Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry
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Leela by Navtej Bharati and Ajmer Rode:: (Language: Punjabi), Second edition, 2019, Basant Foundation (Canada) and Autumn Art (India), Rs 995; $ 49.95.
Get PDFNavtej Bharati and Ajmer Rode are Punjabi-Canadian poets. They are brothers, and Bharati is the elder of the two. They co-produced Leela twenty years ago, in 1999. The book, published in the UK and Canada, elicited considerable critical appreciation and won the Anad Foundation Award. In 2019, the book has been republished with revisions
Introduction: : New Materialism(s) and the Question of the Non-human
Get PDFThis introduction attempts to briefly trace the diverse cartographies and philosophical lineages of new materialism. It charts their multidirectional, multispecies, multidisciplinary orientations in the attempt to liberate conceptualizations of matter and materiality beyond the limits of anthropocentrism and dualistic frameworks of humanist scholarship. However, such attempts don’t remain completely free from contradictions and the introduction, therefore, simultaneously traces the dialogic and critical approaches within new materialist scholarship that accepts their limitations and urges on the necessity of continuous generation of newer ways of questioning and rethinking materiality. The introduction, therefore, attempts to remind that neither the question of matter nor the epistemological approaches of new materialism are one. With such a brief tracing of the essentially pluralistic character of new materialism, the introduction, therefore, gathers together the thematic concerns of this volume, and how the essays engage with cautious experimentations on what the doing of new materialisms in newer, non-western contexts can offer for a fresh re-examination of non-human matters as well as enabling newer ways of engaging with new materialist scholarships
Materiality, Agency, and the “Revised Sublime” in Northeast Indian Anglophone Poetry
Get PDFThis paper undertakes a new materialist reading of the corpus of Anglophone poetry originating from India’s Northeastern states by instrumentalizing the experience of the sublime as a cultural technique that endorses the operations of its surrounding human-nonhuman network. A close reading of the corpus of poetry from India’s Northeast reflects the “material turn” in the discourse of humanities scholarship that involves other interrelated discourses such as feminism, ecocriticism, posthumanism, and material culture studies etc. Human intervention in the landscape producing the experience of the revised sublime disrupts the set distinctions and explores the unfolding of a more-than-human world which provides a larger space for reinventing the narratives. The inhabitants of this region feel a connection between the changes seen in their natural surroundings and their half-forgotten history of ethnic identities. The corpus problematises the concept of extinction by revealing several paradoxical patterns of human existences therein. The concluding part reflects on the affect produced from the experiences of the revised sublime in reconstructing the relationships between humans, nature and the material world. Through the lens of new materialism, this essay will explore how these paradoxical matrices posit the notion of the ‘revised sublime’ and affect at the centre of discussion that nullifies the distinction between organic and inorganic matters and manifests agentic capabilities within inorganic matters
Psychos’ Haunting Memories:: A(n) (Un)common Literary Heritage
Get PDFIn 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
Fractured Identities, Moral Mediations, and Cancerous Aspirations of Madeline Lee and Silas Lapham:: The Allure of Power versus the New Woman and the Nouveau Riche Man
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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
Of Men, Machines and Apocalypses:: Masculine Anxieties in Indian Speculative Fiction
Get PDFExploding 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
The Nation and its Discontents:: Depicting Dissent during the Emergency
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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
Gazing into the Mirror:: Censorship and Self-censorship in Early Gay Australian novels
Get PDFEarly 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
The Censor’s “filthy synecdoche”:: Samuel Beckett and Censorship
Get PDFThis 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.
Animal-humanities and the Eco-sophical Parergon:: Homo Reflectus in Species History
Get PDFPhilosophy 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