Reading Anna: Cross Cultural Perspectives on C N Annadurai

Peraringar Anna (Eminent Scholar Anna), as the former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister, C N Annadurai was affectionately called, rode like a colossus in the political, literary, theatre and film worlds of Tamil Nadu during 1940-1960s.

His writings, speeches and scripts were breaking new ground and setting hitherto unknown benchmarks both for the practitioners of political communication as well as apolitical writers, speakers and script writers.Long before the very short sentences of Indian Advertising's print ads arrived on the scene, Anna popularised the use of very short sentences that sometimes had only a word or two.

While there is an obvious ethnocentrism in the available works on Anna, thanks to the absence of scholarly literature on his works and the inability of majority of scholars and critics of Dravidian movement to uncover the different strands of ideological shifts in the movement from the collected works of either Anna or Periyar through multi disciplinary and cross cultural readings, there is also a great opportunity for those who wish to employ either critical/cross cultural readings of Anna's works to hit new revelations about the substance and style of Anna's works.

The forthcoming volume entitled Reading Anna: Cross Cultural Perspectives on C N Annadurai seeks contributions grounded in cross cultural and trans cultural perspectives on C N Annadurai's multi-faceted creative outputs in the planes of plays, film scripts, political and apolitical speeches, letters, short stories, editorials and other writings.

Abstracts (APA style) in 150 words should reach the editors of the proposed book, Gopalan Ravindran (gopalanravindran@gmail.com) or Antonysamy Sagayaraja (sagayaraja@hotmail.com) on or before September 30 2012. The full articles will be due in December 2012 end. The editors would be willing to help potential contributors to trace resources/texts/translations etc.,of C N Annadurai's works depending on the availability of time and resources.