Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry
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Malvina Reynolds Sings the Truth: : Psychoanalytic Truth, the Post-Truth Era, and History as a Series of Psychoanalytic Sessions
Full text linkThis article showcases a psychoanalytic context for the idea of historical truth as presented in Malvina Reynolds’s album, Malvina Reynolds Sings the Truth (1967). It highlights music’s role as a narrative record of traumatic experiences and its importance within a therapeutic experience at the societal level. The album itself serves as a case study for socio-political topics such as climate change, racism, anti-intellectualism, and religious extremism—issues as critical today as they were in the 1960s. The article highlights music analysis’s dialogue with the psychoanalytic literature, interprets the album as an analytic construction from a single cultural psychoanalytic session, and locates it within a longitudinal study of cultural pathologies manifest in different eras. It demonstrates music’s importance in society’s healing process from traumatic experiences and concludes that music, popular music in particular, seems to have progressed toward more truth-telling and direct engagement with traumatic historical and cultural experiences. Songs as truth-seeking, historical, and narrative records are certainly not new, but their acceptance in popular circles has increased, pointing toward more potential for society to grapple with some of these psychoanalytic issues
A Psycho-semiotic Study of Lexical Choice in Urdu News Media
Full text linkLanguage is the primary means of human communication in which the addresser uses a given linguistic sign to arouse a specific set of meaning(s) in the addressee. The term meaning is used here to refer to the images, interpretations and feelings or signification aroused by a particular sign or lexical item. In other words, communication takes place when there is a correspondence of meaning/ signification between the communicator and the receiver.
Lexical diversity is a significant aspect of Urdu news media. It occurs due to the fact that the news editors, belonging to diverse news agencies, choose from diverse lexical resources at their disposal to convey the same message in their own style and as per their own needs. However, it needs to be considered that the linguistic signs/ words are not just useless or insignificant entities that are used haphazardly and randomly. They have a certain role and signification and are used with certain intent by the news editors while framing the news items. It is clear that meaning of these signs/lexical items depends upon a host of factors including their collocation, socio-cultural setting and context of use. As such, these language symbols are selected and utilized very consciously and systematically by the news editors and, in doing so, they chose and exploit the lexical items in a planned manner to convey the intended message to the audience.
Given this backdrop, the present paper aims to undertake a psycho-semiotic analysis of Urdu news media to throw light on the selective use of lexical items by the news editors according to their background, purpose, and intention
Introduction
Full text linkThe city as a mosaic of anarchic diversity and messy contradictions has always been a rich source of inspiration for practitioners of creative arts. Writers, painters, planners, photographers, performers have deemed the city as the loci of their desire, conflict, passion and memory to chart the minutes of quotidian life in various intricate forms and configurations. “The city came into being when a surplus of food allowed a diversity of tasks”, Lehan asserts in his introduction to The City in Literature. “Diversity is a key to urban beginnings and continuities, and diversity is also the snake in the urban garden, challenging systems of order and encouraging disorder and chaos” (8). As an eclectic site of cultural friction and contamination that simultaneously oscillates between polarities of belonging and non-belonging, order and chaos, the city unlocks myriad windows to the chroniclers of urban realities. The cities in their perpetual making and dismantling, bear an impression of what Amit Chaudhuri terms in a recent talk as the “unfinished-ness” in the context of modern cities1. The “unfinished” is a slippery term as Chaudhuri explains, while it may suggest the Modernist artists’ proclivity towards dereliction, ruin or fragmentation in metropolitan landscape, it also speaks of the “half-made”2, the backward, or the liminal spaces within an urban conurbation. However, this “unfinished-ness” or the fact that “cities are not finished products” as Chaudhuri posits, is also indicative of their “radical openness” and their inexhaustible potentials for reinventing themselves
Dance Movement Therapy and Kathak in India
Full text linkDeveloped in the 1940s America, Dance Movement Therapy is an innovative model that focuses on body movements, expressions, and gestures as helping factors to construe individual emotions and feelings. Originated in northern India and characterised by its special fast footwork (tatkar), hand gestures (hasta-mudra), and fast circular rounds or pirouettes (chakkars), the Indian classical dance form kathak has turned therapeutic with due course of time by implementing its movements for healing purposes. India, in the last few decades, has solemnised several DMT models which function individually for individual healing purposes without its linkage to Indian classical dance forms. The sampoornata DMT model of Kolkata Sanved (KS) is one such model which works towards healing, recovery, and empowerment for rehabilitation of the violence survivors, particularly from trafficking. The discussion of the model aims to bring out the institutionalisation of DMT in India for individual well-being and empowerment. The discussion built around kathak reflects upon the shift in its practice from traditional conventions to its contemporary linkage to therapeutic interventions. Drawing from a serious analysis of existing scholarships made in the areas of DMT in India and dance discourses that focus on Indian classical dances for their therapeutic values, the paper presents two chief arguments. First, established DMT in India confirms that the institutionalisation of kathak as therapy is weaker against the institutionalisation of DMT models for therapy. Second, the DMT approach to kathak attempts to highlight that kathak, with chief features of DMT, can serve as a strong method for psychosomatic and emotional healing
Reading the Disnarrated: : Traumatic Memory, Disrupted Communication, and the Crisis of Modernity in Jeet Thayil’s Low
Full text linkThis paper reads Jeet Thayil’s Low (2020) as a disjointed narrative that defies linearity to accentuate the circular nature of traumatic memory and grief. Chasing forgetfulness, Dominic Ullis flies to a modern Bombay to immerse his wife, Aki’s ashes and submerge his traumatic memories, but his attempts are thwarted by an involuntary recall of events that may have led to her suicide, contextualised within her recurrent retreats to ‘the low’ – a melancholic space she claimed to have access to. By observing past instances of miscommunication and missed communication between Ullis and Aki, and their hallucinatory conversation in the present, the paper examines how Ullis’s journey is guided by Gerald Prince’s concept of ‘the disnarrated’ to narrate his unresolved emotions surrounding traumatic loss retrospectively. Constituting “events that did not happen, but, nonetheless, are referred to,” the disnarrated, the paper argues, manifests itself in Ullis’s traumatic memory, as he gets flashbacks to events that did occur between him and Aki to express his regret for the ones that did not but could have (Prince 3). Drawing upon John F. Schumaker’s arguments connecting mental health with modernity, the paper proposes that Aki’s depressive condition, as residing in ‘the low,’ and her eventual suicide are consequences of her loneliness and unfulfilled relationships aggravated by the modernisation that characterises the urban landscape. Finally, it establishes disnarration as a powerful tool for mediating between an imaginary, hopeful world premised on possibilities of communication and the bleaker modern reality where mental health issues are silenced or stigmatised and thus fail to be expressed – allowing for a socio-cultural critique
The Play of Semiotic Repetition and Intertwined Semiotic Agency: : Ba in the Reciprocal Singing of Chinese Mountain Song
Full text linkPeircean semiotics is characterised by its totality and inclusiveness. Paul Kockelman proposed a neo-Peircean semiotic framework, in which he incorporated agents into Peircean trichotomy, distinguished and formulated residential and representational agency, discussed the semiotic relationship between agents and other semiotic components, and figured out how agents are distributed in the world. Kockelman\u27s discussion of the semiotic agency is highly detailed, but there are problems with the important missing part about the distribution of agency and the fact that he only discusses agency in the real world. This paper takes Han\u27ge, a reciprocal song in Guizhou, China, as a case study, using Ba theory to fill in the margins of agent distribution and analysing semiotic interaction in a semi-theatrical interaction. Through the analysis of Han’ge, this paper makes it clear that the same frame is repeated in the interaction of Han’ge. Additionally, introducing the concept of ba (individual actors and their surrounding environment as a whole) suggests that it manifests itself as an agent for the actors. Furthermore, the singers’ residential agency creates the ba that brings a different ontology from their casual world, and their representational agency becomes the main agency, which becomes the focal point of the creativity of the singers. Finally, as the ba theory suggests, this paper indicates that the Asian perspective can bring further granularity to the universal semiotic framework
Metaphors, Creative Representation, and Self: : A Semiotic Analysis of Selected Short Stories by Arab Women Writers
No full textThe present study investigates conceptual metaphors (CM) and raises a series of questions relevant to the study of literary texts by contemporary Arab women writers; what do the CMs identified in such texts tell us about women’s thoughts? Do such CMs structure Arab women’s thoughts? How do socio-cultural forces determine it? The present paper attempts to argue these questions by means of a semiotic analysis focused on the writings of three well-known contemporary Arab writers. The paper takes nine short stories by prominent Arabic women writers to understand the creative negotiation of their identity and social space. Through the semiotic reading of these stories, the use of various conceptual metaphors by the writers will also be discussed to understand their identification of self in the Arabic social structure
Helene Cixous’s Portrait of Dora: Dora’s Double and the Dramatic Form
Full text linkA certain element of precariousness is present in Freud’s text of the case study of Dora. Like other late nineteenth century works, this piece of writing which Freud calls a ‘case history’, is enclosed within the context of a ‘movement’ (the ‘psychoanalytic’ movement). However, unlike the literary or artistic productions associated with literary or cultural movements, Freud’s case history treads the slippery terrain between the medical science of psychoanalysis and literature, where on the one hand, its theoretical formulations seem to require the rigour of science, demanding narrative linearity and closure, and on the other hand, the knowledge that it would seek is paradoxically in the realm of human affairs, demanding openness to interpretative possibilities. Feminist critics and thinkers have questioned the interpretations of Dora’s illness offered by Freud and thus pointed to the instability in the hysteria archive. Drawing upon Helene Cixous’s insights into Dora’s bi-sexuality and into theatre as a medium that contributes to the psychic drama of hysteria, this paper reads the play “Portrait of Dora” by Cixous in order to suggest that the play attempts an ‘orthodramatisation’ in Lacanian terms of the patient’s subjectivity, which reverses the logic of identifications available to Dora in the scene of the analysis. Cixous’s fascination with the Dora case throws up some moot questions: What may be the distinct issues pertaining to the function of therapy and the cultural evaluation of hysteria that Freud’s case history of Dora leaves unattended or unresolved? How does Dora, as the resistant heroine, appear as an unstable sign within the double trajectory of the repressive past/the unhappy present and some Utopian future? Can there be an alternative/liminal ‘outside’ to the therapeutic context and its history where the hysteric could appear, and how could that liminality translate into the audience or spectator’s experience of the stage’s different mediums such as the visual images, overhead voices, and spoken lines? Who or what might be speaking the lines in the play, and to whom might they be addressed? The aim of the paper will be to address these questions and to demonstrate how the theatrical medium of the play written by Cixous offers insights into the revolutionary possibilities but also into the limitations of hysteria in terms of its transmissibility
Bedlam is the Only Cure: : Inverting Panoptic Biopower and the Failure of a Psychotic Revolution in Poe\u27s “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether”
Full text linkWhile popular interpretations of Poe\u27s dark comedy “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” describe the text, its themes, aesthetics, and narrative as satirical political commentary on American democracy, a latently subversive polemic against nineteenth Century American medico-legal praxes and their ancillary institutions, or as a parody of the works of other notable authors such as Charles Dickens and Nathaniel Parker Willis, the fact that Poe\u27s narrative transpires within the confines of a Maison de Santé suggests that the text is also importantly theoretically complex. Referring primarily to Michel Foucault\u27s discussion of the panopticon in Discipline and Punish (1975), his analysis of the relationship between sexuality and madness presented in The History of Sexuality (1976), and H. H. Scullard\u27s historiographical study of the festival of Saturnalia and its public and private praxes in Festivals and Ceremonies of the Roman Republic (1981), this paper will explore how Poe\u27s narrative presents madness and bedlam as a force and a site of actively disrupting the primary psychophysical principles of the panopticon\u27s establishment and maintenance of biopower over its inmates. As such, this paper will examine the ways in which Poe presents madness and bedlam as \u27cures-by-inversion\u27 against the malady of the criminalization of socio-culturally excrescent forces/behaviours and the pathologising of discord, ruckus, sensuality, excess, and the absurd
\u27Blackie\u27 by Abhimanyu Acharya : (Translated from Gujarati by Viraj Desai)
Full text linkIn the current issue of Sanglap, we are publishing a Gujarati short story titled “Blackie” by Abhimanyu Acharya. The story seems to be an addition to what we popularly call cross-over literature. Cross-over texts of diasporic encounters, conflict zones, and hybrid experiences in the context of India are largely written in English, with a few exceptions. The story is significant because it is suggestive of both the sensibility and temperament of people from Gujarati business communities supporting a young migrant from their community to settle and establish in the West and the cross-over experiences of the migrant struggling to get permanent residence. The story involves various borders of class, migration, or human-animal. The entry point to the story is, however, its sense of humour mixed with pain familiar in Rohinton Mistry’s short stories foregrounding an inaccomodable man disconcerted and misfit to the new cultural environment. The alienation of the narrator in this story comes from his gradual becoming of a servant, dependent on his master when he gets supported by a relatively established and wealthy Gujarati Mehta uncle, a close acquaintance of his family. This kind of patron-client relationship between a wealthy provider and a dependent echoes the feudal aura of Indian society, which continues in Canada in another form. We have heard in the story that working under a white man might be even worse with provisions for racism. The story is titled “Blackie,” and we get to know from Mehta uncle that such words are prohibited from being used in that country dominated by liberal values, apparently anti-racist in nature, though such words we know are used randomly in India – their homeland. The Gujarati word ‘kalio’ is used to suggest the public use of such words in India. So, Mehta uncle’s pet dog cannot be called by his adored name Blackie in public. He has a proper Christian name – Jack. The delayed impact of colonialism and its dependency complex continues in new shapes and forms in the postcolonial diasporic experience. The trajectory of belonging is interspersed with signs of unbelonging. The story foregrounds the indeterminacy and fluid experiences that probe us to think beyond the easy binaries of colonial ideology. We witness how ambivalence is created through various inequalities of power – the narrator’s dependence on Mehta uncle, the dog’s dependence on the narrator when under economic pressure he unwillingly accepts to be its caregiver, or Mehta’s aspirations and associations with the West in terms of naming the dog or marrying a Western woman. ‘Blackie’ is the name that cannot be used in public. Yet racial divide and hierarchies born out of coloniality continue creating manifold forms of marginalisation, which the translation captures effectively. After all, the title of the story in the original Gujarati is “Blackie” as well. Blackness and whiteness are translated. Power differences endear as well as exploit the ‘other’. At the end of the story, where the dog is removed from Mehta by a conspiracy of the narrator to free himself from the ignominy and shame of serving a dog out of economic compulsion, acts as a reckoning and the reminder. The image of the gaze of the dog at the moment of its being taken away from Mehta and Mehta’s painful look flashes in the narrator’s memory long after the event when he gets permanent residence and becomes independent in Canada. Stories live beyond the determinacies of power in the horizon of care and compassion unachievable in the present and loaded with a sense of responsibility that is to come. (By Dr Samrat Sengupta, Translation Editor)