Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry

“A Private Woe”

2024-08-12T15:47:01+00:00

This paper tries to find out an adequately race-sensitive definition of the everyday. It contrasts universalized ideas of the everyday as underlined by Rita Felski with specific instances of racist violence described in Audre Lorde’s biomythography Zami: A New Spelling of my Name. It illustrates Felski’s inadequacy in describing the everyday from the perspective of black experience of racist violence. It posits racist violence as a paradoxical phenomenon – it is mundane and everyday while disrupting the everyday. It then questions Andrew Smith’s assertion that the ‘black everyday’ is structurally impossible. The paper also challenges the position of the black individual in a binary of being triumphant or tragic, instead of being ordinary. Taking inspiration from scholars like Matthew F. Delmont, Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe, this paper presents an alternative definition of the everyday, highlighting black people’s ability to recalibrate their everyday narratives despite racist violence, while also presenting definitions of ‘blackness’ beyond skin colour and violence and including the beautiful aspects of their cultural traditions. This paper then problematizes Felski’s assertion that the everyday is “secular” by engaging with the text and the biomythography as a genre.

Textures of the Everyday

2024-08-12T15:53:28+00:00

Memoirs are short autobiographical compositions that are focalized around particular memories and/or experiences instead of aligning with normativities of chronology or historical progress. Historically, the privileging of everyday experiences over life histories configured memoirs as accessible forms of autobiographical composition for disprivileged groups such as women and the working-class (Nussbaum 149). A focus on affects, or states of being, facilitates an intensification of the sensory elements of our terrain, enabling the prioritization of its ‘texture’ (Sedgwick 17). The cultural theorist, Kathleen Stewart employs the term ‘ordinary affects’ to qualify this intertwining of the everyday and the affective and to facilitate an enquiry into the generative potential of everyday life (7). The habitual and the ordinary are privileged in the memoir, titled Aaru Nee (2018) composed by the celebrated Malayali writer and activist, Sarah Joseph. The paper analyses the linkages between the affective registers and Sarah Joseph’s autobiographical subjectivity in Aaru Nee.

A Study of Everyday Aesthetics and (De)Alienation in Wim Wenders’ Alice in the Cities

2024-08-12T15:58:36+00:00

This article is a study of Wim Wenders’ Alice in the Cities (1974) where it attempts to explore the aestheticization of everyday images that Wenders weaves into the cinematic narrative of the film. The article examines how the aestheticization renders the everyday as a site of psycho-political transformation through the intertwined relational concept of ‘alienation’ and ‘de-alienation’. In its first section, the article will attempt a discussion of Wenders’ film aesthetics and the dialectical relation of the cinematic and the photographic images central to it. The article will also explore Wenders’ technique of defamiliarization as a method to critically highlight the transformative potential of everyday. In the second section, the article will examine how the everyday experiences generate the psycho-political alienation inevitable under conditions of post-war capitalism and its attendant modernization. Since this film navigates through different registers of everyday modernity and its impact on the consciousness of its characters, the article will borrow the philosophical insights and sociological approaches of Henri Lefebvre, Walter Benjamin, Georg Simmel who have attempted to theorize the experience of everyday in the context of modernity. It will also follow Nick Malherbe’s political reading of the psychological concept of alienation through a synthesis of the Marxist political praxis and Lacanian psychoanalysis. In the final section the article will investigate the subtle de-alienation that the film maps along the progress in the plot, the character graphs and through its visual regime of the everyday aesthetics in an endeavor to affirm Lefebvre’s hypothesis that the everyday has enormous transformative and emancipatory potential.

Exploring the ‘Everyday’ in Colin Wilson’s The Black Room and The Personality Surgeon

2024-08-12T16:07:03+00:00

This paper attempts to explore and analyse the idea of ‘Everyday consciousness’ in Colin Wilson’s two fictional works, The Black Room and The Personality Surgeon from the perspective of the concept of ‘natural attitude’ put forth by Edmund Husserl. As psycho-physical and spatio- temporal beings, we perpetually remain held in the thrall of ‘everyday’. Husserl terms it as the ‘natural attitude – a state of consciousness where we act in naivety and unreflectiveness without paying attention to how consciousness functions while going through different experiences. Wilson typically calls this state as ‘robot’- a state of mechanistic consciousness where we hardly reflect back, but go on dragging through the routine of everyday existence. The ‘robot’ tends to reduce the amount of ‘conscious’ activity, thus making the reality shadowy and existence inauthentic. This phenomenological analysis is crucial in fetching us a recognition and understanding of the ‘everyday’ which has implications for how we ‘normally’ act in the ‘everyday’ and how it can be changed qualitatively.

Precarious Self and/in the Dalit Everyday Social

2024-08-12T16:17:24+00:00

The paper attempts to analyse the precarity of the Dalit self in the everyday social encounters with caste and its affective state of humiliation. With reference to selected stories from Ajay Navaria’s 2013 anthology, Unclaimed Terrain, the paper examines the notions of alienation in the urban, the techniques of ‘passing’ or caste concealment, and the affect of shame within the framework of everyday existence of Dalits. In studying these elements, the paper elaborates on how the self enters an unstable position in its formation and re-formation. In the modern urban space that is marked by alienation, anonymity allows an escape from caste based humiliation and discrimination. To escape humiliation, the Dalit self indulges in its preservation through the strategy of caste concealment and ‘passing’ as a non-Dalit in the everyday. However, the pervasiveness of caste uses new techniques of humiliation as seen in language, behaviour, and practices, to keep its hegemonic dominance intact. Thus, there exists an impossibility of escape from and in humiliation that further creates a psychological fissure. The Dalit subject is caught in the dilemma of identity assertion and identity concealment in its escape ‘from’ humiliation, and of inhabiting and escaping the self ‘in’ humiliation. The paper, with its study of Ajay Navaria’s stories that explore the everyday spaces of the urban, where Dalits, caught in the angst of city life learn to negotiate their identity; would further help analyse their psychological burden and how caste marks its control over the everyday and also, through the everyday.

The ‘Everyday’ in the Context of Japanese Cultural Anti-Modernism

2024-08-12T16:22:21+00:00

With the opening up of Japan’s borders to the West in the mid-nineteenth century, after about two hundred years of self-isolation, and its eventual defeat in World War II, Japan rushed into an age committed to conscious modernization. The goal was large-scale economic growth, with success depending on the construction of the middle-class ‘salaryman’. In keeping with Lefebvre’s understanding of the modern ‘everyday’ and its ‘everydayness’, the Japanese bourgeois society found itself caught up in an urban ‘everyday’ of anxiety, loneliness and mental depression. This article seeks to highlight anti-modernist voices which look for a ‘rehabilitation’ of this ‘everyday’ by taking recourse to traditional Japanese aesthetic principles. The article points to the distinctly nuanced Japanese approach to the difference between the ‘regular’ and the ‘grand’, such that the ‘everyday’ and the ‘non-everyday’ is appreciated as one and the same. The article critically looks at Isao Takahata’s anime, My Neighbors the Yamadas, to underline the question of success of such Japanese anti-modernist manoeuvres within the domain of a commodified popular culture

Everyday Anthropocene and Multispecies Kinship in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island

2024-08-12T16:27:43+00:00

The term ‘everyday’ typically denotes the routine, mundane aspects of day-to-day life, embodying notions of normalcy, ordinariness, and familiarity. From this perspective, it stands as an antithesis to the unusual, strange, and extraordinary. However, the Anthropocene era—our current geological epoch marked by significant human impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems—has radically transformed our understanding of the ‘everyday’. In this epoch, the everyday no longer signifies a realm of predictability and relatability; rather, it encompasses new environmental realities that are bizarre and unprecedented. Therefore, contemporary literary fiction is challenged to redefine its approach to realism to aptly reflect the altered everyday experiences of its characters within the Anthropocene context. This paper examines Amitav Ghosh’s novel Gun Island (2019) as a literary manifestation of the ‘everyday Anthropocene’, a concept that recognises the Anthropocene not as a distant or abstract epoch but as an immediate, lived reality. The paper argues that the novel advocates for multispecies kinship as a vital survival strategy within the daily realities of the Anthropocene.

“Shakunakharas":

2024-08-12T16:33:28+00:00

The oral culture of the Central Himalayan region of Kumaun survives mainly due to its folk songs, which represent the true spirit of Kumauni life by reflecting the daily struggles, beliefs and superstitions, customs and rituals, and the popular legends and myths of the region. However, there are a variety of folk songs which are sung on specific occasions and have a particular social function. In the following paper, we have attempted to present the translations of some of these popular folk ritual songs called the Shakunakharas.

The Other Senses

2024-08-12T16:39:46+00:00

The word autobiography was coined by William Taylor in 1797 in The Monthly Review. This genre maps the recollection of truth, episodes, thoughts and experiences in the writer’s life. However, an autobiography coming from a disabled person encompasses much more than life experiences, as disability aggravates the challenges faced by a disabled individual. A. V. S. Jayaannapurna states that the “onset of 21st century brought to limelight the dreams and ambitions of individual,” and people began to express their subjectivity. This gave the individual a “spiritual space of freewill,” which Jayaannapurna describes as a “retrieval into self” (28). A psychologist can use the work as a guide to the writer’s mind to understand how disability and the dominant discourses about it may have direct or indirect bearing on the writer’s mind. Disability autobiography acts as an effective way of counter-discourse. It challenges the dominant ableist perceptions of that disability narrative that have contributed to portraying the negative somatic experiences in literature. It unveils or illuminates various issues that beset people with anomalous bodies, like human rights violations, stigma, and social and financial barriers. According to Causer, people who returned from wars and life-threatening diseases like polio and breast cancer spurred the autobiographical writings in such a way that nothing like this had happened before (1997). Until the 1950s, disability narratives were scant; whatever literature on disability was available was written by non-disabled writers based on their limited second-hand knowledge derived from myths, fiction and medical treatises. “The testimony of disabled people includes gritty accounts of their pain and daily humiliations — a sure sign of the rhetoric of realism” (Siebers 65). Autobiographical writing by disabled writers can inspire many disabled people to come out of their closets to share and assert their identity with pride. People, for a long time, relied on information about disability either in medical science or literary works, which was highly biased and heuristic. According to Thomas Causer, misrepresentation of disabled people could also be the cause of the lack of writing by the disabled about themselves. Thus, it becomes imperative for the marginalised to come up with transgressive autobiographical writing (Causer 5).