Shining a light on responsive and responsible reading practices, postcolonial forms of magic realism, democratic epistemology, demonized others, the others of the others, critical insiders and subaltern voices, metonymic cross-writing and cultural criss-crossings, papers in this anthology engage with issues of empowerment and disempowerment, tensions between modernity and tradition and ideas of development and progress as connected to understandings of race, gender, caste, subalternity, and religion.