Postcolonial Disaster: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century by Pallavi Rastogi (review)

It would be a gain to our fields of scholarship if many others, located where print archives are stored in private cabinets and on institutional shelves, were to take inspiration from this book’s patient methods and original insights. The research makes evident how a scholar who may imagine themselves to be underresourced (because of location, or in terms of digital resources or access to large grants to do research) but who has access to a print archive of a magazine or a pamphlet might make an important contribution to scholarship. It would be exciting to read the many such articles that could develop from this path-breaking monograph. In this way it is not only Batra’s own contribution that revitalizes our field, but the generative nature of her approach.