Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry
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Unreliable Physical Places and Memories as Posthuman Narration in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go
Full text linkIn this paper, I argue that Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is best understood through analysis of its unstable places and the narrator’s unstable memory. Through these devices, Ishiguro constructs a panoptic state of surveillance, transforming an otherwise non-urban space into a pseudo-cityscape. It is through the narrator’s interactions and memories of her interactions with these urbanized and controlled spaces that the reader can truly understand and engage with this posthuman narrative. Without fully understanding the ways in which rural places function as cityscapes for the clone characters of this novel, the reader is unable to meaningfully understand the experiences of the clones. This paper employs theories of Edward W. Soja in order to advance discussion of this novel beyond its application of the panoptic mechanism. It also looks closely at the ways the memories of the displaced are used to manipulate the concept of place and its function throughout the novel
Confronting Epochs: The Many Faces of Colonial and Postcolonial Park Street in Kolkata
Full text linkThis paper explores the history of the multicultural urban milieu of Kolkata’s Park Street. It traces the phases of colonization, decolonization and the resistance evoked by the latter. The paper delves into the strategic tool of nostalgia emanating from the advocates of colonial aesthetics to resist components of decolonization.
The paper argues that with post-colonial developments, the economic and cultural interests of the dominant socio-economic groups sought to resist certain aspects of decolonization and preserve the colonial-western heritage of Park Street which by then had become an antique object of the past laden with economic, social and cultural values. The consequent clichéd idea about Park Street as an entertainment hub and symbol of western culture got publicized by mass media and led to the suppression of public discourse regarding the other Park Street born within itself and in its eastern stretch beyond Acharya Prafulla Chandra Road. The other Park Street was blocked from dominant representative images and icons of the city and the street as a result of imposition and re-strengthening of the stereotype centering round Park Street. The concealment of this duality of Park Street gradually was illuminated marking the street’s entrance into the political discourse of the city.  
Dreams of Minsk: A Journey through Aesthetics of Utopia within a European Experience
Full text linkMinsk, the capital city of Belarus, is in search of a cultural text. As writers and artists have done for many today iconic cities, Artur Klinau provides Minsk with such text, in his book Minsk: The Sun City of Dream. The aim of the present article is to explore and interpret this text, approaching it through cultural semiotics.
In Klinau’s literary work, notions of architecture, art, history, philosophy intertwine with personal memory and aesthetic experiences, drawing the exceptional image of a Soviet utopian city with a soul of “provincial sentimentalism”. At the periphery of the Russian and then Soviet Empires, after the Cold War East-West divide, Minsk developed a nostalgia “for something which is not”: Europe. This text shows how Minsk, with its ‘Eastern’ heritage, is instead deeply rooted in Europe.
Addressing many aspects of Minsk’s and Belarus’ historical identity, Klinau shows also the tension between the city and the Empire, manifesting its coercion on the urban space in various forms, in a dialectic relation with philosophic and aesthetic traditions of Utopia. As a result, the proposed text bridges between “actual Minsk” and “potential or desired Minsk”, finally letting the city’s oppressed ego meet with its own manifestation
A Flâneur for the 21st Century: DeLillo’s Cosmopolis
Full text linkWalter Benjamin’s flâneur figure has been a constant presence in the literature of the city since the figure’s evocation in the poetry of Charles Baudelaire. However, while the figure has more or less remained the same, it is the space in which the figure exists that has changed. Rather than focusing on the flâneur figure, my starting point is instead the city in which the flâneur exists. DeLillo’s novel Cosmopolis explores the notion of the flâneur in a city of the digital age. As the contemporary flâneur figure constructs the self within a digital space, traditional notions of the flâneur are lost – or at least need to be reimagined. This paper aims to explore the idea of a 21st century flâneur in DeLillo’s work Cosmopolis, to shed light on how we imagine ourselves in an increasingly digital world. 
The Bombay of Rohinton Mistry: Mapping the cityscape in A Fine Balance and Such a Long Journey
Full text linkThe metropolis of Bombay is rendered a sentient entity with its physical and mental existences in the entire oeuvre of Rohinton Mistry. This paper is aimed at studying the contours of this cityscape as undergoing constant frisson between the forces of change and the pro-status quo forces of resistance against the socio-economic and religious landscape of the city, as traversed by Mistry in Such a Long Journey and A Fine Balance. The implications of the authorial position of Mistry as a diasporic writer belonging to an ethnic minority community in India as well as the Parsi perspective on the depiction of Bombay will also be examined. Additionally, the paper will investigate the engagement of the city of Bombay as portrayed in the novels with the Derridean idea of \u27new cosmopolitics\u27,and “cities of refuge” and the concept of space and the State as analyzed by Henri Lefebvre
Writing Johannesburg into Being: Rituals of Mobility and the Uneven City in Mark Gevisser, Ivan Vladislavić and Lindsay Bremner’s Writing
Full text linkThis article explores the role of Johannesburg in the literary imagination of three contemporary South African writers, counterposing Mark Gevisser’s memoir Dispatcher: Lost and Found in Johannesburg (2014) and Ivan Vladislavić’s semi-autobiographical work of creative non-fiction Portrait with Keys (2006) with Lindsay Bremner’s collection of personal and architectural essays Writing the City into Being (2010). These white South African authors are keenly aware of their privileged position: they use the space offered by writing to make sense of their relation to Johannesburg and the access granted to them because they have the choice either to walk or to drive. I argue that this seemingly mundane choice is indicative of the continuing inequality of post-apartheid South African society, and that this is foregrounded in Bremner, Gevisser and Vladislavić’s literary writing as they use personal rituals of urban mobility to index and expose the boundaries and continuing unevenness of the city. 
Crossing the Threshold: Women in Colonial City Space
Full text linkWomen’s negotiation with the city in the late nineteenth century began with the advent of the reformist agendas by the urban middle class elites and the white colonizers. The relationship of women with this colonial city space in the nineteenth century Calcutta was two-fold. On the one hand the city witnessed the gradual exodus of men and women of the lower class and castes under the impact of rapid industrialization and urbanization who gave birth to and nurtured Calcutta’s rich repertoire of popular cultural forms, the Battala literature. On the other hand, the colonial administrative and culture set-up introduced the social category of the middle class urban elites, popularly known as Bhadralok. Under the social reformist agenda of female emancipation, these middle class urban elites cultivated the “new woman”, the bhadramahila who, through the strategic compliance and contestations to the modes of new patriarchy, curved a space of her own in the colonial city. The present paper looks into the processes of crossing the thresholds by these women, who, being situated within the structure of dual colonization of tradition and modernity, attempted to redefine the city space from a new perspective
Cities from Above in Literature: Moscow, Kolkata1
Full text linkBy focusing primarily on Mikhail Bulgakov\u27s The Master and Margarita and Nabarun Bhattacharya\u27s Kangal Malshat, this paper tries to offer an understanding of the multi-layered implications of the “view from above” in fiction. Distinguishing the literary representations as having a separate set of concerns and problems, as opposed to similar views in visual cultures, the paper focuses on three aspects mainly. The first section deals with the moral connotations of flight and its function in fiction; the second deals with the power/knowledge equation and high-altitude perspectives in literature; and the final sections deal with ideas of history and the high-altitude perspective, along with elements of the carnivalesque in such transgressive texts