Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry
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Book Review: An(other) Quest for the Political:: Ranjan Ghosh’s Detechnification of Pedagogy Through Tagore
Get PDFWhile reading Ranjan Ghosh’s book Aesthetics, Politics, Pedagogy and Tagore: A Transcultural Philosophy of Education (2017) one may follow the (in)fusion approach and the philosophy of trans introduced by Prof. Ghosh himself (Ghosh 2016)
Indian Women in Comedy: : An Inquiry into the Perpetuation of Rape Culture on Social Media
Get PDF‘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. 
Life, Law, and Abandonment in Giorgio Agamben
Get PDFThe 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
Horror’s Effect on Identity in Life of Pi and Arthur Gordon Pym
Get PDFBoth 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
Words in a world of scaling-up:: Epistemic normativity and text as data
Get PDFCultural 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
The Real and the Cut
Get PDFAbstract: 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
Human Subjects and “Green” Protest in Black African Photography at the Ninth Rencontres de Bamako
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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
Intimacy and the Aesthetic of “Litter” Writing: : Epistolary Renarrativisation in Georgina Kleege’s Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller
Get PDFFirst-person genres of life writing such as autobiography and diary at the point of their completion evoke anxiety about the ‘death of the author.’ The letter does not do so: it forms part of a correspondence and facilitates continued writing. Its relational nature indicates that the epistolary closure might nevertheless spell authorial death upon readerly non-response. This paper inquires into the problem of non-response as confronted by the subject who addresses her letters to a dead person with reference to Georgina Kleege’s Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller (2006). The readerly silence in a fictional correspondence thwarts the subject’s desire for interpersonal intimacy. In Blind Rage, however, the very act of writing the letter rather than its intersubjective reciprocation becomes a way of forging intimacy with one’s dead addressee; the fulfilment of intimacy in fictional letter writing is processual and not closural
“Give it a definite literary flavour”:: Humphry House’s Experiments with the Pamphlet as Genre
Get PDFHumphry House’s I Spy with My Little Eye (1937) was a satirical pamphlet which explores the system of “spyarchy” that had been imposed in Bengal in the late 1930s by the colonial police. This meant a constant surveillance of thought, action and writing by the state, accompanied by “messy” operations of policing through casual informants. The pamphlet was received enthusiastically in Bengal, where its perceptiveness and use of humour to call out an oppressive regime were appreciated. Its reception in England was less warm. This paper is an attempt to understand the political moment which produced this mysterious text and to explore the generic experiments which the author undertakes in his writing of it. It situates the author within the Calcutta social circles he inhabited and the text within two intersecting traditions: that of satirical pamphleteering and of political pamphleteering, in order to assert its importance in the history of pamphlets in terms of generic flexibility