Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry
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Nabarun Bhattacharya: An Introduction
Get PDFNabarun Bhattacharya was born in Calcutta in 1948 to Bijan Bhattacharya and Mahasweta Devi, both noted literary personalities
4+1 Nabarun Bhattacharya
Get PDFIt was a day of incessant rain, though not torrential enough to cause waterlogging. The wind was shivering cold and the light was weak
Terror and the Literary:: An Introduction
Get PDFTerror and terrorism are probably the most frequent catchwords of the contemporary times. At the turn of the century, Hardt and Negri warned us that we are living in a world of Empire as biopolitical production, where transnational corporations operate the mechanics of governance, and can wage ‘just war’ and resolve conflicts with the moral policing of the NGOs (2001: 22-41). Terror is part of the surveillance and regulation of life, while ‘terrorism,’ in its delimited political use, is only one way of engaging with it. Agamben’s notion of ‘state of exception’ in fuller picture indicates that the practice of life in contemporary times is a conscious response to fear of an unknown, unaccountable death which may not always be the death of the body as corpse. As Elizabeth Dauphinee and Christian Masters note: “Livings and dyings are ruptured by survivings that are neither livings nor dyings, but which are otherwise: liminal spaces of abjection that are dangerously difficult to recognize.” (2007: xvi) If contemporary bio-politics frames life from a normative position of mortality, as Badiou argues, its ethics foregrounds a ‘victimary’ notion of the human subject. The task for Badiou’s ethics is to counter-emphasize the ‘immortal’ in man where he treats a situation from the point which is impossible in relation to that situation. To treat the situation qua its impossible point is to change the situation and replace it with a new one and this highlights the subject’s immortality over the ephemeral situation. If this change is premised on the evental dimension of novelty, it encounters the impossible, which is not without its horizon of terror and trauma
Acknowledging Fascination with Catastrophe and Terrorism:: September 11 and the Nuclear Destruction of Hiroshima/Nagasaki
Get PDFAt the end of the twentieth century there was a critical shift from prioritizing the anti-aesthetic and the “sublime” towards favoring beauty in aesthetic as well as political matters. In this context, the present article discusses the role of beauty and aesthetics in such major disasters as the September 11 terrorist attacks and the Hiroshima/Nagasaki nuclear bombings. More specifically, it posits that there is a morally unacceptable feeling of fascination when witnessing destructive events of such magnitude. On the other hand, aesthetic appreciation is paradoxically indispensable for an ethical assessment of man-made catastrophes
Body and Terror: : Women’s Bodies as Victims andPerpetrators of Terror
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Bodies are vulnerable because they are intrinsically linked to death. Bodies are social and they are embedded with meaning. They cannot be extracted from their specific contexts. The nation is also often equated with body politic. As a result individual bodies become the site of security/ insecurity depending on the social location of bodies. Within this discourse, this article tries to locate the bodies of women. It will look at the bodies of women as victims of terror as well as perpetrators of terror. It will try to understand if in these differentiated roles, women are able to break away from stereotypes or are still caught in heteronormative narratives
Penny-wise…’:: Ezra Pound’s Posthumous Legacy to Fascism
Get PDFThe article traces the history of Ezra Pound’s engagement with Fascist politics and its contemporary influence on the far-right in America, Britain and Italy. It seeks to explore a political legacy of Pound’s, which is sometimes strangely at odds with his poetic legacy but on other occasions, informs and coalesces into the latter
Speculation and Fiction
Get PDFAs students of literature, one of the most frequent questions we encounter is: how does one write anything? What are the factors responsible for writing fiction? Does fiction have its autonomous qualities? Put in a slightly different way: what is thought or how is thought put into fiction? Broadly speaking, the study into the domain of thought is speculation. The Oxford English dictionary defines “speculation” this way
The Posthuman Child as a Genderless Ideal
Get PDFArtemis Fowl is a series of eight science fiction fantasy novels targeted at the young adult audience. The central protagonist is Artemis Fowl II, a 12-year-old criminal mastermind who exploits the magical Fairy People and discovers the fairy technology commonly known as magic. The series raises several important discussions around androgyny, gender roles and even re-conceptualizes the traditional image of the body. As a text of children’s literature, Artemis Fowl intersects the fantasy world of magical creatures of pixies and fairies and the real world of the pre-teen and re-imagines them to provide new answers to questions of what the body is in the age of technoculture. Positioned among these concerns is the adolescent teen’s search for his own identity, which is woven together with bioethical and technological issues. The series raises important questions about the co-existence of humans with the machinic developments of the twenty-first century as well as about the very nature of human identity in an age of advanced scientific possibility. This article will serve to answer some of these complexities through a critical assessment of how the posthuman/ technologically enhanced child is foregrounded all through the series and will interrogate his relationship to gender and adulthood
The Italian Job:: Giambattista Vico at the Origin of Edward Said’s Humanism
Get PDFThe aim of this paper is twofold. First, it will try to clarify the importance of the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) in shaping Edward Said’s categories. Second, it will shed light on the theoretical importance of such genealogy. From the philological point of view, it is important to show how profound Said’s knowledge of Vico’s work is. Therefore, this paper will follow references to Vico within the whole of Said’s work, from late the sixties ones to the posthumous Humanism and Democratic Criticism. As far as theory is concerned, understanding Said’s use of Vico’s concepts explains why Said refers to his own work with the controversial term “humanism.” Vico, critiquing modernity from the onset, is the basis on which Said built a new critical humanism. In particular, Said uses the very essential elements of the philosophy of Vico: the importance of the body as the source of humanity, the critique of modern abstractions, the idea that man knows what he makes, and the idea of the historicity of every human invention and construction
Hong Kong as a Test Case for World Literature
Get PDFThis article posits Hong Kong as a test case for several theoretical perspectives currently developed in the rising field of world literature. Focusing on three main areas—namely, Hong Kong’s semi-peripheral neocoloniality, its language politics, and the proliferation of the poetry genre—the article aims to examine how world literature and Hong Kong can strike a dialogue with each other, exploring each other’s limits. For Hong Kong to make meaningful contributions to world literature, it desperately needs to build a name for itself as a literature of its own concerns