Contemporary Authors.

Chandigarh : Unistar, 2005.

pp. 208+xxiii. Rs.395

“Going back to the time of Frances Trollope, Dickens, and Tocqueville, our understanding of American life has always been enriched by the observations of sharp-eyed visitors from abroad. They may miss things that natives know in their bones, but as outsiders they show an uncanny sense of what most natives ignore or simply take for granted. Above all, they defamiliarize the cultural landscape, upending the conventional wisdom about what is central to it and what is marginal. To Dr. Nibir K. Ghosh, a distinguished Indian scholar of American literature, the ever-shifting margins of American society, especially the diverse groups that compose it, are central: like Ralph Ellison, he sees American culture as the braided strands of many cultures, not static and separate but dynamically interwoven in shifting patterns. During the course of an academic year spent in Seattle, often seen as one of America’s whitest, most homogeneous cities, Dr. Ghosh set out to explore these margins through conversations with writers…Dr. Ghosh’s ultimate subject is the diversity of American life and writing, not the stunted ideological diversity of identity politics but the prismatic diversity of a true multiculturalism…Dr. Ghosh’s engaging colloquies with each of these varied figures bring to mind the work of journalist Studs Terkel, who has spent a lifetime talking to ordinary and extraordinary Americans, and the celebrated interviews with writers that have appeared in the Paris Review over the past half century.” 
                                                                                                                                                                                              -- Morris Dickstein,
                                                                                                                                                                                                  Distinguished Professor of English
                                                                                                                                                                                                  Graduate Center of the City University of New York  
BEYOND BOUNDARIES  RELEASED

In what turned out to be a mega event, Prof. Moolchand Sharma, Vice-Chairman, University Grants Commission, and Mr. Adnan A.Siddiqui, Cultural Affairs Officer, U.S. Embassy, New Delhi jointly launched Beyond Boundaries: Reflections of Indian and U.S. Scholars at the United States Educational Foundation in India, New Delhi on 22 August, 2007. The book edited by Dr. Nibir K Ghosh, a Senior Fulbright Fellow at the University of Washington, Seattle during 2003-04 & Reader in English at Agra College, Agra and Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani, a computer engineer from Princeton University, and a Fulbrighter from Pakistan, has been published by iUniverse, New York. This wonderful collage of 61 essays, 34 from Indian Scholars visiting the US, and 27 from their US counterparts visiting India, between 1959 and 2006, presents  intimate narratives of Fulbright Scholars, Post-Doc Researchers, Humphrey Fellows, participants of International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP), and East West Center Fellows from the two largest democracies in the world.

Prof Moolchand Sharma lauded the efforts of Dr. Ghosh and Zeeshan for their pioneering effort in foregrounding how "global calamities and cataclysms require to be addressed not from the narrow grooves of ideas and ideologies but from the vantage point of healing fountains of human compassion and friendship." Mr. Adnan Siddiqui hailed Dr. Ghosh as "a wonderful cultural ambassador" in India and said that "Cultural exchanges evoke a unique commonality of concern and help open up avenues for a wide spectrum of possibilities for communication across restrictive boundaries." Dr. Jane E. Schukoske, Executive Director, USEFI, emphasized in her address how the individual stories  in Beyond Boundaries demonstrate that "many lives have been profoundly touched by people-to-people exchanges" and how these "will doubtless inspire others to share their stories and thoughts as well." On this occasion Dr Devdas Chhotray, Vice Chancellor, Ravenshaw university,
Cuttack expressed his appreciation for the essay by Nibir K Ghosh in the collection entitled "From the city of the Taj Mahal to Bill Gates Town" that  links the monument of love – the Taj Mahal – and the "the Windows" of Bill Gates in navigating the terrains of differences across the vast regions of space and clime with a mere click of the mouse.