“In her book, New Postcolonial Dialectics, Vengadasalam presents a study of the literature of Nigeria and India as instances of an involved, protracted, and complex interaction between the colonizer’s intentioned policies of systematic control and manipulation of the occupied country and its educated youth which, paradoxically, experiences closest interaction with western education and culture. […] Consistency within the analysis in all of the respective authors and their works allows the reader to perceive the commonalities of experience as they follow the condition of the nation’s post-colonial experience; the unique educational, cultural, political biography of the individual author; [and] the interpretive analysis of the individual work by each author that shows this background context yielding innovations in style, form, and content of each work. […] The unique contribution of this work is to show a clear connection between post-colonial national crises, the unique preparation of the writer who wields his pen for multi-pronged purposes, and clear connections to the genre innovations of form, content, rhetoric that are undertaken usually to defy the binaries that seem to separate the socio-cultural fabric of the nascent nation.”
Arundhati Sanyal
Watchung Review, Volume 4, July 2021

“Sarbani Vengadasalam’s New Postcolonial Dialectics: An Intercultural Comparison of Indian and Nigerian English Plays published in 2019, an extension of her PhD thesis, is a plethora of insights that involve critical comments on the conditions of pre-Independent and post-Independent India along with Nigeria, as depicted in the selected literary texts. The book offers a comprehensive account of flux experienced amidst the transitions from being to becoming and back to nothing. The book highlights the emerging need of a comparative dialectic through the lens of interculturalism. […] [T]he author’s extensive contribution in the field of postcolonial and comparative literature makes the book a valuable read.”
Pronema Bagchi
Review, Muse India, 2019

“Sarbani Sen Vengadasalam’s book proposes an original comparative exploration of selected plays of India’s Rabindranath Tagore, and Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka through the lens of “intercultural dialectic.” Both Tagore in 1913, and Soyinka in 1986 won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The author contends in the Preface that there is “an urgent need for intercultural dialectic” in analyzing their dramas. The author’s strong analysis of Tagore is historically grounded in excavating Tagore’s lectures abroad and his involvement with unfair colonial laws at home. […] Overall a useful book in its comparative scope of linking Indian and Nigerian playwrights. […] The text includes a useful Appendix with Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources.”
Ketu H. Katrak
University of California, Irvine

“Sarbani Sen Vengadasalam’s New Postcolonial Dialects: An Intercultural Comparison of Indian and Nigerian English Plays is an engaging chronicle of the British rule in India and Nigeria. Whilst few other historians have trodden this ground before, Vengadasalam’s ingenuity lies in the breadth of her visualization, which extends to the investigation of how Indian and Nigerian English plays while being situated in national traditions reframed their own cultural environment in transnational terms. Such a range allows her to draw comparisons and contrasts across theatres and nations in a unique manner. Any serious learner of the issue will require reading this book. […] The book is a significant, highly readable description of the Indian and Nigerian colonial and postcolonial experiences, which is a lesson in how literary and historical studies can enhance each other.”
Amara Khan
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Lahore College for Women University, Pakistan; Sumerhill, Vol 25 No 2 (2019)

“In this book, Sarbani Sen Vengadasalam talks about her scholarly investigation on interculturalist philosophy in India and Nigeria before and after their Independence. Her research revolves around the struggle of Indian and Nigerian writers in finding a middle path for achieving a "cultural renaissance" in their respective countries by highlighting the role of interculturalism which neither denies tradition nor rejects western culture. […] As a reader of this book, I would agree that the author accomplishes her desired objective because her "investigation on four different intercultural plays confirms" (p. 215) that intercultural analysis could be used to compare cross-cultural literature as well as act as a bridge for achieving cultural renaissance.”
Satkirti Sinha
Asian Theatre Journal, Volume 37, Number 2, Fall 2020

“New Postcolonial Dialectics provides a theoretical framework that is both succinct and far-ranging enough to provide the tools for an intercultural discussion of two phases in the theater and histories of India and Nigeria. Her discussion of each of the three playwrights animates both the colonial and postcolonial experience that produced each play. At the same time, her intercultural analysis argues convincingly for connections and patterns in the experience of the writers and the plays they produced.”
Elizabeth Brewer Redwine
Lecturer, Seton Hall University; African Studies Quarterly, Volume 18, Issue 4

“Vengadasalam’s critique of three renowned writers from India and Nigeria provides a highly lucid overview of the relevance and impact of their work. She offers an informative assessment of the aspects of their upbringing, family, education and personality traits that contributed to their artistic choices and development. The book also displays a very vast knowledge of the political and historical backdrop of India and Nigeria, the progress of the colonial/British occupation, the independence struggle, the national cultural and social/political awakening, the aesthetic and social movements in the US and Europe, and the impact of all of these on the literature that emerged during the early 20th century and later. […] Considering the scope and length of this text, it would be a very useful volume for a student of postcolonial literature in general as she covers a great deal of historical and theoretical terrain in assessing the development of major nationalist movements in India, the black power and negritude movements in Africa, theoretical terminologies and periods, and offers a clear-sighted perspective on their value for the study of contemporary literary and cultural theory. […] [The] book’s greatest value lies in the amount of ground it covers in detailing the work of three major writers who used traditional forms and narratives to fit the need of the times through the subject of their writing, and the act of reaching out to a local as well as global audience, which is clearly necessitated by the times they wrote in.”
Abha Sood
Department of English, Monmouth University, USA; Journal of Critical Studies in Language and Literature, Volume 1, Issue 2

“Vengadasalam use of the intercultural scaffolding in critical theory shows that the method has great promise. She validates its use by drawing attention to the similarities and differences in the pieces and the context in which they originated. The ability of the intercultural scaffolding to be focused, widen, shrunk, and even stretched for one piece, or to compare multiple pieces of cultural works, gives it the ability to cast a new lens on a topic. Instead of forcing a cultural artifact into a rigid philosophical system/theory for understanding, interculturalism allows the critic to gauge the authenticity of when something truly is new, derived from an interaction between cultures. Vengadasalam has validated a new tool of analysis which broadens our understanding of the human experience.”
Jason R. Rossi
Regional Librarian, DeVry University; DeVry University Journal of Scholarly Research (2018), Volume 5, Number 1