Democracy, Resistance, and the Practice of Literature:

Introduction

Authors

  • Sourit Bhattacharya
  • Arka Chattopadhyay

Abstract

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?

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Author Biographies

Sourit Bhattacharya

Sourit Bhattacharya is a doctoral candidate in English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. He works in historical crisis and literary realism in the twentieth-century Indian novel. His broader areas of interest include colonial and postcolonial studies, especially South Asia and Southern Africa, world literature, environment studies, materialist aesthetics, and crime fiction. 

Arka Chattopadhyay

Arka Chattopadhyay is an M.A, MPhil in English Literature, Jadavpur University, India. Having finished his MPHIL on Samuel Beckett and Alain Badiou, he is now pursuing his PHD at Writing and Society at University of Western Sydney on Samuel Beckett and Lacanian Psychoanalysis under the supervision of Prof. Anthony Uhlmann and Dr. Alex Ling. He has presented at conferences like 2010 and 2011 NEMLA Conventions, 2012 International Samuel Beckett Working Group and the 2014 Oxford Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies Symposium. His articles have been published in books, anthologies and journals like Miranda and Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui. He has edited the book Samuel Beckett and the Encounter of Philosophy and Literature with James Martell, published by Roman Books, London in 2013. Along with Sourit Bhattacharya, he is the editor of the peer-reviewed online academic journal Sanglap. He has a chapter titled ‘“I switch off”: Towards a Beckettian Minority of Theatrical Event’, forthcoming in Palgrave MacMillan’s 2015 book Deleuze and Beckett edited by Stephen Wilmer et al.

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Published

2021-10-27

How to Cite

Bhattacharya , S. ., & Chattopadhyay, A. (2021). Democracy, Resistance, and the Practice of Literature:: Introduction. Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry, 1(2), 1–26. Retrieved from https://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/32