2024-03-28T21:14:13Z
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/oai
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/1
2021-11-15T13:39:39Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/1
2021-11-15T13:39:39Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 7 No. 2 (2021): Cultures of Sexuality; 1-25
Performing the ‘Maternal’ Body:
Hooda, Ojaswini
2021-09-18
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/1
Sexuality
Gender
Oral Tradition
Motherhood
Body
Desire
en_US
This paper looks at women’s folk singing tradition of Haryana to unearth the images of the new mother, as constructed in the folksongs called Jachcha, sung in the context of childbirth. The attempt is to foreground the embodied voices of women as they emerge in the context of motherhood, in order to recognise and augment the voices as much as the silences, that abundantly “speak” and subvert the dominant patriarchal notions of the docile, chaste body of the mother that are constructed to manage the potentially threatening aspect of the fertile female body. As we hear women’s voices and self-imaging, we find neither the tender, nurturing “motherly” body nor the modesty, embarrassment or voicelessness so often identified as appropriate female behaviour. What remains at the centre of these female genres is the potency and the legitimacy of female desires along with placing a strong positive value on their fulfilment. A reading of women’s cultural forms reveals these to be discourses that carry a very different understanding of “maternal” body and sexuality, disrupting the prevailing dominant polarised conceptualisations of the female body wherein the maternal body is often desexualised, assuming an incongruity between active sexuality and motherhood in a good wife. My contention is that such resignifications and alternative self-figurations of the maternal body by women serve to challenge dominant ontological claims, thereby revealing ontology to be a contested field as well as enhancing the field of possibilities for (re)imagining the “maternal” body.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/4
2021-11-15T13:39:39Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/4
2021-11-15T13:39:39Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 7 No. 2 (2021): Cultures of Sexuality; 26-47
Indian Women in Comedy:
Sharma, Mridula
2021-09-18
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/4
Comedy
Women
Rape Culture
Social Media
Digital Abuse
en_US
‘Postfeminist’ society has created the impression that contemporary discourses on gender representation, particularly in digital media platforms, are pointless. This misconception is coupled with online aggression by men’s rights activists who position feminist debates as sources of male oppression. However, media practices and consumption processes continue to maintain the supremacy of the male gender identity, which strengthens the process of transforming social media into a component of the “manosphere.” The failure of the fourth wave of feminism in utilising the Internet for mobilising activism for the ontological equality of all genders has succeeded by increasing gender-based violence against women. Indian women in comedy negotiate with these systemic inequalities while navigating male dominance in the comedy industry. The paper is an attempt to examine the structures of gender inequality and bias that affect the participation and advancement of women in the comedy circuit. Its focus remains on the formulation of a rape culture on social media and its subsequent consequences in the larger social context of the development of a patriarchal culture.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/5
2021-11-15T13:39:39Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/5
2021-11-15T13:39:39Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 7 No. 2 (2021): Cultures of Sexuality; 48-76
Sexual Cultures and Imaginations of Justice in Anvita Dutt’s Bulbbul (2020)
Dasgupta, Ananya
Paul, Sreejata
2021-09-18
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/5
avenging woman
vigilante justice
intertextuality
#MeToo
devi
en_US
This paper locates Anvita Dutt’s Bulbbul, a Hindi-language film released on Netflix in 2020, within the contentious cultural milieu of contemporary public discourse on issues of sexual violence, the need for legal reform, and extralegal modes of testimony. It reads the multiple imaginations of justice as redressal for gendered and sexual violence offered within Bulbbul through its delineation of four intertextual formations: child bride, widow, avenging woman, and devi (goddess). In doing so, it considers the manner in which Bulbbul offers a speculative space at the limits of judgement and sentence, which emerges out of the need to go beyond proceduralist concerns and address the possibility of desire as a legitimate axis for women’s self-expression.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/6
2021-11-15T13:39:39Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/6
2021-11-15T13:39:39Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 7 No. 2 (2021): Cultures of Sexuality; 77-94
Exploring the Interactions between Sexuality, Law and Gender in Early India:
Singh, Aradhana
2021-09-18
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/6
Sexuality
early India
gender
law
ethics
en_US
This paper seeks to analyse and decode the numerous precepts/legal codes on sexual crimes and their respective punishments, as gleaned from the Mānavadharmaśāstra. The central concern is to delve upon the manner in which the three important categories of Sexuality, Gender and Law/ethics intersected with each other, and what does a combined analysis of these manifest, regarding the socio-cultural system of Early India. A close reading of the text reveals that before the prescription of punishments for crimes like adultery, male sexual assault and female sexual assault, its composer Manu takes into due consideration both the offender and the victim’s caste, class, gender, and other important categories, like, mental and physical condition, age, frequency of the crime, etc. In fact, the present study reveals that these categories have a direct bearing on the public and private nature of repentance, or the penance (prāyaścitta) and punishment (daṇḍa) binary. However, the very idea of criminalizing sexual activities, even where the consent (anumati) of the participating individuals is involved, something we find extensively in the Mānavadharmaśāstra, points towards a larger aim, which in my understanding was an attempt to control the sexual desire of the populace at large, and impose psychological control or ‘self-censorship’. A closer reading of the text reveals that unbridled sexual activity was discouraged even within the socially and ritually sanctified institution of marriage. And while legal techniques were employed to control sexual interactions outside marriage, a range of social solutions or norms were prescribed to encourage and convince people of the benefits of exercising self-control over their desires. A gendered reading is therefore bound to offer some fresh insights on the socio-psychological and legal aspects at work in the construction and representation of sexuality in the Mānavadharmaśāstra.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/7
2021-11-15T13:39:39Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/7
2021-11-15T13:39:39Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 7 No. 2 (2021): Cultures of Sexuality; 95-119
Bodies in Transition:
Chatterjee, Hiya
2021-09-18
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/7
Sexuality
transgender
Indian cinema
South Asian studies
gender studies
en_US
The paper closely studies the representations of queer bodies and sexualities in four Indian films of the last decade: Arekti Premer Golpo, Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish, Nagarkirtan and Super Deluxe. Through the comparative study, the paper will try to explore if, and how, the representations of non-normative sexualities have changed in alternative and in regional cinema, despite the lack/misrepresentation of these individuals in mainstream Hindi cinema. In the process, the questions of the performativity of gender, self and identity, desire and resistance of the queer subject and queer bodies will be addressed against the backdrop of queer theory and queer politics in global as well as in local contexts.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/8
2021-11-15T13:39:39Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/8
2021-11-15T13:39:39Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 7 No. 2 (2021): Cultures of Sexuality; 120-148
Sex and the Aesthetics of the Vulgar:
Chakraborty, Purba
2021-09-18
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/8
#MeToo
Misogyny
Underground Comix Movement
Pornography
Creative Paradox
en_US
Informed by the #MeToo movement, the following paper is an attempt to revisit the allegations of misogyny in the works of Robert Crumb, the founder of the Underground Comix Movement. Now more than ever it becomes relevant to talk about Crumb not only because of his unconventional modes of expression which often verged on the levels of obscenity and seemingly outright misogynistic but also because of the curious reason—why he chose the very particular mode of sexual objectivity in his works that has been read as pornography. The paper perceives a chasm between general perception of art and the artist’s conception of it and attempts to read it as a ‘creative paradox’. The allegations and criticisms received by the works of Crumb, the paper will argue, are generated from this paradox. Finally, the paper would attempt to look beyond extreme ideologies to bring home the idea of artistic expression and freedom
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/13
2021-10-27T12:27:09Z
sanglap:ART
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/17
2021-10-27T11:49:58Z
sanglap:ART
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/18
2021-10-27T11:50:29Z
sanglap:ART
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/20
2021-10-27T13:37:19Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/20
2021-10-27T13:37:19Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 1 No. 1 (2014): Terror and the Literary; 1-10
Terror and the Literary:
Bhattacharya, Sourit
Chattopadhyay, Arka
2021-09-27
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/20
en_US
Terror and terrorism are probably the most frequent catchwords of the contemporary times. At the turn of the century, Hardt and Negri warned us that we are living in a world of Empire as biopolitical production, where transnational corporations operate the mechanics of governance, and can wage ‘just war’ and resolve conflicts with the moral policing of the NGOs (2001: 22-41). Terror is part of the surveillance and regulation of life, while ‘terrorism,’ in its delimited political use, is only one way of engaging with it. Agamben’s notion of ‘state of exception’ in fuller picture indicates that the practice of life in contemporary times is a conscious response to fear of an unknown, unaccountable death which may not always be the death of the body as corpse. As Elizabeth Dauphinee and Christian Masters note: “Livings and dyings are ruptured by survivings that are neither livings nor dyings, but which are otherwise: liminal spaces of abjection that are dangerously difficult to recognize.” (2007: xvi) If contemporary bio-politics frames life from a normative position of mortality, as Badiou argues, its ethics foregrounds a ‘victimary’ notion of the human subject. The task for Badiou’s ethics is to counter-emphasize the ‘immortal’ in man where he treats a situation from the point which is impossible in relation to that situation. To treat the situation qua its impossible point is to change the situation and replace it with a new one and this highlights the subject’s immortality over the ephemeral situation. If this change is premised on the evental dimension of novelty, it encounters the impossible, which is not without its horizon of terror and trauma.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/21
2021-10-27T13:37:19Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/21
2021-10-27T13:37:19Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 1 No. 1 (2014): Terror and the Literary; 11-26
Acknowledging Fascination with Catastrophe and Terrorism:
Aretoulakis, Emmanouil
2021-10-27
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/21
Beauty
Hiroshima
9/11
Terrorism
Aesthetic
Judgment
Imagination
Ethics
en_US
At the end of the twentieth century there was a critical shift from prioritizing the anti-aesthetic and the “sublime” towards favoring beauty in aesthetic as well as political matters. In this context, the present article discusses the role of beauty and aesthetics in such major disasters as the September 11 terrorist attacks and the Hiroshima/Nagasaki nuclear bombings. More specifically, it posits that there is a morally unacceptable feeling of fascination when witnessing destructive events of such magnitude. On the other hand, aesthetic appreciation is paradoxically indispensable for an ethical assessment of man-made catastrophes.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/22
2021-10-27T13:37:19Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/22
2021-10-27T13:37:19Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 1 No. 1 (2014): Terror and the Literary; 27-43
Life, Law, and Abandonment in Giorgio Agamben
Ray, Manas
2021-10-27
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/22
Exception
Law
Modernity
Holocaust
Testimony
Agamben
en_US
The present article deals with the political philosophy of Giorgio Agamben and explores his seminal concepts like ‘homo sacer’ and ‘state of exception’ to examine the relationship between law and human life and probes into the philosopher’s thoughts on the function of the biopolitical machine in the modern state to allocate the positions of terror vis-a-vis legality and the function of sovereignty. Working through Agamben’s body of thought and relating it to a host of other political thinkers like Schmitt and Mbembe for example, it sketches out the fundamental definition of politics and what it means to be in relation to that in our modern times.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/23
2021-10-27T13:37:19Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/23
2021-10-27T13:37:19Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 1 No. 1 (2014): Terror and the Literary; 44-61
Horror’s Effect on Identity in Life of Pi and Arthur Gordon Pym
Steensma , Alyx
2021-10-27
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/23
Abjection
Identity
Universality
Isolation
Survival
en_US
Both Life of Pi by Yann Martel and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allen Poe provide climatic moments of horror that lead to a change of motivation. Specifically, I will be taking a look at one important scene from each novel: the arrival and departure of the ‘death ship’ when Arthur Gordon Pym is stranded on a slightly sunk ship and the materialization of the mystical green island that Pi comes across. With the entrance of a horror, both scenes portray a change in the narrator, a renewal then subsequent loss of hope, a moment of self-assessment that changes the young boys’ lives. I will be evaluating the effect of horror through the lens of Julia Kristeva’s “The Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection”. According to Kristeva, the abject refers to the human reaction (which is horror) to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other. The primary example for what causes such a reaction is the corpse (which traumatically reminds us of our own materiality) which is the object of horror that changes the identities of Pi and Pym. The questions I will pursue are: Why does horror change the identities or conscious motivations of these boys? Are their reactions universal or individualized? What previous notions do they project on the horror they face?
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/24
2021-10-27T13:37:19Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/24
2021-10-27T13:37:19Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 1 No. 1 (2014): Terror and the Literary; 62-76
Psychos’ Haunting Memories:
Lima, Maria Antónia
2021-10-27
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/24
Psychos
Terror
Haunting Memories
Literary Heritage,
Poe
en_US
In our times, one of the most prevailing forms of terror is certainly the psychological terror. In the history of literature and cinema, it’s impossible to forget some very widely known characters called psychos, especially those created by Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Bloch, Stephen King, Bret Easton Ellis, Sarah Kane and Patrick McGrath. Usually, they are haunted not only by their own private memories but also by a literary memory that associates them to a common heritage, as if each psychotic character belonged to a very old gothic family, in which every member had been cursed to inherit the disease of his ancestors or the sins of his fathers. Haunted by images of their past, that recurrently return to the present, these psychos defy the barriers of time and all the traditional distinctions between reality and imagination, because one can never be sure if the stories are really about murders or about victims of their very diseased minds. Uncertainties and doubts disturb the reader as they also disturb the main character in search of a lost identity.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/25
2021-10-27T13:37:19Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/25
2021-10-27T13:37:19Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 1 No. 1 (2014): Terror and the Literary; 77-93
Autoimmunity and the Irony of Self-Definition:
Sengupta, Samrat
2021-10-27
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/25
Autoimmunity
Literary
Human
Animal
Biopolitics
Death
en_US
In order to avoid descending into the state of nature, the sovereign takes over the appearance of the state of nature itself – the animality that is primordial to the constitution of this legal framework, the animality of primitive force. This is the autoimmunity of the modern state which in order to provide security to its subject, to save them from going down to the state of nature, unleashes violence – it kills in order to protect. The principle of the modern state is to produce killable entities or antibodies within. This paper would attempt to address the philosophical tension: how far can animality be effectively confined or killed and does it come back to haunt the being? If behind the power of the sovereign is the founding violence, the animal force which makes one obey, the traces of that original moment continue to haunt the sovereign. However this paper would argue that one has to be responsible to the animality within to deal with the crisis of autoimmunity. It would end with a certain idea of the literary that can encounter this moment of crises, deferring the mute indefinable and non-representable terror.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/26
2021-10-27T13:37:19Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/26
2021-10-27T13:37:19Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 1 No. 1 (2014): Terror and the Literary; 94-114
Sri Lankan Conflict and Tamil Nadu:
Pillai, Swarnavel Eswaran
2021-10-27
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/26
Terror
Sri Lankan Conflict
Tamils
LTTE
Rajiv Gandhi Assassination
Dhanu
Female Suicide Bomb
Perarivalan
en_US
The long and violent Sri Lankan Tamil conflict had its most severe impact on its closest neighbour Tamil Nadu, as exemplified by the violent response of the LTTE to the atrocities of the Indian Peace Keeping Force by the assassination of the ex-Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi at Chennai. By exploring the ramification of the suicide bombing of Rajiv Gandhi through the protracted trial and sentencing of Perarivalan (one of the three accused in the case, others being Santhan and Murugan), and the detailed reading of a contentious article that analyzes the causes for the failure of LTTE and addresses the polarization after the genocide, this essay argues how the specter of the suicide bombing is still haunting the Tamil psyche by underscoring its centrality for regional politics and media. By drawing attention to the figure at the heart of that specter Dhanu, the female suicide bomber who assassinated Rajiv Gandhi, this essay seeks to address the specificity of justice in the context of the Sri Lankan Tamil conflict and its bearing on bare lives.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/27
2021-10-27T13:37:19Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/27
2021-10-27T13:37:19Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 1 No. 1 (2014): Terror and the Literary; 115-128
Reading Terror in Literature:
Longkumer, I Watitula
2021-10-27
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/27
Temsula Ao
North-East,Insurgency
Terror
Nation
en_US
For some places, literature can hardly go beyond the bondage of terror. North East India, which has suffered since the independence on accounts of sovereignty, language, and ethnic influx, and seen unimaginable levels of violence and atrocity perpetrated both by the military and the insurgent bodies, finds little beyond terror when its literary writers try to explore its history and culture. This paper would like to study Temsula Ao’ collection of stories in context of the contentious history of Nagaland. Set in the 60s and 70s, when the Naga claims of separate territory and sovereignty were widespread in the hill regions, Ao’s stories explore the issues such as military violence, stolen adults, unmindful destruction of innocent lives and private and public property, etc that have tried to strangle life in Nagaland. In course, it also seeks to define and complicate the term insurgency. Many of Ao’s stories are woven around simple wit and humour which seem to bind the multi-ethnic Naga communities together. I argue that this might be one way of moving beyond the bondage of terror and foster a communal memory that has shared and survived those moments and remember them with the community’s everyday way of living life.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/28
2021-10-27T13:37:19Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/28
2021-10-27T13:37:19Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 1 No. 1 (2014): Terror and the Literary; 129-146
Terror, Hospitality and the Gift of Death in Morrison’sBeloved
Damai , Puspa
2021-10-27
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/28
Terror
Autoimmunity
Deconstruction
Hospitality
Spectrality
en_US
The “us versus them” narrative still pre-dominates the analysis of terrorism in the West, which invariably associates “them” with terrorism. Toni Morrison’s hauntingly memorable novel – Beloved – provides a radically different and historically grounded view of terror and terrorism in the West. The novel not only releases us from the “us versus them” paradigm by demonstrating America’s intimacy with terror, it also enables us to examine terror and terrorism from the perspective of a gendered and ethnic subject who subverts the easy categorization of “us” and “them” or civilized and terrorist. Following Jacques Derrida’s contemplations on death and terror, I contend that Morrison’s novel foregrounds autoimmunity, the gift of death and hospitality as key components in the experience of terror for a subject of colonialism and slavery.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/29
2021-10-27T13:37:19Z
sanglap:ART
v2
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2021-10-27T13:37:19Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 1 No. 1 (2014): Terror and the Literary; 147-157
Hollywood’s Terror Industry:
Koch, E.C.
2021-10-27
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/29
The Bluest Eye
Racial Hegemony
Film Studies
Terror
Ideals of Beauty
en_US
Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye (1970) examines the effects of 1940s American white cultural hegemony on her black characters: Claudia, Pauline, and Pecola. The dominant influence of white society, specifically white ideals of beauty, are perpetuated through film and exemplified by such actresses as Shirley Temple and Greta Garbo. The terrifying nature of the Hollywood ideal is borne from its influence and ubiquity and is highlighted by Pecola’s deranged pursuit of this impossible standard of beauty. Ultimately by attempting to realize this paradigm, blacks are disenfranchised while the ideal is recharged with the power of those who continue to pursue it.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/30
2021-10-27T13:37:19Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/30
2021-10-27T13:37:19Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 1 No. 1 (2014): Terror and the Literary; 158-170
Body and Terror:
Sultana, Parvin
2021-10-27
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/30
Body
Suicide Bombers
Victims
Ethnic Conflict
Terrorism
en_US
Bodies are vulnerable because they are intrinsically linked to death. Bodies are social and they are embedded with meaning. They cannot be extracted from their specific contexts. The nation is also often equated with body politic. As a result individual bodies become the site of security/ insecurity depending on the social location of bodies. Within this discourse, this article tries to locate the bodies of women. It will look at the bodies of women as victims of terror as well as perpetrators of terror. It will try to understand if in these differentiated roles, women are able to break away from stereotypes or are still caught in heteronormative narratives.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/32
2021-10-27T13:38:00Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/32
2021-10-27T13:38:00Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 1 No. 2 (2015): Democracy, Resistance, and the Practice of Literature; 1-26
Democracy, Resistance, and the Practice of Literature:
Bhattacharya , Sourit
Chattopadhyay, Arka
2021-10-27
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/32
en_US
Recent world politics has witnessed the rise of a certain style of authoritarianism. It can be roughly characterized with a cult of masculine leadership, a popular rhetoric of foreign investment and development, and a phobia of the illegal immigrant made into an ethical obligation. These contradictory forms of politics – the paean to multinational corporations, free trade, and the ‘bloc’-ing of power and the simultaneous mobilization of hyper-nationalism in the form of censoring books and throttling subversive aesthetic practices – characterize the conception and practice of what may be called “authoritarian democracy.” Considering the democratically elected basis of this authoritarianism, it becomes all the more important to ask if democracy paves the way for it. In that case, where do we locate democracy today? Is it right to say that the real democratic space unfolds itself in people’s movements and not in the electoral process? If this is the case, a radical conception of democracy would have to account for a shift of emphasis from the locus of governance to that of resistance and co-option. Historically speaking, democracy may not always be the means but it has been one of the ends for the various acts of resistance such as the working class, anti-colonial, nationalist, feminist, LGBT, or constitutional multiculturalism. In our sour and hungry times, when state aggression is overpowering the geographical marking (Russia’s in Ukraine or Israel’s in Palestine), or strangling the voice of internal resistance (North Eastern regions in India), not to mention religious fundamentalism, we need to rethink the old questions of democracy and resistance. With the ISIS, Boko Haram or the Taliban practice, we have seen how resistance itself can produce a dangerous authoritarianism which further complicates the relations between democracy, authoritarianism, and resistance. How do we historicize and ethically theorize resistance in relation to both democracy and an authoritarianism which borders on fascism?
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/33
2021-10-27T13:48:59Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/33
2021-10-27T13:48:59Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 1 No. 2 (2015): Democracy, Resistance, and the Practice of Literature; 27-70
Penny-wise…’:
Rinaldi , Andrea
2021-10-27
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/33
Ezra Pound
Modernism
Fascism
en_US
The article traces the history of Ezra Pound’s engagement with Fascist politics and its contemporary influence on the far-right in America, Britain and Italy. It seeks to explore a political legacy of Pound’s, which is sometimes strangely at odds with his poetic legacy but on other occasions, informs and coalesces into the latter.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/34
2021-10-27T14:22:11Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/34
2021-10-27T14:22:11Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 1 No. 2 (2015): Democracy, Resistance, and the Practice of Literature; 71-89
Resistance and Street Theatre:
Kamble, Rahul
2021-10-27
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/34
Resistance
Street theatre
Representation
Accountability
en_US
The present paper explores how the practice of street theatre by staging resistance not only exercises the right to resist but strengthens the democratic values and institutions. India’s independence and the acceptance of democracy were the results of simultaneous resistance against colonial power and the undemocratic, hierarchical, caste-class-ridden social structure. However, it didn’t end the phase of resistance. Values, such as resistance to injustice, anarchy, dominance and assertion of newly gained rights make democracy meaningful. Over the years the natures, aims, means, and modes of such values also change. Occasionally, it appears that the resistance has become unethical, technical, and ritualistic. Such developments however undermine the genuine and concerned articulations of resistance. The need is to strengthen the ethical, pragmatic, and representative deliverability of resistance. Thirst (2005), a street play by Telugu playwright Vinodini, stresses how street theatre could demonstrate resistance as a right and ethical duty. It puts rigours to show that resistance is not incidental, haphazard, and episodic but a sustained activity to achieve a durable goal of a democratic society as against the immediately bargained temporary goals. It argues constructively for distributive justice and decentralization in an organized, focused, and principled manner.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/35
2021-10-27T14:37:05Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/35
2021-10-27T14:37:05Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 1 No. 2 (2015): Democracy, Resistance, and the Practice of Literature; 90-102
``Fyataru and Subaltern War Cries:
Purakayastha , Anindya Sekhar
2021-10-27
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/35
Nabarun Bhattacharya
Author as Saboteur
Subaltern
radical violence
literary Bolshevism
en_US
Nabarun Bhattacharya, the radical literary voice of Bengal demonstrates notions of dissidence and aesthetic Bolshevism. His fictive dissenting subjects, the fyatarus typify rebellious roles in a post-ideological era when complicity and conformity are rewarded as the norm. Nabarun`s literary crusade interrogates the status quo and composes counter-currents of subjectivities. As a revolutionary saboteur he redefined the mode of subaltern representation by scripting the prose of counter insurgency through literature. The present excursus pays homage to this noted maverick writer of dissidence and attempts an analysis of the singularity of Nabarun`s fictional domain with specific references to some of his best known fictional works which constitute and explicate his prototypical subaltern anti-heroes such as fyatarus and Choktars who emerge as brilliant metaphorisation of dissent and disgust at our contemporary socio-political praxis. While the popular literary trends of the day have colluded with the hegemonic narrative of global capital that prevents the litterateur to coronate revolutionary anarchism or insurgency, Nabarun has consistently caused epistemic tremors through his overt advocacy of radical violence and systemic change.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/36
2021-10-27T14:44:10Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/36
2021-10-27T14:44:10Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 1 No. 2 (2015): Democracy, Resistance, and the Practice of Literature; 103-126
Little Rebellions:
Mandal, Arijeet
2021-10-27
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/36
Kamtapur
New Social Movement
Leftism
Bengal
Anarchy
en_US
During the last years of 1990s and the beginning of the millennia, North Bengal was shaken from its mundane reality right into a middle of a rebellion. With tears of history and warcries of the present, Kamtapur movement revealed itself. In this paper I have tried to locate the social, political, and ideological inclinations that are present within the movement. On one hand my paper intends to critique the presence of what can be called Kochbehar nationalism based on the memory of a pre-independence princely state, on the other hand I am also critiquing the trends and aftermaths of Leftist politics that has been assimilated into the movement itself. While the presence of these two different and to an extent contradictory political thoughts are present within the movement; I have also taken up these new trends in the lights of anarchist tendencies which put more importance on quasi-separations from dominant power centres than class-determinism alone, of course followed by a goal for local empowerment.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/37
2021-10-27T15:42:02Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/37
2021-10-27T15:42:02Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 1 No. 2 (2015): Democracy, Resistance, and the Practice of Literature; 127-148
Academic Publishing On Student Debt:
Shafer , Joseph R
2021-10-28
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/37
Student Debt
Academic
Intellectual
Publishing
Critical University Studies
en_US
The recent call for a critical university studies from the American Studies Association speaks to a growing body of criticism about university corporatism, specifically its "colonialization" through, and production of, student-debt. The subject centralizes constraints upon academic freedom vocationally and discursively, yet little focus has been on the role of the academic as a participating member of such an institution. The tacit significance of the role of the intellectual within colonialization should be explicitly juxtaposed with the unique position of the academic within the university, and new questions of discursive resistance can be interrogated by reviewing the relationship of the academic and the university, the academic and academic publishing, and academic publishing and the university. Although the theoretical and legal dependencies of academic criticism are paradoxically defined by their academic "discipline," the historical turn in both the role of the university, as a globalizing industry of student-debt culture, and the turn to a critical university studies, lends the American academic to be situated as the resistant subject in an unprecedented crisis of discourse. A review of "academic publishing" on Americanized student-debt teases out and introduces an arising crisis.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/38
2021-10-28T05:32:54Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/38
2021-10-28T05:32:54Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 1 No. 2 (2015): Democracy, Resistance, and the Practice of Literature; 149-157
Literary Debate on the American Civil War:
Bandyopadhyay, Debashis
2021-10-28
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/38
Goldwin Smith
Global Mercantilism
American Civil War
Slavery
en_US
The article takes up the diplomatic texts of Goldwin Smith such as economic treatises and epistles and demonstrates the irony within the imperial discourse where the liberal democratic strain reveals a curious counterpoint in its insistence on global imperial mercantilism. It underscores the ironic contrast between Smith’s anti-slavery position in America and his preaching of colonial cultivation in India, resulting in the cotton famine of 1877-78.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/39
2021-10-28T08:49:45Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/39
2021-10-28T08:49:45Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 1 No. 2 (2015): Democracy, Resistance, and the Practice of Literature; 158-169
Fractured Identities, Moral Mediations, and Cancerous Aspirations of Madeline Lee and Silas Lapham:
Berezowsky, Karly
2021-10-28
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/39
Democracy
Locational Vulnerability
Confinement
Fractured Identity
Agency
en_US
I provide a critical analysis of literary democracy within The Rise of Silas Lapham and Democracy. I attempt to advance an original view of why the American Realism literary movement should include tropes not only of the figure of the New Woman but also those of the figure of the Nouveau Riche man. It will further illustrate how the protagonists’ morals drive them to rebel against their personal ambitions, their oppressive environments, and their behavioural conditioning — thus provoking them to act other than as society would dictate.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/40
2021-10-28T08:56:35Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/40
2021-10-28T08:56:35Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 1 No. 2 (2015): Democracy, Resistance, and the Practice of Literature; 170-179
Hydrocarbon Genre:
Mehta , Vineet
2021-10-28
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/40
Abdel Munif
Oil
Arab
Amitav Ghosh
Novel
en_US
This paper analyzes Abdel Munif’s Cities of Salt and Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason as illustrations of the ‘Hydrocarbon Genre.’ These novels narrate the socio-cultural-economic and ecological implications of the oil business on the Arab world. Munif and Ghosh, in these works, expose the dark underside of the petro-capitalist takeover of the Middle East. They not only point out the complicity of the Gulf’s elite in the resultant crisis but also delve in detail into the various forms of resistance to the new petro-capitalist order. This paper further attempts to establish these novels as a subversive retendering of the oil encounter from a marginalized native’s and an excluded migrant’s perspective
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/41
2021-10-28T09:06:08Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/41
2021-10-28T09:06:08Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 1 No. 2 (2015): Democracy, Resistance, and the Practice of Literature; 180-202
Late Capitalism and the Problem of Individual Agency:
Banerjee, Rupsa
2021-10-28
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/41
J.H. Prynne
Poetry
Agency
Capital
Subject
en_US
Geography’s relation to the creation of a national identity has indelibly influenced different forms of literary writing. In the late capitalist age, the incommensurability of the territorial entity of the nation and physically experienced space cause us to delve deeper into the practices that interpellate us as inhabitants of a democratic nation-space. The scalar fluidity of an individual’s identity is figured by the different ways in which language emulates the social and personal identity of the individual. The virtual nature of the modern democratic state-form where power essentially appears as an empty place is counteracted upon by the poetic language of the late modern British poet J.H. Prynne. Through a study of his two poems (published in the poetry collection Kitchen Poems, 1968) this essay will look into the ways in which individual lives are intertwined with the functioning of economic capital in the state. In an age following the proverbial incursion of the economy into the affective premises of life, Prynne’s language attempts to give agency to the individual caught in the functioning of multiple discourses, separating every day from the pervasive abstractions of high finance resource mobilizations. This task of locating the individual’s identity is done by identifying the connections that the individual shares with the land and by uncovering the material basis of political identity.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/42
2021-11-01T07:53:14Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/42
2021-11-01T07:53:14Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 2 No. 1 (2015): Speculation and Fiction; 1-24
Speculation and Fiction
Bhattacharya , Sourit
Chattopadhyay , Arka
2021-10-28
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/42
en_US
As students of literature, one of the most frequent questions we encounter is: how does one write anything? What are the factors responsible for writing fiction? Does fiction have its autonomous qualities? Put in a slightly different way: what is thought or how is thought put into fiction? Broadly speaking, the study into the domain of thought is speculation. The Oxford English dictionary defines “speculation” this way:
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/43
2021-11-01T07:53:14Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/43
2021-11-01T07:53:14Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 2 No. 1 (2015): Speculation and Fiction; 25-49
The Runaway Sign:
Choksey, Lara
2021-10-28
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/43
Science Fiction
Doris Lessing
Biosemiotics
Sociobiology
Epigenetics
en_US
This article derives a notion of adaptation as a semiotic process from the work of Jesper Hoffmeyer and the Copenhagen-Tartu school of biosemiotics, suggesting it as way of considering fictional writing on genetics and evolution both empirically and analogically. Along these lines, I read changes in significations of reproduction and inheritance in Doris Lessing’s The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (1980).
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/44
2021-11-01T07:53:14Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/44
2021-11-01T07:53:14Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 2 No. 1 (2015): Speculation and Fiction; 50-71
Of Men, Machines and Apocalypses:
Roy , Dibyadyuti
2021-10-28
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/44
Speculative fiction
postcolonial masculinity
technology
apocalypse
militarization
anxiety
en_US
Exploding bombs embedded with catastrophic potential have remained central to our eschatological conceptualizations for more than a century. Future war fiction—a key sub-genre of speculative fiction—in building upon this obsession introduces us to unforeseen apocalyptic settings, which are brought forth through a nexus between gendered bodies and destructive military machinery. In underscoring the decidedly masculine nature of future war fiction, this article explores depictions of anxious postcolonial masculinity within the little-explored terrain of Indian speculative fiction. Apocalyptic settings in these texts, I argue, provide a topos for enacting postcolonial masculine anxieties, which are subsequently countered through making male bodies contingent on the volatile performances of destructive military technology. In utilizing R.W Connell’s conceptualization of “hegemonic masculinity,” I explore the reasons behind the emergence of postcolonial masculine insecurities, which, I argue, results from India’s colonial history and its continued legacy within the subcontinent. Finally, my examination of representative Indian speculative texts, namely Mainak Dhar’s Line of Control (2009) and Sami Ahmad Khan’s Red Jihad (2012) emphasizes that making hegemonic postcolonial masculinity contingent on the destructive capabilities of military technology results in unstable and threatening masculine performances; much like the unpredictable nature of war machinery highlighted in these texts.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/45
2021-11-01T07:53:14Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/45
2021-11-01T07:53:14Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 2 No. 1 (2015): Speculation and Fiction; 72-90
“Improbabilities abound”: Daphne du Maurier’s Rule Britannia and the Speculative Political Future
Byrne , Aoife
2021-10-28
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/45
literary categories
du Maurier
post-war
political future
fiction
British culture
en_US
Contextualising Daphne du Maurier’s Rule Britannia (1970) in what I tentatively identify as a speculative books boom of the late 1960s and 1970s, this paper posits that speculative fiction as a literary category is both a broad and hybrid one, but one that is often used synonymously with science fiction. Following this observation, this paper explores the effects of du Maurier’s amalgamation of genres and intertextual resonances on the mood of suspicion, unease and desolation that pervades this speculative work. This article explores how Rule Britannia‘s uneasy mood speaks to an equally troubled cultural moment for Britain. Rule Britannia interrogates cultural and national symbols at a moment of concentrated cultural and national anxiety. Examining what it means for du Maurier to write an invasion narrative for Britain in 1972, when British identity is at a cultural and historical crossroads, this paper argues that du Maurier takes a hard look at Britain in its post-war context, drawing attention to its perceived failings, its weakened global status and its shifting national identity. Du Maurier imagines a coloniser-turned-colonised invasion narrative for a previously powerful country coming to terms with post-war economic strife, bankruptcy, Cold War global tensions and the process of decolonisation.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/46
2021-11-01T07:53:14Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/46
2021-11-01T07:53:14Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 2 No. 1 (2015): Speculation and Fiction; 91-110
Possible and Possibilities:
Sen , Anushka
2021-10-28
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/46
Speculation
genre
aesthetic
vocabulary
performative
en_US
Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go can easily be categorised as speculative fiction, both within the framework of Atwood's controversial definition, and under the looser rubric which encompasses many genres that stretch and exceed the limits of 'reality'. In this article, I explore how speculation lies at the heart of this novel, not merely because of the hypothetical world in which the narrative unfolds, or the curiosity and ethical confusion that the novel provokes, but also because speculation seeps into the very texture of the novel as the characters—a community of individual clones—constantly reflect on their own fate. This paper seeks to comment on how an aesthetic of speculation is at work throughout the novel, and how this derives from, but is not entirely determined by the diverse genres (such as science fiction, life writing, teen romance) that the novel draws upon. In my analysis, I wish to look at specific elements like the community's initially opaque, personalised vocabulary; and the performative aspect of their lives, which I relate to their speculative condition. I will also discuss other works by Ishiguro, and a few texts built around the theme of cloning, in order to tease out the elusive status of Ishiguro's novel when set against his oeuvre and comparable speculative fiction/SF.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/47
2021-11-01T07:53:14Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/47
2021-11-01T07:53:14Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 2 No. 1 (2015): Speculation and Fiction; 111-127
“I’m a refugee from the past”:
Nakamura , Asami
2021-10-28
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/47
Dystopia
Nostalgia
Trauma
The Handmaid’s Tale
Surfacing
en_US
Notably, Margaret Atwood prefers to call her future-oriented novel, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), “speculative fiction” rather than “science fiction,” in order to foreground its characteristic as a cautionary tale which is extrapolated from things and events in the past. In this sense, prediction is deeply connected with history, or nostalgia; the future is something already embedded in the past, and Atwood’s task is to (re-)discover it, not to create it. Meanwhile, criticisms of Atwood’s dystopia tend to evaluate the protagonist’s resistance to authority either as defeatist or militant. Yet what is lacking from these lines of argument is a close re-examination of the concept of resistance itself, which could be achieved by the analysis of nostalgia. As working models for exploring various aspects of nostalgia in The Handmaid’s Tale, the following types are presented: forbidden nostalgia, mythophilia and inhibited nostalgia. The analysis of nostalgia will be combined with that of the notion of trauma; although it appears to be an opposite concept, Offred’s narrative proves that they can be dialectically intertwined. In particular, what is striking in Offred’s nostalgia is that it is rather repetition compulsion than a longing, and homesickness is presented as a chronic condition; this characteristic can be traced back to Atwood’s more explicitly nostalgic novel, Surfacing (1972). Offred is always/already a refugee; her resistance is centred on her refusal of the one-dimensional conception of time and space, yet at the same time, Offred remains as “a blank […] between parentheses. Between other people”.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/48
2021-11-01T07:53:14Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/48
2021-11-01T07:53:14Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 2 No. 1 (2015): Speculation and Fiction; 128-139
Personhood:
Brown , Kristine
2021-10-28
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/48
genetic engineering
cloning
eugenics
ethics
dystopia
speculation
en_US
Together, fiction and rhetoric not only illustrate grim possibilities, but also the processes and rationale by which they occur. Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian novel Never Let Me Go (2005) documents the lives of cloned children in twentieth-century England whose sole purpose is to provide organs to keep their human predecessors alive. While the children mature to become donors or caregivers to peers undergoing donation, nothing exempts them from death following repeated organ harvesting. However unnerving, the novel tells of potential realities associated with genetic engineering, a trend conservative political scientist Francis Fukuyama addresses in his work Our Post Human Future. This article endeavours to present Never Let Me Go as a fictional, yet an appropriate supplement to Fukuyama’s writing, incorporating new historicism and accentuating Fukuyama’s points of caution in Ishiguro’s novel. Through dissecting and discerning the complementary relationship of the two works, readers may garner enriched perspectives in debates on cloning and other forms of bioengineering.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/49
2021-11-01T07:53:34Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/49
2021-11-01T07:53:34Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 2 No. 2 (2016): Censorship and Literature; 1-22
Censorship and Literature:
Bhattacharya , Sourit
Chattopadhyay , Arka
2021-10-28
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/49
en_US
The Oxford English Dictionary defines censorship as “the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.”1 There is at least a two-fold meaning in this definition: first, certain factors give rise to censorship including obscenity, security, etc.,
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/50
2021-11-01T07:53:34Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/50
2021-11-01T07:53:34Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 2 No. 2 (2016): Censorship and Literature; 23-52
The Nation and its Discontents:
Dasgupta , Supurna
2021-10-28
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/50
Emergency
(Self-)Censorship
Archives
Testimonies
Surveillance
en_US
The article examines the poetics of documenting dissent during the Emergency under Mrs. Indira Gandhi through two specific archives. The declaration of Emergency in a democracy attempts to cut down the very scale of political citizenship to which dissenting bodies seem to aspire. Historians of the Emergency have noted how the Indira-led-Congress systematically closed down all spaces of dissent. The texts used for this article are taken from either a particular archive which was inadvertently discovered by an Indian researcher in a US library, or from O V Vijayan’s doodles on the Emergency. As an Emergency veteran Makarand Desai claims, the truth had to be “smuggled” out of the Congress’ reach for it to be unearthed later. This “smuggling of dissent” occured either across physical spaces or in many cases within the text itself, hidden behind apparent innocuousness through sophisticated techniques. What were the forms of censorship and self-censorship adopted by these chroniclers of Emergency? What is the value of belated testimonies in recuperating what Desai calls “Truth”? And finally, one might wish to speculate over the extent to which the surveillance measures of the Emergency, and the subsequent regulated access to censored documents led to the shaping of the contemporary educated middle-class (readers) in India? This article will be an attempt to creatively read these two archives as modes of approaching the question of smothered dissent during the Emergency. Such a reading will interest scholars of visual and textual studies, as well as political theorists of the text.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/51
2021-11-01T07:53:34Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/51
2021-11-01T07:53:34Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 2 No. 2 (2016): Censorship and Literature; 53-76
Subjectivity and the “Shocking”: Walter Pater:
Mukherjee, Ashmita
2021-10-28
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/51
Aesthetics
Ethics
Pater
Wilde
Shocking
Surveillance
Foucault
Epicureanism
en_US
The article analyzes the “shocking” and so-called “immoral” as a response to the institution-imposed methods of surveillance. This leads to the initiation of discourses over behaviour or actions which may not be unethical but which may be questionable in terms of social propriety. Moreover, the “shocking” may be seen as persistent attempts at the formulation of subjectivity -the “performative self.” These ideas are analyzed with reference to Foucault's perspective on the issues and briefly in the context of the late Victorian Aesthete culture spearheaded by Walter Pater and later, Oscar Wilde, the quintessential “dandy.” Their texts Marius the Epicurean and The Picture of Dorian Gray are read with the question of ethics and hedonism in mind, also relating the same to their fascination with classical Epicureanism.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/52
2021-11-01T07:53:34Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/52
2021-11-01T07:53:34Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 2 No. 2 (2016): Censorship and Literature; 77-97
Gazing into the Mirror:
Fisher , Jeremy
2021-10-29
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/52
Self-censorship
gay literature
freedom of expression
publishing
en_US
Early gay Australian novels stepped delicately in their depiction of homosexual relationships. In a murky legal climate, both publishers and authors fumbled in their efforts to recount overt homosexual narratives. As well, they were constrained by social conventions. In this environment, writers acted as their own censors, sometimes guided by their publishers, but more often cautiously coming to terms with being able to tell their own stories. Fifty years on, it is possible to document the manner in which some writers of novels with overt gay narratives navigated their problematic world and how the final works were influenced by self-censorship and censorship. As well, some reception of these writers’ works by the mainstream literary market is given a preliminary analysis in this article.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/53
2021-11-01T07:53:34Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/53
2021-11-01T07:53:34Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 2 No. 2 (2016): Censorship and Literature; 98-126
Commodification of Censorship in Iranian Writing in English
Fotouhi, Sanaz
2021-10-29
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/53
Iranian literature
World literature in English
Iran
en_US
This paper examines the commodification of censorship and banning in relation to the cultural products that are emerging from and about Iran in the West. Using books written by the Iranian diaspora in English as example, it highlights the often ironic emphasis where a cultural product/idea that has been oppressed, banned or censored in Iran is taken up vicariously in the West under the illusion that it has overcome that censorship/oppression by the virtue of being presented in the West, only to be read again in a definitive and biased framework that identifies it as a censored or banned piece of work. It pays attention to how the commodification of censorship offers an illusionary shift in a power relationship where under the guise of Western liberation, the creators feel a sense of freedom, agency and powerfulness by being heard and seen against those oppressions that they previously faced, only with the reality being that in some ways their work and voices are ironically contributing to further emphasizing stereotypical understandings and power relations between the East and the West.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/54
2021-11-01T07:53:34Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/54
2021-11-01T07:53:34Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 2 No. 2 (2016): Censorship and Literature; 127-151
“…like an egg without salt”:
Maitra , Dipanjan
2021-10-29
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/54
James Joyce
Ulysses
censorship
scandal
sewage
jouissance
en_US
Joyce’s “scandalmunkering” began in his college days with the stall on the publication of his incendiary pamphlets and the president of the Literary and Historical Society of University College Dublin refusing to allow “Drama and Life” (1900) to be read before the Society. Although he faced similar situations with Dubliners (1914) the climax of the Joycean battle with censors was surely the long and much cited legal battle ‘“The United States of America v. One Book Called “Ulysses”’ (1933). However, Finnegans Wake (1939) though no less “scandalous” never faced governmental censorship. This paper attempts to understand how Joyce managed to continue his “scandal work” (as Margot Backus terms it) across his oeuvre while at the same time developing a modern “poetic method” (in Benjamin’s sense of the term) which aimed at recycling cultural waste utilizing the Postal system and even protectionist copyright policies. The paper thus hypothesizes how Joyce’s scandal work also similarly presupposes its own ideal reader, who could either be a “genetic” reader, forced to read backwards or as Lacan suggests, as Joyce himself privy to his own jouissance slipping from letter to litter. Both readers in this view are forced to confront the “scandalous” –– understood in its etymological implications.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/55
2021-11-01T07:53:34Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/55
2021-11-01T07:53:34Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 2 No. 2 (2016): Censorship and Literature; 152-169
Is Critique “Universal”?:
Ghatak, Suvendu
2021-10-29
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/55
Swift
Parrhēsia
Censorship
Critique
Habermas
Foucault
Butler
Asad
en_US
This article seeks to examine the dimension of “courage” or “risk” involved in the exercise of critique through a genealogical survey in relation to Michel Foucault’s work on Parrhēsia and an examination of Jonathan Swift’s Drapier’s Letters as an exemplar depicting the contours of “norm” in 18th century public discourse. The tension between norm, truth and freedom of speech would be brought out to examine the censorship, intrinsic to the foundation of universal public reason that is pointed out by Judith Butler in her critique of the Habermasian model of public discourse. The vocabulary of public discourse will be assessed to understand whether universal normativity can at all be achieved.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/56
2021-11-01T07:53:34Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/56
2021-11-01T07:53:34Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 2 No. 2 (2016): Censorship and Literature; 170-192
Mum’s the Word: Heteronormative Indian Society and the Censorship of Single Unwed Mothers
Das, Madhurima
2021-10-29
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/56
Heteronormativity
Supreme Court
class
stigma
heteromasculinity
neoliberalism
en_US
The right of single unwed mothers in India has not only been a widely debated topic but is also situated at the core of gender equality. Scholars have discussed the positionality of single unwed mothers in Indian society within the larger discourse of patriarchy. In this paper, I examine the materiality of the spaces within which the recent Supreme Court’s ruling on single unwed mothers can be implemented. I argue that the emancipation of single unwed mothers is contingent on macro social and institutional analysis. I situate my argument in the larger context of class mobility, social stigma and the neoliberal economic debate. In doing so, I also analyze the censorship of unwed mothers as a ramification of heteronormativity that aims to marginalize any other form of sexuality. In conclusion this paper by closely examining the censorship and stigma of single unwed mothers will shed new light on the rarely acknowledged larger issues of class mobility and neoliberalism
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/57
2021-11-01T07:53:34Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/57
2021-11-01T07:53:34Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 2 No. 2 (2016): Censorship and Literature; 193-216
The Censor’s “filthy synecdoche”:
Schauss, Martin
2021-10-29
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/57
Beckett
Censorship
Obscenity
Scatology
Resistance
en_US
This article considers Beckett’s lively use of “offensive” material—sexual and faecal—as it stages a confrontation with censorship practices. Following recent political readings of Beckett’s work, the article argues that Beckett is interested in exposing the structural paradox at the heart of the censor’s position and the instability of institutionalised moral borders. It draws on the novels Molloy and Watt, among others, and reviews Beckett’s early essay “Censorship in the Saorstat.”
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/58
2021-11-01T07:53:34Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/58
2021-11-01T07:53:34Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 2 No. 2 (2016): Censorship and Literature; 217-235
“Not in Our Good”: Nationalist and other Concerns in the Censorship Debates in Early Indian Cinema.
Bhattacharya , Binayak
2021-10-29
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/58
Censorship
Indian cinema
Late-colonial India
Bengal
en_US
The present article traces the historical and cultural roots of the censorship practices in cinema in late-colonial India. The emergence of censorship in India, it suggests, carries a larger concern of the hierarchized nationalist public sphere which sought to establish its effective social control over the newly emerged medium of popular mobilization. Interestingly, the British film industry could enjoy only a limited entry into the film industry in India, and the colonial authority too showed their apparent reluctance towards carrying out necessary reforms in securing the prospects of the nascent sector. This specific feature eventually necessitated a coalition between the dominant social institutions and the colonial authority in carrying out the cultural policing of cinema. The development was further valorized by the emerging sector of literary intelligentsia whose rejection of all forms of films other than literary cinema instigated the middle class professional to enter into the production vis-à-vis the discursive domain of cinema in India. The article summarizes this historical process to locate the coordinates of the social control which, in the virtual absence of a regimented censored regime, produced the normative rules for cultural policing in order to overpower the constitutional exercise of censorship in India.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/60
2021-11-01T07:53:34Z
sanglap:REW
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/60
2021-11-01T07:53:34Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 2 No. 2 (2016): Censorship and Literature; 236-244
Book Review:
Chakraborti, Aritra; Jadavpur University
2021-10-29
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/60
en_US
We’re the best judges of the public interests. Therefore, just out of ordinary morality, we have to make sure that they don’t have an opportunity to act on the basis of their misjudgments.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/62
2021-11-05T09:06:17Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/62
2021-11-05T09:06:17Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 3 No. 1 (2016): Critiquing Humanism; 1-16
Critiquing Humanism
Bhattacharya, Sourit
Chattopadhyay, Arka
2021-11-01
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/62
en_US
The word “humanism” is associated with the revival of classical antiquity in 13th -15thC Italy. “It involves,” as Nicholas Mann writes, “the rediscovery and study of ancient Greek and Roman texts, the restoration and interpretation of them and the assimilation of the ideas and values that they contain” (2).
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/63
2021-11-05T09:06:17Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/63
2021-11-05T09:06:17Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 3 No. 1 (2016): Critiquing Humanism; 17-27
Latin American Literature and Criticism of Universal Humanism:
Briones, Pablo Lazo
2021-11-01
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/63
en_US
In the following essay, I propose that Latin American literature is not a fictitious space of evasion. But rather, it is a space that mirrors violent realities, power abuses, and concrete administrations of justice and power through narrative imagery. I use Julio Cortázar’s classic short story “House Taken Over” to exemplify how Latin American literature is capable of depicting social and political truth of humanistic ideology that posits itself as universal
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/64
2021-11-05T09:06:17Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/64
2021-11-05T09:06:17Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 3 No. 1 (2016): Critiquing Humanism; 28-43
The Posthuman Child as a Genderless Ideal
Chanda , Sagnika
2021-11-01
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/64
Childhood
Genderless
Posthuman
Androgyny
Adolescence
en_US
Artemis Fowl is a series of eight science fiction fantasy novels targeted at the young adult audience. The central protagonist is Artemis Fowl II, a 12-year-old criminal mastermind who exploits the magical Fairy People and discovers the fairy technology commonly known as magic. The series raises several important discussions around androgyny, gender roles and even re-conceptualizes the traditional image of the body. As a text of children’s literature, Artemis Fowl intersects the fantasy world of magical creatures of pixies and fairies and the real world of the pre-teen and re-imagines them to provide new answers to questions of what the body is in the age of technoculture. Positioned among these concerns is the adolescent teen’s search for his own identity, which is woven together with bioethical and technological issues. The series raises important questions about the co-existence of humans with the machinic developments of the twenty-first century as well as about the very nature of human identity in an age of advanced scientific possibility. This article will serve to answer some of these complexities through a critical assessment of how the posthuman/ technologically enhanced child is foregrounded all through the series and will interrogate his relationship to gender and adulthood.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/65
2021-11-05T09:06:17Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/65
2021-11-05T09:06:17Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 3 No. 1 (2016): Critiquing Humanism; 44-58
Robunism:
Roy , Saptarshi
2021-11-01
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/65
Post-humanism
Robots
Refugees
Technology
Aid and Rescue
en_US
This paper is divided into two realms. The first portion aims at addressing the post-humanist developments that continually assay to evolve whilst ambivalently opining about the castaways of the world who are the end products of tech-chrysalis. Simultaneously, the second section tries to focus on those very machines that try hard and fast to aid the émigré and refugees. It also attempts to understand the conflicting positions of politics, technology and humanity.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/66
2021-11-05T09:06:17Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/66
2021-11-05T09:06:17Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 3 No. 1 (2016): Critiquing Humanism; 59-81
Becoming Béla Tarr’s Bêtes, or How to Stop Being Afraid of Ceasing to Be a Human Being
Martell, James
2021-11-01
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/66
en_US
Against our common rush to understand the world in our own, human terms, Béla Tarr’s films give us the opportunity to come in touch with our own stupidity, and through it, with our madness and the becomings it opens up. This essay looks at the current state of the world (disdainful gesture, disgustedly) and with Terrian eyes, tries to question our speeds, and to see the bottomless abyss that Nietzsche, Deleuze, and others proposed to us as our only living escape
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/67
2021-11-05T09:06:17Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/67
2021-11-05T09:06:17Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 3 No. 1 (2016): Critiquing Humanism; 82-96
The Italian Job:
Scalercio , Mauro
2021-11-01
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/67
Edward Said
Vico
Humanism
Modernity
Historicity
Facticity
en_US
The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it will try to clarify the importance of the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) in shaping Edward Said’s categories. Second, it will shed light on the theoretical importance of such genealogy. From the philological point of view, it is important to show how profound Said’s knowledge of Vico’s work is. Therefore, this paper will follow references to Vico within the whole of Said’s work, from late the sixties ones to the posthumous Humanism and Democratic Criticism. As far as theory is concerned, understanding Said’s use of Vico’s concepts explains why Said refers to his own work with the controversial term “humanism.” Vico, critiquing modernity from the onset, is the basis on which Said built a new critical humanism. In particular, Said uses the very essential elements of the philosophy of Vico: the importance of the body as the source of humanity, the critique of modern abstractions, the idea that man knows what he makes, and the idea of the historicity of every human invention and construction.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/68
2021-11-05T09:06:17Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/68
2021-11-05T09:06:17Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 3 No. 1 (2016): Critiquing Humanism; 97-114
Animal-humanities and the Eco-sophical Parergon:
Purakayastha , Anindya Sekhar
Pandit, Saptaparni
2021-11-01
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/68
Anthropocentrism
Posthumanism
Animal Studies
Anthropocene
New Materialism
Manifesto
en_US
Philosophy is perhaps all too human and excludes the non-human Other from its epistemic humano-sphere. This paper dislodges the human monopoly over the planetary life-world so that a “zoography” of morals can be inaugurated in a world witnessing the Anthropocentric apocalypse caused by our arrogant sense of human supremacy. In a restructuring attempt, we try to “think through” the Earth and the Earth Others, so as to expose the inherent violence in our normative nonchalance when it comes to our atrocities against animals or our colonization of non-humans. Perceived through post-Anthropocentric optics, the normative binary of human/non-human assumes larger significance as we endeavor to think through other fellow species to salvage the damage of our “common home”- the planet Earth, inhabited equally by humans and non-humans. Human-centric epistemic trajectories are premised on power bound binaries of inside/outside, human/non-human, etc and such divisions remind us of Derrida`s notion of the “parergon” that problematises the frame/content, or inside/outside binaries to tease out a bridge between the divided realms. We therefore, argue for an eco-sophical parergonal suturing of the human/non-human, the Earth/Earth-others to constitute a holistic frame of co-living. Borrowing Claire Colebrook, Tom Cohen and J Hillis Miller`s ideas in their Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols (2016), we intend to work for alternative philosophems – something Rosi Braidotti and Cary Wolfe named as anti-humanism or posthumanism. We propose to deepen such post-humanist approaches in the humanities and social sciences so that a better critique of Anthropocentric humanism can be actualized.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/69
2021-11-05T09:06:17Z
sanglap:REW
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/69
2021-11-05T09:06:17Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 3 No. 1 (2016): Critiquing Humanism; 115-120
The Chronicler of “Ordinary Grief”:
Mukherjee, Anuparna ; IISER Bhopal
2021-11-01
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/69
en_US
Laetitia Zecchini’s Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India (2014) is a decisive work on the precepts of modernism in India as it panned out around the aesthetic praxis of Kolatkar and his contemporaries against the cosmopolitan cultural background of Bombay (the present-day Mumbai) in the post-independence era. Primarily known as a poet in the pan-Indian literary scene, this book introduces Kolatkar as a man of many talents.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/72
2022-01-08T07:10:56Z
sanglap:ART
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/73
2022-11-30T16:30:14Z
sanglap:ART
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/74
2022-11-30T16:30:14Z
sanglap:ART
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/75
2022-11-30T16:30:14Z
sanglap:ART
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/76
2022-11-30T16:30:14Z
sanglap:ART
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/77
2022-11-30T16:30:13Z
sanglap:ART
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/78
2022-11-30T16:30:13Z
sanglap:ART
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/79
2022-11-30T16:30:13Z
sanglap:ART
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/80
2022-11-30T16:30:13Z
sanglap:ART
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/81
2021-11-17T06:01:37Z
sanglap:OPI
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/82
2021-11-17T06:00:31Z
sanglap:AWK
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/83
2021-11-05T09:10:15Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/83
2021-11-05T09:10:15Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 4 No. 1 (2017): Why World Literature?; 1-8
Why World Literature?:
Bhattacharya , Sourit
Chattopadhyay , Arka
2021-11-02
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/83
en_US
In this issue, we acknowledge the phenomenal rise of world literature in current (Euro-American) literary studies. Although world literature as an object of study was revived in the 1990s, it was not till the last decade or so that scholars expressed such intense engagement with the issue.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/84
2021-11-05T09:10:15Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/84
2021-11-05T09:10:15Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 4 No. 1 (2017): Why World Literature?; 9-23
Hong Kong as a Test Case for World Literature
Tsang , Michael
2021-11-02
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/84
Hong Kong
Neo-coloniality
Language politics
World Literature
en_US
This article posits Hong Kong as a test case for several theoretical perspectives currently developed in the rising field of world literature. Focusing on three main areas—namely, Hong Kong’s semi-peripheral neocoloniality, its language politics, and the proliferation of the poetry genre—the article aims to examine how world literature and Hong Kong can strike a dialogue with each other, exploring each other’s limits. For Hong Kong to make meaningful contributions to world literature, it desperately needs to build a name for itself as a literature of its own concerns.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/85
2021-11-05T09:10:15Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/85
2021-11-05T09:10:15Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 4 No. 1 (2017): Why World Literature?; 24-30
What are You Trying to Say?:
McMahon, Josh
2021-11-03
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/85
Translation
World Literature
Identity
Alterity
Marginalisation
en_US
At the heart of World Literature lies a tension between translation and the texts’ position in the world. This essay argues that whilst translation dichotomously offers a teleological understanding of texts, it fails to grapple with the deep cultural milieus that manufacture texts. Thus, whilst translation offers an awareness of the text, it further de-centralises the text and author. Translation further emphasises the power literary institutions have over texts written from the fringes. Finally, this essay grapples with the dialectic between texts drawing meaning from the centre, and texts that are written from the fringes acquiring meaning in the centre. This centre is an institutional figment, often seen to be the European literary canon.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/86
2021-11-05T09:10:15Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/86
2021-11-05T09:10:15Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 4 No. 1 (2017): Why World Literature?; 31-42
Words in a world of scaling-up:
Bhattacharyya , Sayan
2021-11-03
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/86
Digital humanities
subaltern
power/knowledge
postcolonial
distant reading
grammatization
en_US
Cultural and literary studies have long been cognizant that apparatuses for knowledge production can render certain kinds of texts “illegible.” The relationships between knowledge, power and episteme that produce this occlusion have traditionally been explored and analyzed at the level of engagement with specific social and literary texts. This paper describes how a similar problem can arise in the context of the analysis of large-scale bodies of text. Our example is an analytical tool, intended for discovering trends and patterns in large text corpora. By describing what happens when the tool is applied to a large, heterogeneous and diverse textual corpus, we show how textual inscriptions that stand in a relationship of subalternity to structuring normativity of the text corpus could become invisible unless they already conform to the epistemic assumptions underlying those normativities. We conclude by discussing how my observations relate, by analogy and by allegory, to some issues of interest in discussions of world literature.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/87
2021-11-05T09:10:15Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/87
2021-11-05T09:10:15Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 4 No. 1 (2017): Why World Literature?; 43-54
World Literature:
Chakraborty , Thirthankar
2021-11-03
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/87
World Literature
Cosmopolitanism
Translation
Samuel Beckett
Rabindranath Tagore
Marx and Engels
en_US
This article examines the place of world literature today. Starting with the current political context in Britain, the first part outlines a brief history of Weltliteratur via Goethe, Marx and Engels, and contemporary literary critics such as Pascale Casanova and Emily Apter. Using Samuel Beckett’s views and letters on nationalism and translation, the second part problematizes the centre and periphery model upon which most of these theories are based. The final part introduces Tagore’s contrasting view of visva-sahitya, which, as evidenced through Beckett’s position as a writer and translator of impotence, presents an alternative mode of perceiving world literature.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/88
2021-11-05T09:10:15Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/88
2021-11-05T09:10:15Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 4 No. 1 (2017): Why World Literature?; 55-68
What Cities Enclose:
Martínez Guerrero, Mitzi E
2021-11-02
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/88
urban space
world literature
city
geoliterature
contemporary literature
semi-periphery
en_US
After its reappearance on the literary scope, world literature has become such an inevitable paradigm in contemporary reflections, that, as expressed by Theo D’Haen (2012), “no other approach to literary studies has known as spectacular a success in the new millennium”. Paradoxically, this has also caused an entrance into an ongoing cycle of metadiscursive reformulation, which has distanced the concept from its own definition, methodology and boundaries. Towards grasping world literature spectrum, the present proposal encompasses certain theoretical notions around 21st-century literature, by following the representation of urban space in The Museum of Innocence (Orhan Pamuk) and Jerusalém (Gonçalo M. Tavares) as samples for contemporary concerns seen from a geoliterary angle
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/89
2021-11-05T09:10:15Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/89
2021-11-05T09:10:15Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 4 No. 1 (2017): Why World Literature?; 69-79
Samuel Beckett’s ‘The Way’ and Stirrings Still:
Kaur, Pavneet
2021-11-03
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/89
Buddhism
Veil of Maya
Arthur Schopenhauer
Emptiness
Self
Phenomena
en_US
The article discusses the idea of the self in Samuel Beckett’s late short prose writings. The nature of the self, presented in disintegrated and essenceless form in Beckett’s works, responds powerfully to the category of world literature through their crossing of cultural boundaries. Beckett read the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer and Schopenhauer in turn, was influenced by the Eastern philosophies of Buddhism and the Vedas. The essential characteristic of the presentation of the self in Beckett’s writings, when filtered through Schopenhauer’s understanding of the Eastern philosophy, leads to what Beckett called ‘an intellectual justification of unhappiness’ and the understanding of the ‘veil of Maya.’
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/90
2021-11-05T09:10:15Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/90
2021-11-05T09:10:15Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 4 No. 1 (2017): Why World Literature?; 80-92
Transcendence through Illumination: Marginalized Identity Re-valued as Art and Literature
Berezowsky , Karly
2021-11-03
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/90
Autobiography
Feminism
Identity
Diamela Eltit
en_US
I provide a critical analysis of the female identity of E. Luminata, written by Chilean writer, Diamela Eltit. This essay will examine how E. Luminata fits into the world of autobiographical feminism, with ties to multiculturalism, and world literature. Her series of artistic scenes in the town square allow her to challenge standardized notions of beauty’s ephemerality and permanence. Within the text, E. Luminata uses her art to protest Pinochet’s military government during the 1980’s. E. Luminata actively uses art, aesthetics, and her sexualized identity to create an argument against the “grotesque” nature of the military regime. As such, her artistic protests, read within a piece of translated literature, help readers to define the nature of the aesthetic experience of womanhood and contemplate personal agency, desire, and cultural possessiveness. Her identity is manifested through the contradictory binary of the natural and the artificial, since she presents herself as a spectacle, for others to perceive. By doing so, she deconstructs her own objectification within the novel.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/93
2021-11-05T10:17:49Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/93
2021-11-05T10:17:49Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 4 No. 2 (2018): Lacanian Psychoanalysis and the Logic of the Cut; 1-9
Lacanian Psychoanalysis and the Logic of the Cut
Chattopadhyay, Arka
Banerjee, Arunava ; Université Paris 8
Maitra, Dipanjan; State University of New York at Buffalo
2021-11-05
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/93
en_US
Psychoanalysis is a practice of speech between at least two people (which does not mean two subjects as two people can embody more than two subjectivities). The cut is an important driving force of this speech practice.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/94
2021-11-05T12:01:38Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/94
2021-11-05T12:01:38Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 4 No. 2 (2018): Lacanian Psychoanalysis and the Logic of the Cut; 10-25
The Freudian Cut
Troha , Tadej
2021-11-05
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/94
Cut
Irreversibility
Disposition
Constitution
Accidental
en_US
The article discusses the concept of irreversibility in psychoanalysis. By examining some of the key stages in the development of the Freudian enterprise, it argues that there is a single question that psychoanalysis has been dealing with from the very beginning and that enables us to articulate the real core of its history. The question that progressively produced the disposition of psychoanalysis, i.e. the irreversible trajectory on which it has been situated ever since is the following: Is it possible to intervene into the irreversible?
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/95
2021-11-05T12:14:18Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/95
2021-11-05T12:14:18Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 4 No. 2 (2018): Lacanian Psychoanalysis and the Logic of the Cut; 26-54
Cinematic Logic and the Function of the Cut
Ling , Alex
2021-11-05
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/95
Suture
Fantasy
Real
Cinema
Hitchcock
en_US
This paper investigates the essentially ‘Lacanian’ function of the cut in cinematic logic, arguing that the historical relationship between cinema and psychoanalysis is rooted in their shared logic of elision and division. However, while standard cinematic practice is to disavow the cut (through the repressive operation of ‘suture’) so as to construct and conserve the filmic ‘fantasy’ and thereby strengthen the imaginary, psychoanalysis contrarily seeks to directly attain to the real by traversing the fantasy along the lines of the cut. In examining this ‘diverging convergence’, the paper looks to the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, whose celebrated films cut across both sides of the divide, providing the comfort of ‘imaginary resolution’ while at the same time undermining this equilibrium by directly invoking the real in the form and figure of the cut. In particular, the paper examines how Hitchcock’s films supplement the various cuts constitutive of cinema’s very being with an additional ‘foundational cut’; a cut that is equally formative of the film itself, but which simultaneously introduces a fundamentally determinative rift in this world, a central hole around which everything – plot, image, dialogue, etc. – twists and turns (and which is, moreover, intimately tied to Lacan’s formulation of the subject-object relation). The paper then goes on to address two key questions arising from this examination: what becomes of the suture when cinema, like psychoanalysis, truly acknowledges the cut and traverses its own fantasy; and (following Žižek) is there really a ‘proper’ way to remake a (Hitchcock) film?
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/96
2021-11-05T12:30:50Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/96
2021-11-05T12:30:50Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 4 No. 2 (2018): Lacanian Psychoanalysis and the Logic of the Cut; 55-79
The monad and the cut in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame
Brown, Llewellyn
2021-11-05
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/96
Psychoanalysis
Lacan
Beckett
Topology
Fantasy
Monad
Fort/da
Freud
Melancholy
en_US
Interruptions and false starts are omnipresent in Beckett’s work, revealing a similar preoccupation with the cut in psychoanalysis. And yet, Endgame would seem to present a situation devoid of a structuring cut, with its characters lodged in a form of uniform monad devoid of any opening to the outside: it appears as a desperately homogenous world, belonging to the imaginary register, one that dissimulates real anxiety. One major cut is therefore the exclusion of the characters from the phallic register, supportive of desire. While the refuge is a place of stasis, the cut intervenes in the come and go movement leaning on the symbolic register, driving the movement to go on. Clov’s tormented relationship to Hamm can be seen as exemplifying the formula of the fantasy, involving the cut between subject and a object, where any complementarity dissimulates a fundamental breach. Such an object is embodied by the other characters, as well as by the refuge itself. Finally, the cut is associated with the subject and discourse as a closed structure. However, the question could also be seen from the point of view of the use of lalangue, which informs the real dimension of saying.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/97
2021-11-05T12:41:50Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/97
2021-11-05T12:41:50Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 4 No. 2 (2018): Lacanian Psychoanalysis and the Logic of the Cut; 80-110
Nabokov, Cinemathomme
Jöttkandt , Sigi
2021-11-05
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/97
Psychoanalysis
Paternal signifier
Cinema
Incest
Anthropocene
en_US
Vladimir Nabokov famously detested psychoanalysis. He loathed what he regarded as the crudeness of the psychoanalytic imagination and its seemingly universalizing narratives that would track everything back to a single Oedipal source. In Ada or Ardor, Nabokov's parody of the Joycean writer, Nabokov nevertheless offers a template for the future of psychoanalytic reading practices in a 21st century characterized by an all-pervasive Imaginary. In this reading, incest provides Nabokov with the conceptual figure for an enjoyment that did not submit to the paternal cut, which floods into the Symbolic through his hybrid literary-cinematic style. Creating a sinthome of an infinite book from the letters of his name, here Nabokov, as cinemathomme, offers himself pre-eminently as a thinker for what Jacques-Alain Miller has called today's "great disorder of the real".
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/98
2021-11-05T14:10:09Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/98
2021-11-05T14:10:09Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 4 No. 2 (2018): Lacanian Psychoanalysis and the Logic of the Cut; 111-134
Heidegger Contra Lacan:
VanLieshout, Eric
2021-11-05
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/98
Heidegger
Lacan
Western metaphysics
Subjectivity
Theories of the Subject.
en_US
The question of the subject and subjectivity is being broached with a new urgency as Neuroscience, Biology, artificial intelligence research, and post-modern philosophies are all trying to understand and model human consciousness. Consequently, the understanding of consciousness is becoming more complex and the traditional conceptual hegemony of the unified, individual, Knowing Self posited by Western metaphysics and science is becoming increasingly precarious. Following some introductory comments on the conventional Western subject this article will focus on specific ways Heidegger and Lacan develop theories of subjectivity that constitute exceptions to the traditional theories. Examining these two radically divergent theories of the subject, it will be shown how one method for re-modelling the idea of the subject is through the integration of internal divisions or cuts. Heidegger’s Dasein and Lacan’s thinking of subjectivity diverge from the traditional philosophical subject on the basis of a differing relation to the cut or split that bars them from any objective self-knowledge. First, looking closely at the development of Dasein in Being and Time (1927), this article will show how particular instances of cutting or splitting distinguish Dasein as a radical break with the traditional subject of philosophy. Next, this article will look at how Lacan refines Freud’s revolutionary work on subjectivity and the splitting of the mind by examining how in his recently translated (2017) fifth seminar, Formations of the Unconscious (1957-1958), Lacan expands Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex and psychic development to develop a more complex and dynamic notion of subjectivity. Both Heidegger and Lacan develop subjects that differ from the traditional subject and from each other through integrations of cutting or internal division that entail different relations to history and language. Moreover, tracing out how these subjects are conceived in relation to processes of cutting or splitting brings about a new manner of modeling subjective positions vis-à-vis knowledge, self-consciousness, and community. Ultimately, the developments from the philosophical subject to Dasein and Lacan’s subject indicate how increasingly verisimilar theories of human subjectivity can be developed on the basis of increasingly complex relations and integrations of structural splitting.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/99
2021-11-05T14:55:36Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/99
2021-11-05T14:55:36Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 4 No. 2 (2018): Lacanian Psychoanalysis and the Logic of the Cut; 135-150
The Real and the Cut
Haney, Janet
2021-11-05
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/99
Cut
Interpretation
Real
Politics
Brexit
en_US
Abstract: Lacan entered the psychoanalytical scene by inventing three powerful signifiers with which he divided the field into the registers of the symbolic, imaginary and real. The cut as an analytical tool has been present since the beginning of Lacan’s practice, and is often conflated with the variable-length session. Although there can be a relation between the cut and the length of a session, the two are not the same thing. The cut has to do with the real of psychoanalysis, and as such has to do with the opacity of jouissance, distinct from the law of desire. The analytical cut can also be distinguished from interpretation, which is placed on the side of meaning. An analytical cut can be achieved through a variety of tactics, so long as these tactics are governed by the particularity of the transference under the analytic policy invented by Freud – to work with the subject of the unconscious.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/100
2021-11-06T06:20:06Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/100
2021-11-06T06:20:06Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 4 No. 2 (2018): Lacanian Psychoanalysis and the Logic of the Cut; 151-166
The Cut and Misunderstanding
Olivos , Alejandro
2021-11-05
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/100
Autism
Language
Misunderstanding
Trauma
Cut
en_US
This article attempts to approach the question of the cut in analytic practice and in directing interviews with parents of autistic children admitted to the institution. The clinic of autism can be envisaged in its relations with language to develop a crucial aspect of the symbolic register: the notion of misunderstanding. This notion was introduced by Jacques Lacan early in his teaching and can be traced to his initial work on structural linguistics till his final pronouncements in the 70’s on topology and the nodal clinic. In his very last seminar of 1980, entitled Dissolution!, Lacan associates the notion of misunderstanding with that of trauma that leads on to this idea that one is already traumatized by misunderstanding that exists between parents. We hope that these formulations will provide us with elements to better conceptualize direction and organization of interviews with parents of autistic subjects admitted to Institutions.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/103
2021-11-08T12:14:14Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/103
2021-11-08T12:14:14Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 5 No. 2 (2019): Environment From a Humanities Perspective; 1-4
Environment From a Humanities Perspective:
Chattopadhyay, Arka
Bhattacharya, Sourit
2021-11-08
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/103
en_US
In the last decades, there has begun a close and productive dialogue between humanities studies and environment and disaster studies. This has arisen from the general understanding in academic and policy-making circles that the problem of environmental crisis or of climate change cannot be meaningfully engaged with through the lens of one single discipline or for that matter through scientific studies alone.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/104
2021-11-08T12:14:14Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/104
2021-11-08T12:14:14Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 5 No. 2 (2019): Environment From a Humanities Perspective; 5-18
The Anthropocene Memorial:
Massol, Clara de
2021-11-08
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/104
en_US
At the intersection of environmental humanities and memory studies, this article addresses the memorial response to the Anthropocene in an attempt to understand how climate change is and could be displayed and remembered in a public space. Through an examination of Climate Chronograph, a climate change memorial project, the article contextualises commemorative practices within interconnecting social, cultural and environmental realms. Climate Chronograph is a memorial project designed by architects Erik Jensen and Rebecca Sunter. On the banks of the Potomac river in Washington D.C, a sloped park of cherry trees will gradually be submerged in the rising river creating a visual record of climate change. The memorial allows its visitors to imagine a future past of the Anthropocene, an anticipated decaying and drowned future memory. This article explores the specificity of memorial sites in the Anthropocene, how they underline the transcultural dimension of climate change and the meaning-making dimension of memory.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/105
2021-11-08T12:14:14Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/105
2021-11-08T12:14:14Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 5 No. 2 (2019): Environment From a Humanities Perspective; 19-29
Gaia Theory and the Anthropocene:
Wright , D. B. Dillard
2021-11-08
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/105
Latour
Lovelock
Gaia hypothesis
Posthumanism
Plastics
Systems theory
en_US
Good readings of the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock understand the theory as positing multiple, interlocking Earth systems, characterized by rapidly-changing feedback loops, in a way that is harmonious both with Darwinian evolution and contemporary climate science. The dawning of the geologic epoch of the Anthropocene offers little comfort for those who would like to preserve a providential role for human beings in the unfolding of planetary systems. The climate crisis and its attendant catastrophes demonstrate that human beings cannot control themselves, much less the Earth systems on which they depend. The Gaia hypothesis, properly understood, provides an insight into the shock of radical contingency, the realization that the Earth and life can go along perfectly well without human beings. The Gaia hypothesis provides a good framework for seeing the place of humanity at the dawn of the Anthropocene, a decentering of the human even as humanity alters every Earth system and biome.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/106
2021-11-08T12:14:14Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/106
2021-11-08T12:14:14Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 5 No. 2 (2019): Environment From a Humanities Perspective; 30-40
A Postcolonial- Ecocritical Perspective on Modern American Literature
Zakarriya , Dr. Jihan
2021-11-08
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/106
Violence
identity
difference
postcolonial ecocriticism
en_US
This paper provides a postcolonial ecocritical perspective on modern American novel. It relates and examines aspects of ecological and human violence in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: The Evening Redness in the West (1985) and Anne Pancake’s Strange as This Weather Has Been (2007). The paper argues that while McCarthy represents examples of ethnic and racial violence and Pancake focuses on class violence, the two novelists articulate a particular awareness of the interconnections between economic and political hierarchy and different forms of ecological and human violence within different American contexts. The two novels, then, denounce the deterministic, colonial constructions of economy, power and knowledge in modern societies on the one side and the validation of antagonism and violence against otherness and difference on the other. The paper argues further that colonizing countries, as well as colonized countries, still suffer, at different levels, the discrepancies and contradictions within colonial culture and politics. The two novels expose the limitations of white Americans’ freedom, and equality within colonial and national frameworks. This paper specifically examines the psychological-mental challenges and changes of the fifteen-years-old female teenager, Bant in Strange as This Weather Has Been and the male teenager, the kid, in Blood Meridian as exemplifying how specific individuals and groups through their ecological awareness try to deconstruct such deterministic, colonial constructions of identity and violence.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/107
2021-11-08T12:14:14Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/107
2021-11-08T12:14:14Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 5 No. 2 (2019): Environment From a Humanities Perspective; 41-52
Human Subjects and “Green” Protest in Black African Photography at the Ninth Rencontres de Bamako
Ulmer, Spring
2021-11-08
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/107
African photography
neo-colonisation
toxic sublime
green protest
en_US
The photographs of George Osodi, Abdoulaye Barry, Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi, Nyaba Leon Ouedraogo, and Mário Macilau exhibited at the ninth Rencontres de Bamako photography festival, which had sustainability as its theme, featured humans living amidst environmental degradation. Documenting communities affected by oil extraction, fishermen in the face of climate chaos, as well as lives of diamond and granite miners and e-recyclers, these black African photographers’ human-centered focus—a trend identified by Cajetan Iheka as also common among most black African ecocritical authors and scholars—may eschew a more African cosmology-inspired gaze that ideally twines human and nonhuman implications of environmental tragedies. Yet such a human-centered focus, this paper argues, unlike the leading Western visual environmental discourse—the toxic sublime, obsessed as it is with an unpeopled landscape, ultimately, implicates the consumerism of privileged viewers in environmental degradation in ways environmental photography that resists assigning blame to corporations and consumers doesn’t.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/108
2021-11-08T12:14:14Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/108
2021-11-08T12:14:14Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 5 No. 2 (2019): Environment From a Humanities Perspective; 53-60
“The Hidden Valleys of My Home”:
Chakraborty, Paban
2021-11-08
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/108
Mamang Dai
Environmental Justice
Identity
Representation
Nature
Culture
en_US
Concepts of Environmental Justice have impacted on our understanding of the relationship between social aspects and the representation of nature. The environment, for centuries, has been seen as a trophy, to be possessed and controlled. The Anthropocene has ruptured this sense of oneness with nature. Going beyond the borders of language and authorial representation, nature has eluded the racks of human knowledge. We have come to understand that nature is also a part of our social interaction and politico-human relationships. The concept of identity associated with nature depends on the medium of representation. I want to show, in the light of environmental justice, that nature is a challenge, which is both cultural and representational. The question of identity creeps out of the unlikeliest places and challenges the norms of social and cultural representation. I will argue that the interdisciplinary approach of environmental justice can offer a better understanding of our relationship with nature. Simple modes of storytelling can use the medium of language to challenge and seek social justice through voices of the repressed. Environmental Justice is about this need for voicing the unheard stories and the unusual lives of those considered aloof from modern civilization. Mamang Dai is a perfect example of an author who understands the crisis of identity in association with the environment.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/109
2021-11-08T12:14:14Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/109
2021-11-08T12:14:14Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 5 No. 2 (2019): Environment From a Humanities Perspective; 61-68
Negative Externalities of Modern Development:
Mohapatra, Sarbani
2021-11-08
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/109
autochthonous identity
environmental cost shifting
postcolonial capitalism
myths
bioregionalism
ecological nationalism
en_US
The land for an indigenous community is a significant part of their collective consciousness. However, the economic model of growth that India adopted post-independence did not accommodate the idea of tribal territorial sovereignty. Ill-conceived industrial policy coupled with the failure of land reforms in most parts of the country displaced these peoples, severing the primordial links they had with their land. This paper would undertake a study of issues like legislative nomenclature for tribal groups, their subjection to structures of marginalisation and environmental cost shifting as the contemporary backdrop against which Gopinath Mohanty’s novel Paraja can be read. Paraja posits the inalienable autochthonous identity of a tribe rendered vulnerable to the logic of postcolonial capitalism. The paper seeks to explore the role played by the novel in articulating the worldview of an indigenous community. The mythical universe of the Parajas would be studied vis-à-vis Levi-Strauss’s structuralist discourse on myths. A modern state’s phallocentric gaze upon native land and resources would be addressed in conjunction with the ideas of bioregionalism and ecological nationalism.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/110
2021-11-08T12:14:14Z
sanglap:REW
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/110
2021-11-08T12:14:14Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 5 No. 2 (2019): Environment From a Humanities Perspective; 69-71
Book Review of Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept by Timothy Clark
Deepak
2021-11-08
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/110
en_US
In literary criticism, the term ‘ecocriticism’ is employed to capture the various aspects of the relation between literature and environment; it “expresses a desire to bring to the study of literature the concerns of ecopolitics” (Egan 33-34). Timothy Clark brings together his expertise in philosophy, literature and literary theory in addressing the question of ecocriticism, giving directions as well as discussing the possible challenges this task might encounter.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/113
2021-11-16T06:56:50Z
sanglap:ART
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/114
2021-11-09T07:25:59Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/114
2021-11-09T07:25:59Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 6 No. 1 (2019): Caste in/as Humanities: Unsettling the Politics of Suffering; 1-6
Caste in/as Humanities:
Kumar Das, Kalyan
Sengupta, Samrat
2021-11-09
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/114
Varna
Untouchability
Colonial Modernity
Experience
Self-narratives
Re-textualization
en_US
From the time of early travel narratives on South Asia by western tradesmen, orientalist scholars like William Jones, Max Muller, narratives written by Christian missionaries like Mead or Caldwell or the denigrators of ‘oriental societies’ like G.W. F. Hegel and concerned critics like Karl Marx to much of our postcolonial socio-political struggles, ‘caste’ has been perceived as either an elusive, resilient hydra-headed monster or a unique feature of the Hindu society that pre-empts competition that western modernity brings about. However, caste could be read both diachronically as well as synchronically, as a historical formation as well as a structural imperative. This makes any easy understanding of the question of caste impossible. Textual evidences are not enough, neither are the various archaeological resources, as we know that each historical moment is also constituted by the logic of synchronicity and structure which produces its own form of aphasia and silence. This introduction to the Special Issue of Sanglap on ‘Caste in Humanities’ would show how question of caste is also about silence and therefore requires incessant and seamless re-textualization.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/115
2021-11-09T09:46:48Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/115
2021-11-09T09:46:48Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 6 No. 1 (2019): Caste in/as Humanities: Unsettling the Politics of Suffering; 7-19
Natural Order and Wise Synthesis:
Casas Klausen, Jimmy
2021-11-09
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/115
Varna
Sovereignty
Violence
Aurobindo Ghosh
Arthaśāstra
en_US
The Dalit Panthers Manifesto made the claim that a revolutionary transformation of Indian society was necessary because of its systemic character—i.e., a form of systemic violence that “survives the ever-changing forms of power structure” from premodernity (“Hindu feudalism”) into and beyond the anticolonial struggle. This article aims to analyze two such systems of sovereignty-violence-varna, one in a premodern and the other in an anticolonial treatise, the Kauṭīlya’s Arthaśāstra and Aurobindo Ghose’s essays “Indian Polity” in The Foundations of Indian Culture. This article investigates how these visions of Indian polity—rightly ordered distinction; wise, stable synthesis—each necessitate two sovereign violences of varna: what, in complementary analyses, Walter Benjamin called lawmaking and law-preserving violence, and what Geroges Dumézil identified as magical and juridical sovereignty (of raj and brahman, respectively). By analysing two iterations of the sovereignty-violence-varna system, this article suggests that Brahmanic political theology might be better understood not as primarily based on inclusion/exclusion as in an Agambenian understanding, but rather on relations of opposition and complementarity.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/116
2021-11-09T12:06:26Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/116
2021-11-09T12:06:26Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 6 No. 1 (2019): Caste in/as Humanities: Unsettling the Politics of Suffering; 20-36
W.E.B Du Bois, B.R. Ambedkar and the History of Afro-Dalit Solidarity
Sekhar Purakayastha, Anindya
2021-11-09
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/116
W. E. B. Du Bois
B. R. Ambedkar
Afro-Dalit solidarity
Dalit-Black internationalism
caste as race
en_US
Caste is not a category, exclusively endemic to Indian society, rather, it typifies universal forms of social stratifications premised on racial, religious, ethnic and colour based segregation. In fact W E B Dubois, the celebrated Black civil rights crusader used the word ‘caste’ while diagnosing the cause of racism in Jim Crow America. DuBois and Ambedkar share a lot of commonalities, both were renowned observers of specific modes of social division prevalent in their individual societies, they spearheaded historic social mobilisations and evinced wonderful capacities to internationalize issues of caste and race as universal forms of social systems of discrimination to be abolished for ever. Both knew each other, communicated to each other and shared a collective vision for social justice. A conjunctive study of DuBois and Ambedkar will throw new light in Ambedkar studies by foregrounding unexplored histories of Afro-Dalit solidarities that had significant connection to postcolonial studies and international struggles for peace.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/117
2021-11-09T12:32:24Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/117
2021-11-09T12:32:24Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 6 No. 1 (2019): Caste in/as Humanities: Unsettling the Politics of Suffering; 37-51
Why all the Fuss about Purity?:
Saha , Subro
2021-11-09
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/117
en_US
Focusing on the question of untouchability and how a discourse of hygiene comes to justify it in the recent times, the paper attempts a brief genealogy tracing the linking of caste and the concept of hygiene. Trying to open up the entanglements that enable such linking, the paper goes deeper into the issues of sedimentation and embodiement that enable such continuity of caste discrimination. With such an approach the paper presents caste as a ghost and thus engages further on the contingencies haunting any attempt to theorize a ghost. It is herein that the paper calls for the urgency to engage more critically with the idea-matter embrace (instead of seeing them as detached) that constitute the elementary aspects of practicing caste: touch, purity and body.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/119
2021-11-10T04:55:50Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/119
2021-11-10T04:55:50Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 6 No. 1 (2019): Caste in/as Humanities: Unsettling the Politics of Suffering; 52-63
Obscurity of Camp Life:
Datta , Joydip
2021-11-10
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/119
Refugee Camp
Essence
Phenomena of Death
Silence
en_US
The paper would talk about how the existence of refugee camps in post-partition Bengal was very purposive and it was the immediate assistance given to the people whose way of life was disrupted by the sudden event of Partition. In Bengal the experiences of camp has an ontological distinction with regard to the question of caste. This paper will look into the obscurity of camp life with regard to its mode of silence. The understanding of silence is incorporated here from the seminal book by Martin Heidegger Being and Time to analyze the existential ontological foundation of language. The paper will try to interpret how in such spatio-temporal circumstances the being of lower caste refugees expresses themselves or their passivity to write. Maurice Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster gives us a new direction to think of silence. It will be attempted here to explicate whether the silence of the camp creates a possibility to disclose the dominant discourse of the political subject of the refugee.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/120
2021-11-10T05:04:09Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/120
2021-11-10T05:04:09Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 6 No. 1 (2019): Caste in/as Humanities: Unsettling the Politics of Suffering; 64-77
Undecidable Spaces:
Sengupta, Samrat
2021-11-10
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/120
Politics of Space
Ambedkar
Abandonment
Precarity
Dalit Narratives
en_US
Organization of space in a modern urban locale is apparently secular and unmotivated by any divine or religious principal. Yet it always functions on the basis of exclusion. Simultaneously the dread of the excluded returning to haunt the stability of the city structures its organization of space. In this paper we shall see how the pre-modern system of Casteism has similarities with as well as difference from the modern democratic system of governance across the world and its distinct form of abandonment. It shall also be suggested how abandonment becomes an indispensible technique through which a governmental apparatus comes into existence both in pre-modern Caste Society in Indian subcontinent as well as modern democracy. This work shall focus on Bengali Dalit author Manoranjan Byapari, coming from Namashudra, a Dalit subcaste in Bengal to show how autobiographical form of writing resurfaces the quintessential question of caste pushed back in modern normative arrangement of space.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/121
2021-11-10T05:19:07Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/121
2021-11-10T05:19:07Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 6 No. 1 (2019): Caste in/as Humanities: Unsettling the Politics of Suffering; 78-87
Namasudra Literature and the Politics of Caste in West Bengal
Roy , Rajat
2021-11-10
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/121
Caste
Bengal Politics
Namasudra Literature
Utopia
en_US
The paper examines the popular claim that West Bengal politics is ‘unique’ due to an absence of caste-based assertions in the post-colonial period. By taking Namasudra literature as the primary site, the paper argues that since the late twentieth century there is numerous literature written by low caste people in West Bengal on the issue of caste. These writings have created a literate Dalit public sphere operating at the grassroots level and mainly outside the framework of governmental party politics. One of the dominant themes of Namasudra literature is the visions of anti-caste utopia. By analysing a Namasudra writer and activist Manindranath Biswas’s texts Harichand Tattwamrita, the paper argues that Dalit’s writings on history don’t follow a linear or a mythical structure; rather, there is a political exigency for history, in which utopic past/future is often invoked through a logic of circularity and yet redemptive fulfilment of time.
oai:ojs2.sanglap-journal.in:article/122
2021-11-10T05:26:15Z
sanglap:ART
v2
http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/122
2021-11-10T05:26:15Z
Boibhashik, Kolkata
Vol. 6 No. 1 (2019): Caste in/as Humanities: Unsettling the Politics of Suffering; 88-98
Goopy Gayen Bagha Bayen:
Sen Chaudhuri, Ritu
2021-11-10
url:http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/122
Caste
Humiliation
Humour
Fantasy
Bengal
en_US
In this paper I read a specific moment of GupiGayenBhaghaBayen (1968), a children’s fantasy film by Satyajit Ray, as an instance of everyday caste experiences. I imagine the contours of caste – lying somewhat covert yet significantly bearing on the diegesis of the film – through the structure of humiliation. The reading moves around few basic questions: how do we trace the real-discursive presence of caste in Bengal? How do we read the unassuming events of caste discrimination? This is a multi-layered film where Ray talks about the villages and people of Bengal depicting relationships, poverty, politics, kingship, war, magic and several other things. Caste based discriminations operate within this inter-sectional arrangement. It is never expressed in direct terms. I talk about the film as it hints at one of the ways caste has functioned in Bengal – inconspicuous-ordinary yet oppressive and humiliating.
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