Dreams’ Navel provides an interdisciplinary exploration of Akhtaruzzaman Elias’s Khwabnama, a monumental work of Bengali modernist fiction. This collection of essays examines how the novel enriches official nationalist histories of Bangladesh and the 1947 Partition. By attending to the ‘minutiae of locality’—the marshes, myths, and memories of rural North Bengal —contributors from anthropology,
Literature and political science demonstrate Elias’s unique ability to weave the oneiric and the magical into historical experience.
The volume offers fresh reflections on subaltern agency, gendered domesticity, and the evocative sensory world of the Bengali rural landscape. Dreams’ Navel provides a transformative vantage on a classic text,
positioning Elias not just within the Bengali canon, but as a vital and provocative voice in global conceptual inquiry. This scholarly tribute is essential for readers seeking to understand the enduring power of Elias’s literary imagination and its resonance in the postcolonial world.