Democracy, Resistance, and the Practice of Literature: Introduction

  • Sourit Bhattacharya University of Glasgow
  • Arka Chattopadhyay IIT Gandhinagar

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?

Author Biographies

Sourit Bhattacharya, University of Glasgow

I am an Early Career Fellow in the Institute of Advanced Study at the University of Warwick and a Sessional Tutor at Warwick's English and Comparative Literary Studies department, from which I also received my Ph.D. degree in June, 2017. This degree was funded by a Chancellor's International Scholarship and was jointly supervised by Prof Neil Lazarus and Prof Pablo Mukherjee. I have BA and MA degrees in English Literature from (Presidency College) University of Calcutta and from Jadavpur University, Calcutta, and MPhil degree in Cultural Studies from the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC), Jadavpur University. Before joining Warwick, I taught as part-time faculty in English at Rani Birla Girls' College, an undergradute college under Calcutta University.

Arka Chattopadhyay, IIT Gandhinagar

Arka Chattopadhyay is assistant professor of literary studies in the department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Gandhinagar, India. He is a B.A., M.A., MPhil in English Literature, from Presidency College and Jadavpur University, India. He has written his MPHIL thesis on Samuel Beckett and Alain Badiou and finished his PHD from Western Sydney University on Beckett and Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Arka has been published in books like Deleuze and Beckett and journals like Miranda, Textual Practice, S, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui and Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, Harold Pinter Review, Language and Psychoanalysis.  He has co-edited Samuel Beckett and the Encounter of Philosophy and Literatureand a Bengali critical compendium on the works of Nabarun Bhattacharya. Arka is one of the founding editors of the online literary journal Sanglap (http://sanglap-journal.in/). He has guest-edited the SBT/A issue on Samuel Beckett and the Extensions of the Mind. His first monograph, Beckett, Lacan and the Mathematical Writing of the Realis published by Bloomsbury in December, 2018. He is currently co-editing a volume of essays on and translations of Nabarun Bhattacharya, contracted by Bloomsbury for 2020.

Published
2015-01-31
How to Cite
Bhattacharya, S., & Chattopadhyay, A. (2015). Democracy, Resistance, and the Practice of Literature: Introduction. Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry, 1(2), 01-26. Retrieved from https://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/66
Issue
Vol 1 No 2 (2015): Democracy, Resistance, and the Practice of Literature
Section
Articles

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