Dream's Navel

Dream’s Navel is an interdisciplinary essay collection that explores Akhtaruzzaman Elias’s Khwabnama, a landmark of Bengali modernist fiction. The contributors, drawing from anthropology, literature, and political science, examine how the novel complicates official nationalist histories of Bangladesh and the 1947 Partition. By focusing on the ‘minutiae of locality’—the marshes, myths, and memories of rural North Bengal—the essays show how Elias weaves the dreamlike and the magical into historical experience. The volume offers fresh perspectives on subaltern agency, gendered domesticity, and the sensory world of the Bengali rural landscape. Dream’s Navel positions Elias not only within the Bengali canon but as a vital voice in global conceptual inquiry, making it essential reading for those interested in the enduring power of his literary imagination and its postcolonial resonance.