Book Launch Event

The Department of English and Cultural Studies hosted the formal launch of Non-Conforming Women in Neoliberal Cities: Re-thinking Female Empowerment in Contemporary Fiction and Film, authored by Dr. Shrimoyee Chattopadhyay, Assistant Professor in the department. The event brought together faculty members, students, researchers, and invited guests for an engaging academic gathering that celebrated the scholarly achievement while opening up vital conversations around gender, migration, and contemporary urban cultures.

The programme began with a welcome address that contextualised the significance of Dr. Chattopadhyay’s work within the department’s ongoing engagements with interdisciplinary humanities research. Highlighting the book’s contemporary relevance, the introduction noted how questions of female empowerment, mobility, and urban belonging have become increasingly central to cultural and academic debates in the twenty-first century. The audience was offered an overview of how the book repositions these discussions through a South Asian diasporic lens, emphasising the need to rethink empowerment beyond mainstream neoliberal frameworks.

Dr. Chattopadhyay presented the core arguments of her book, foregrounding the intersections between gender, migration, and the spatial dynamics of Western neoliberal cities. Drawing from contemporary fiction and film, her research analyses the lived experiences of South Asian diasporic women who navigate multiple layers of displacement—geographical, cultural, psychological, and emotional. Her talk traced the historical trajectory of post–World War II migration to the UK and the US, showing how these movements created new urban landscapes marked by both opportunity and marginalisation. She discussed how neoliberal cities, while often imagined as sites of autonomy and self-fashioning, also reproduce social precarity, cultural exclusion, and gendered vulnerabilities.

A key part of the author’s presentation explored the book’s interdisciplinary methodology, which brings together literary studies, film analysis, urban theory, and feminist scholarship. By reading narratives of mobility and marginality through a spatial lens, the book highlights how women’s encounters with the city become catalysts for both trauma and transformation. Dr. Chattopadhyay illustrated how characters in diaspora fiction and cinema negotiate complex emotions—alienation, longing, resilience, and reinvention—as they inhabit the shifting terrains of London, New York, and other global metropolitan spaces. These narratives, she noted, challenge dominant ideas of empowerment by emphasising agency as a process of negotiation rather than liberation.

Following the presentation, the event featured an interactive discussion where faculty and students engaged with themes such as cultural modernity, identity formation, and the politics of representation. Participants reflected on the broader implications of the book’s arguments for understanding contemporary diasporic subjectivities and the limitations of neoliberal discourses that often invisibilise structural inequalities. The dialogue underscored the importance of storytelling—across film and literature—as a means of articulating marginalized voices within urban environments.

The event concluded with a formal acknowledgment of Dr. Chattopadhyay’s contribution to the department’s research profile and to the wider fields of feminist and diaspora studies. The launch not only celebrated a significant scholarly milestone but also reaffirmed the department’s commitment to fostering critical thought and interdisciplinary inquiry into the cultural questions shaping our global present.