Theory and the Transformative Humanities [1 ed.] 1527584925, 9781527584921

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Theory and the Transformative Humanities

Theory and the Transformative Humanities Edited by

Kunhammad K K and Rafseena M

Theory and the Transformative Humanities Edited by Kunhammad K K and Rafseena M This book first published 2022 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2022 by Kunhammad K K and Rafseena M and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-8492-5 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-8492-1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Theory and the Transformative Humanities .......................... 1 Dr. Kunhammad K K Learning from Derrida: The Literary and the Political .............................. 14 Prof. Jonathan D Culler Interdisciplinary Humanities and the Future of Theory ............................. 34 Prof. Jonathan D Culler Media Convergence, Virality and Fandoms: Reflections on Contemporary Celeb-Culture ........................................................................................... 51 Dr. Arunlal K Narrative as Cognitive Mapping: Reading Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.................................................................................. 60 Dr. Pradeepkumar K The Infinity and Ecstasy of Meaning: The Possible Worlds of Dhwani.... 65 Thulasi Das B From natio to Nation: Ideological Ambivalence in the Postcolonial Conceptualization of Nation ...................................................................... 72 Dr. Prasanth V G Historicising Narrative through Cultural Memory: A Study of Select Native Novels ............................................................................................ 77 Manchusha Madhusudhanan Possible Bonds: Medical Humanities and Interdisciplinary Theoretical Exchange ................................................................................................... 87 Smrthi M Venugopal and Sheron K P R Memorising the Holocaust Trauma: A New Imperialist Hegemonic Mechanism ................................................................................................ 95 Dr. Ninitte Rolence and Saigeetha S

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Towards a Binary Articulation: Food Metaphors in Joanne Harris’ Five Quarters of the Orange ................................................................... 102 Dr. Duna Liss Tom The Hetero-Normalisation of the Transgender Identity: A Critique of Njan Marykutty.................................................................................... 108 Dr. Anu Kuriakose The Digital Gaze: Unveiling the Transition of Gaze in the Digital Era... 119 Dr. Rafseena M Visual Discourses of Transformative Performativity: Reading Women’s Art Installations ....................................................................................... 129 Dr. Sajan N The Epical Romance of Sirat ‘Antar: Negotiating Contours in Arabian Chivalric Courtly Traditions .................................................................... 141 Dr. Pinky Isha The Matrix of Desire: David Lurie and the Deleuzio-Guattarian Ethics in Coetzee’s Disgrace.............................................................................. 150 Milda Mary Savio and Shivshankar Rajmohan A K Cancel Culture Paving the Black Mirror in “Forget Me Not” ................. 161 Prasadita L Raveendran Contributors ............................................................................................. 170

INTRODUCTION: THEORY AND THE TRANSFORMATIVE HUMANITIES KUNHAMMAD K K

There is no theoretical critique without practical transformation… And no practice without transformation. As a result, …, an interpretation … will not even have been possible, as interpretation, without transformation, without transformative alteration. —Jacques Derrida, Theory & Practice 1967 (2019)

The Humanities has been at the forefront of intellectual discourse for centuries. Nevertheless, there seems to be a growing consensus among educational thinkers and researchers that the humanities discipline is in a state of crisis. The essence of this “sorry state of affairs” is inescapably captured in the words of Ibanga B. Ikpe: The future of the humanities as an academic pursuit that is relevant to the needs of society has been variously described as gloomy, hopeless and bleak. This diagnosis has been mainly due to declining interest in the humanities both by students and the society in general. Whereas the more favoured disciplines in business and technology bask in the admiration of society and thereby attract funding for studies, research and community engagements, the disciplines that make up the humanities struggle by the day under the threat of being consigned, like alchemy, to the rubbish heap of history. The reason for this sorry state of affairs is not farfetched; the humanities is said to have failed to evolve with society and has therefore lost its relevance. (51)

Ikpe touches on the two crucial dimensions of this debate about the increasing obsolescence of the humanities discipline. On the one hand, various thinkers, including Rabindranath Tagore, Edward Said, Paul Gilroy, and Mikhail Epstein, concur with Ikpe’s view that the established traditions of academic freedom, the flexibility of imagination, and the very idea of education have been challenged by a profit-driven agenda that has forced the humanities to seek, not philosophical and political, but

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economic justification for its continued relevance. In their view, this pervasive influence of the logic of profit has corroded the university ethos and seeks to overthrow the basic premises of thehumanities as a discipline. Martha Nussbaum has called this “a silent crisis of massive proportions and grave global significance” (1). According to these thinkers, new advances in science and technology that offer the possibility of artificially prolonging, destroying, and transforming human life challenge the true purpose of education and the very meaning of what it is to be human. In the face of such a posthuman future, the traditional focus of the humanities on questions of value, of meaning, and of ethics, are more important than ever before. As Nussbaum puts it: “When practiced at their best, moreover, these other disciplines are infused by what we might call the spirit of the humanities: by searching critical thought, daring imagination, empathetic understanding of human experiences of many different kinds, and understanding of the complexity ofthe world we live in” (7). On the other hand, there are thinkers, such as Mikhail Epstein, who believe that the humanities have failed to evolve with society and that the courses offered by the discipline belong to the bygone days when there was no need for specialized skills. Epstein persuades us that the current crisis is directly related to the “textual turn” in the humanities that reached its apogee in the twenty-first century: No one now seems to expect anything from the humanities except readings and re-readings, and, first and foremost, criticism rather than creativity and suspicion rather than imagination. As a result, the humanities are no longer focusing on human self-reflection and self-transformation. …. [T]here is now a vacuum of human meaning and purpose that technology cannot, and the humanities will not, fill. As they retreat from the forefront of history and society, the humanities lose the best and brightest to other fields, becoming a shelter for those less creative and those with more “archival” inclinations. (2)

Epstein argues that just as doctors make people better, lawyers ensure that there is law and order in the society, and sociologists seek political solutions to social problems, the humanities must make better humans: “the humanities create the human… the humanities must humanize” (7). If science can transform human life through technology and if sociology can transform society through politics, it is high time that the humanities developed a practical dimension and took up the task of the transformation of culture through the work of the humanities. Epstein remarks:

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Will the humanities let this evolutionary dynamic go by without their own attempt to enhance the role of humans in the transformation of the universe and their own nature? Will the humanities depart from their mission of serving human self- fulfillment? Will the humanities miss the astonishing opportunities of exploring the very phenomenon of the human in the time of its greatest and most dramatic transformation? (Epstein 11)

Epstein calls such a sustainable humanities “the transformative humanities”— a humanities programme that can transform cultures and through it individuals and the society. How can the humanities transform culture? As a kind of thinking that attempts to transform thinking, it is theory that plays a crucial role in rendering the humanities truly transformative in its impact. In the first article in this collection, “The Interdisciplinary Humanities and the Future of Theory,” Jonathan Culler echoes this sentiment: The impetus to theory is a desire to understand what one is doing, to question commitments and their implications. Theory is driven by the impossible desire to step outside one’s thought, both to place it and to understand it, and also by a desire—a possible desire—for change, both in the ways of one’s own thought, which always could be sharper, more knowledgeable and capacious, more self- reflecting, and for change in the world which our thought engages, so there will always be new developments, will always be changes in the realm of theory, for discussions of theory today. (10)

Theory, in this approach, is fundamentally transformative, because the theoretical drive, the impetus that drives one to theorize, triggers “the impossible desire to step outside one’s thought, both to place it and to understand it, and also by a desire—a possible desire—for change.” Change or transformation is the key word here. Theory is not an inert object of knowledge—theorizing is the beginning of change, of transformation. The distinction that Krippendorff draws between “theory of” and “theory for” is that “TheoryOf” is nothing but representation, something inert that is meant for passive consumption while “theory for” implies efforts at producing transformative effects through acts of theorizing (102). However, way back in the late 1960s, Jacques Derrida had stressed the significance of transformation within the humanities with greater subtlety and depth. Long before Epstein emphasized the need for a shift “from interpretation to performativity” (69) and wrote a manifesto for the “transformative humanities”, Derrida had declared that interpretation

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worthy of the name would be essentially performative. It can be seen that the whole point of deploring the decline of the humanities ultimately boils down to the age-old dichotomy between theory and practice, thinking and doing. Although theory and thinking are synonymous for Derrida, “the final objective of thinking” is never “to think correctly”. Since true thinking invariably aims at revolutionary practice, a new theory of revolutionary practice is essential for the revolutionary transformation of practice itself, a transformation that brings about what Derrida (invoking Marx) calls “a relevance that is more rigorous” (8). As Derrida remarks: One cannot even say—this would be a gross understatement—that one can think praxis only on the basis of revolution or revolutionary practice, for that would suppose that the final objective was to think correctly, to have a good theoretical concept of the meaning of practice (unless thinking isn’t equivalent to theory...) No, one can practise practice only in a revolutionary way, but revolution itself revolutionizes … only by transforming practice in a revolutionary way, and starting from a transformed practice, from a new concept of practice, and, every concept being a theory/practice, from a new practice of practice.” (12)

According to this Derridean position, every theory or every act of theorization or of textual interpretation, every “theoretical critique”, is a “theory/practice” that effects “transformative alterations”. The two essays by Jonathan Culler—“Interdisciplinary Humanities and the Future of Theory” and “Learning from Derrida: the Literary and the Political”—develop this Derridean interpretation of the true objective of textual interpretations and concludes thattheory is driven not only by “the impossible desire to step outside one’s thought” but also “by a desire—a possible desire—for change, both in the ways of one’s own thought… and for change in the world which our thought engages, so there will always be new developments.” This desire for changes has fuelled, Culler maintains, a host of new theoretical developments, such as the posthumanism of Dona Haraway, Object-Oriented Ontology of Graham Harman, New Materialism of Jane Bennett, speculative realism of Quentin Meillassoux, Actor-Network theory of Bruno Latour, and the transformative possibilities embodied in these theoretical critiques. The questions that Culler raises not only touch upon many of the issues discussed in the field of theory and the humanities today but also pose significant issues of their own. The synoptic outline of the terrain of theory—from its early phase of ascendency in the humanities departments across the world to its

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contemporary status as teachable wisdom—that Culler presents in the first essay attests to the transformative potential of theory and the humanities. In “Learning from Derrida: the Literary and the Political”, Culler directly engages the problem of the potential of “transformative alteration” embodied in practices of textual interpretation through a lucid exposition of the inevitable imbrication of the political in the literary in Derrida’s works. Drawing heavily on some of the relatively less known works of Derrida, Culler demonstrates how literature, as “the most interesting thing in the world, more interesting than the world” (Culler 2009), verges on and shades off into the field of the political. Derrida, in his view, “gives great importance to literary discourse, but not as an aesthetic phenomenon apart; rather to its engagement with the world, on the edge of the world, and to the engagement that it calls forth in readers.” Through a rigorous close reading of Derrida’s insightful essay “A Taste for the Secret”, Culler links our experience of literature to our experience of democracy: This structure of the secret without secret is nevertheless a condition both of literature and of democracy, and here Derrida’s reading of a literary text displays his conviction that critical writing is not revelation of a secret of the text but intervention in a broader field. “If a right to the secret is not maintained,” Derrida writes in “A Taste for the Secret,” “we are in a totalitarian space.””

In Culler’s reading of Derrida, a reader’s desire for transparency in a literary text is a totalitarian temptation, which is an affirmation of the political potential of the literary.Since literature functions, in Derrida’s approach, on the basis of a secret,—“the secret of literature” … is “a secret whose possibility assures the possibility of literature” (Derrida 2001 39), Culler argues that Derrida’s account of the performativity of literature in its potential for inventive political and transformative interventions is inscribed in his (Derrida’s) very definition of the true nature of literature as a modern invention inscribed in conventions and institutions which … secure in principle its right to say everything. Literature thus ties its destiny to a certain noncensure, to the space of democratic freedom, (freedom of the press, freedom of speech, etc.). No democracy without literature; no literature without democracy. … The possibility of literature, the legitimation that a society gives it, the allaying of suspicion or terror with regard to it, all that goes together— politically—with the unlimited right to ask any question, to suspect all dogmatism, to analyze any presupposition, even those of the ethics or the politics of responsibility. (Derrida 1993 28)

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Arunlal Mokeri’s “Media Convergence, Virality and Fandoms: Reflections on Contemporary Celeb-Culture” investigates the transformations that celebrity culture has undergone in the recent past with the appearance of social media, such as the drastically shortened life of celebrity-hood, the enrichment of its vocabulary with new terms—“viral”, “like”, “share” and “reach”—and celebs’ visual availability for consumption. Drawing on the insights of Walter Benjamin who had argued that the “celebrity achieves an aura through mass reproduction”, Arunlal effectively captures life caught in the cusp of another media revolution and sheds enormous light on the development of a new celeb-culture against the background of the transformative humanities. Pradeep Kumar takes up the question of transgender resistance from Arundhati Roy’s perspective in his paper, “Narrative as Cognitive Map: Reading Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness”, as part of discovering a landmark that situates the individual within a complex, in a seemingly unrepresentable and disoriented cultural totality. The paper critically follows the Jamesonian reading of the evolution of the contemporary postmodern society and the development of cognitive mapping delimitingthe cultural and social spaces. Fredric Jameson suggests “cognitive mapping” to “achieve some general sense of the cultural dominant” (Postmodernism 6) of the postmodern condition of late capitalism, which we know as globalisation. Cognitive mapping, to Jameson, is a part of the ideological critique along the lines of Althusser which enablesthe “situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that the vast and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structure as a whole (51)”. The invention and projection of global cognitive mapping on social and spatial scale is a political act that helps subvert the exploitative structures of globalisation. To Arundhati Roy, her novel is “[…] a way of binding together the worlds that have been ripped apart” (Interview 2011). The paper situates the novel as a political resistance that struggles to impart meaning through the processes of mapping, organizing, and assembling recognizable patterns in an unwieldy political and social historicity. In his article, “The Infinity and Ecstasy of Meaning: The Possible Worlds of Dhwani”, Thulasi Das unearths the poststructuralist potential of the concept of Dhwani, which opens up infinite possibilities of meaning and leads the reader to Ananda or jouissance. Traditionally defined as the suggestive sense found in poetry, Dhwani arises from the tertiary function of a word namely Vyanjana. By drawing on a sound taxonomy of Dhwani, Thulasi Das skilfully substantiates the principle of Dhwani in its

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poststructuralist avatars, most specifically its aporetic nature, which Anandavardhana terms ananthya. Dhwani is strongly redolent of the poststructuralist notion of the incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier. This paper successfully demonstrates how a transformative reading of Dhwani could show ancient aesthetic theories reflect and respond to the exigencies of contemporary taste and needs. Ever since the publication of Benedict Anderson’s classic Imagined Communities (1983) gave the discourse of nationalism a new impetus, there has been a veritable explosion of nationalist discourses. Works, such as Homi K. Bhabha’s Nation and Narration (1990), Partha Chatterjee’s Nation and Its Fragments (1993), Miller’s On Nationality, U. Özkirimli’s Theories of Nationalism, and A.D. Smith’s Nationalism and Modernism, testify to the relentless discursive production on nationalism and affirm the transformative potential of this discourse. As Bresser-Pereira puts it, “… [N]ationalism is the ideology that legitimizes nations, and seen as modern society is territoriallyorganized into nation states, the ideology of nationalism is strong and omnipresent” (1). Prasanth V. G. takes undertakes an exploration into the discourse of nationalism in his paper “From natio to Nation: Ideological Ambivalence in the Postcolonial Conceptualization of Nation” with to show how the concepts of the nation and nationalism have assumed greater significance in the context of postcolonial debates on the intricately intertwined historical developments of colonialism, imperialism, and conquest on the one hand, and neocolonialism, diaspora, and globalization on the other. Prasanth demonstrates how these diverse developments would make sense not in isolation but in their totality, despite the number of inherent contradictions within such developments. He examines the historical, social, and political backgrounds that have contributed to the development of the nation and its fictional representation in works of literature, and draws on Benedict Anderson’s epoch-making Imagined Communities to unmask the contingency of nation states and related theoretical constructs. Prasanth explains how, despite their contingent origins and existence, nations have come to establish themselves as real and the predominance of nation states gets challenged by the turn of this century with two contradictory trends: globalization and devolution. Another theoretical terrain that holds transformative potential for culture is the emerging field of Memory Studies, which is a constellation of ideas related to the retention of the past and its implication for cultural transformation. Culture is in a constant state of flux and is not an entity that can be codified permanently. It is ever ready to be created, transmitted,

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re-framed and is at times endangered and at times developing. To a significant extent, culture is believed to be stored in memory and transmitted biologically. The categorisation of memory into biological and social realms caused a series of sporadic developments, in the field of Memory Studies and consequently in the field of the humanities, specifically Cultural Studies. Manchusha Madhusudhanan’s paper, “Historicising Narrative through Cultural Memory: A Study of Select Native Novels”, proposes to analyse the different ways in which Cultural Memory guides human representation of the past and serves to historicise narratives, especially in native literature. She throws light on how the capacity to remember, to create and re-create past events, was used by minority groups to legitimize their cultural differences by claiming localized and competing traditions. In the post-world warscenario that survived untold trauma and remorse, it became a kind of therapeutic regeneration to turn to “a collective past” even in fiction and art. Emphasizing the interventions of Paul Ricoeur, Maurice Halbwachs, Aleida Assmann, and Jan Assmann, Manchusha shows how memories are not static representations of past events, but “advancing stories” through which individuals and communities forge their sense of identity. As a theoretical perspective, Cultural Memory has become one of the most productive areas of research in the field of literary studies. Manchusha’s discussion of a few selected texts—Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale, and Chappy by Patricia Grace—in the light of memory studies illustrates the inter- relations between memory, culture, and the human condition. Medical Humanities is another burgeoning field of enquiry in the humanities. In “Possible Bonds: Medical Humanities and Interdisciplinary Theoretical Exchange”, Smrithi Venugopal M. and Sheron K. P. R. look at how humanistic values and principles are incorporated into the study of medicine and medical education. Humanities and the sciences are still looked upon by many as disciplines on opposite poles. Venugopal and Sheron examines how, in comparison with science which relies on the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and the natural world through observations and experimentations, the humanities as the study of human cultures, language, literature, philosophy, and history, among others, is still held in low esteem. The domain of the humanities is also criticized for studentslearned but “not necessarily learned enough” to take up a specific profession, thus making many students reluctant to choose it on account of inadequate job prospects. The authors show how, despite being accused of reading and re-

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reading texts, the humanities forever play an inevitable role in adding a moral, ethical, and liberatory spirit to the concrete, empirical facts that the sciences attempt to explain. In their view, medical humanities is a growing field of scholarship that produces powerful, innovative analyses of today’s health care issues, many of which are fundamentally moral and ethical. The authors call for an application of the humanities, social sciences, and the arts to medical education and practice. Venugopal and Sharon conclude that in the technologically advanced contemporary societies, the need to bridge the gap between scientific and humanistic cultures is of paramount importanceIn recent decades, trauma theory has emerged as an indispensable force, birthing a new school of literary reading called “trauma theory”. Shoshana Felman, one of the most important theorists of trauma, has defined the twentieth century as the “age of trauma” and her works, including Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (with Dori Laub) (1992), The Juridical Unconscious (2002), and Writing and Madness (2003), showcase some of the most remarkable attempts at charting out possible interfaces between literature and trauma. Cathy Caruth (1996) and Ulrich Baer (2000) have applied trauma theory in the reading of some of the masterpieces of world literature, such as Albert Camus’ The Plague. Most recently, Catherine Malabou has taken trauma theory to a different level (though not with an intent to apply it to literary works) in her new book, The New Wounded (2012). The paper “Memorising the Holocaust Trauma: A New Imperialist Hegemonic Mechanism” by Ninitte Rolence and Saigeetha seeks to explore this aspect of the revival of traumatic memories in the context of contemporary life. Trauma features a disruptive tendency in the individual and the collective psyche of a community. Autobiographical trauma becomes a cognitive perception in the reading of more extensive traumatic incidents and experiences that humanity itself had faced at large. Ninitte and Saigeetha argue that at various historic moments, these occurrences have created havoc in the construction of personal identities and have also put to question the sense of security in the face of danger. Taking into account the political significance of the revival of holocaust memories in the humanities today, the authors argue that in a world on the verge of total annihilation, the holocaust acts as a means of holding the various smaller political “powerdoms” under the control of the hegemonic powers. Recent theoretical trends in food studies have opened new avenues in literary and cultural studies. The significance of studying food as a pathway to understand culture and history has by now been well established. In her paper “Food and the Binaries: An analysis of Joanne Harris” Five Quarters of the Orange”, Duna Liss Tom explores the ways

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in which food helps to frame different binaries for individuals as well as the society. Every community celebrates with food and incorporates foods as symbols, and many of these traditions provide the cultural memory for how foods should beprepared for healthful consumption. Furthermore, each region that gives rise to a distinct literature necessarily also maintains culturally specific rules governing foods that are especially valued and foods that are especially shunned, and control the contexts in which particular foods may or may not be eaten. Food events, in which food is served, therefore, help define the social organization and cultural identity of the very communities that give rise to distinct literary traditions. Food studies examine how the use of food imagery and metaphor represents complex ideas and deeper meanings in literature. In her novel, Five Quarters of the Orange, Joanne Harris depicts the inextricably entwined past and present of the Dartigen family in a scrapbook of inherited recipes and memories. In her paper “Hetero-Sexualising the Transgender Identity: A Discourse of the Marginalized in Njan Marykkutty (2018)”, Anu Kuriakose analyses the question oftrans identity in the film in terms of Butler’s understanding of gender performativity, the Kristevian notion of abjection, and the Lacanian notion of object petit a or the object-cause of desire. The author highlights drastic shifts of paradigm in Kerala with regard to the trans identity. With the introduction of the government-sponsored gender mainstreaming interventions, the visibility of transgenders and sexual minorities in the public sphere of Kerala are carefully observed and critically examined. The popular media in the state reconfigure its space to include the nonnormative gender and sexuality as a matter of concern in the contemporary times and the conspicuous absence of those who experience gender dysphoria from the space is getting blurred. Anu Kuriakose examines the depiction of a transsexual as the lead character in the recent Malayalam film Njan Marykkutty (2018, Dir. Ranjith Sankar) and the representation of the transgenders in the popular media. The film portrays the transgender as an aberration and downplays the rampant hetero-sexualisation of the transgender body. Though the popular support for a transgender lead character is sensationalised in the media as a huge success saga, it also makes the individual a commodity to be consumed in a market economy. It is argued that the excess in normalisation of the transgender body ironically endorses the heterosexual values of the binary gender performance when the surgically re-appropriated body is celebrated, clapped at the big screen, and sensationalised as achievement, as the central character voices the misconception that “I am not a transgender, I am a transsexual”.

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In “The Digital Gaze: Unveiling the Transition of Gaze in the Digital Era”, Rafseena M examines how the conceptual framework of gaze as a profoundly influential concept in cultural theory has been restructured, reoriented, and redefined. She demonstrates that the new version of gaze via the digital form helped re-contour the ontological structure of the human world and constitutes new forms of agential representation in the digital space. Taking cue from the various platforms of the digital space— the follower counts of top celebrities in social media platforms, including Instagram and Facebook, and the philanthropic side of the digital media at times of emergencies—Rafseena investigates the ways in which the digital gaze can have transformative effects on society. N. Sajan and Pinkey Isha address the question of the transformative performativity of art. In “Visual Discourses of Transformative Performativity: Reading Women’s Art Installations”, Sajan discusses how Indian artists liberated themselves from subservience to western modes and forms of representation, and explore their re-invention of visual and performative idioms. In his analysis of the major installations of four women Jayashree Chakraborthy, Anita Dube, Anju Dodia and Bharti Kher—Sajan provides profound insights into how they had developed their visual media and strategies of transformative performativity in the newly emerging

ethos of installation art. Pinkey Isha’s “The Epical Romance of Sirat ‘Antar: Negotiating Contours in Arabian Chivalric Courtly Traditions” presents a close reading of Sirat ‘Antar, an epical romance modelled on the great warrior poet Antara. Isha studies the various aspects of this chivalric epic and shows how Sirat ‘Antar embraces the echelons of oral performance, visual culture, and popular art practices. In “The Matrix of Desire: David Lurie and the Deleuzio-Guattarian Ethics in Coetzee’s Disgrace”, Milda Mary Savio and Shivshankar Rajmohan A. K. address the question of desire and subjectivity. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation of“machinic” production of desires, they demonstrate the “becoming” of David Lurie, the protagonist who invents a new ethic of desire. Prasadita L. Raveendran investigates an emerging cultural trend called “wokeism” or “cancel culture” and demonstrates how itproceeds to reconfigure and reconstruct our traditional notions of justice and accountability. Through a detailed comparative analysis of the first episode “Forget Me Not” from the Netflix series Ray, a motion picture rendering of Satyajit Ray’s short story and “The White Bear” episode from the series Black Mirror, Prasadita situates the transformative elements within practices of digital wokeism and cancel culture.

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The articles collected in this volume are structured around a series of interlinked questions that are inspired by the possibilities of revitalizing the humanities and engage with various kinds of cultural artifacts to effect what Derrida calls a “rigorous relevance” through transformative interpretations. Broadly speaking, these essays raise and attempt to answer the following questions: How crucial is the role that art and literature play in human life? How do language and representation impact culture and society? How do discourses on gender transform our modes of living and relating to the world? What is the future of theory in a world that is increasingly marked by a wilful neglect of the humanities? What idea of the human would be involved in the revised theories and practices of a transformative humanities? What values and sense of responsibilities are opened up by a posthuman perspective? How does history illuminate these concerns? How do conflicting notions of humanity and of what counts as human relate to the numerous instances of exclusion, exile, and dispossession that we see around us? How can the teaching and research practices of the humanities account for erased or manipulated histories, absent geographies, forbidden archives, and other instances of organized forgetting? Is Jonathan Cullerெs claim that a semiotics can revitalize the humanities still valid? We hope that along with us, the reader enjoys these multidisciplinary perspectives and revels in the dhwani that works of art can evoke in the human mind.

Works Cited Bresser-Pereira, Luiz Carlos. “Nationalism at the Centre and Periphery of Capitalism.”EstudosAvançados, vol. 22, no. 62, 2008, pp. 171-193. Derrida, Jacques. “I Have a Taste for the Secret,” in Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, trans. Giacomo Donis, Polity P, 2001. —. Theory & Practice.Translated by David Wills, U of Chicago P, 2019. —. “Passions: “An Oblique Offering,”” On the Name, Thomas Dutoit (ed.), trans. David Wood, Stanford UP, 1993. Epstein, Mikhail. The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto. Translated by Igor Klyukanov, Bloomsbury, 2012. Ikpe, Ibanga B. “The Decline of the Humanities and the Decline of Society.” Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, vol. 62, no. 142, March 2015, pp. 50- 66. Krippendorff, K. “A Recursive Theory of Communication.” Communication Theory Today, edited by D. Crowley and D. Mitchell, Stanford UP, 1994, pp. 78-103.

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Miller, David. On Nationality.Oxford UP, 1995. Nussbaum, Martha. Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, Princeton UP, 2010. Özkirimli, Umut. Theories of Nationalism.St. Martin’s P, 2000.Smith, A. D. Nationalism and Modernism.Routledge, 2003.

LEARNING FROM DERRIDA: THE LITERARY AND THE POLITICAL JONATHAN CULLER

I proposed several topics for my talk here, concerning various aspects of critical theory and literary studies. “Learning from Derrida” is a topic that could take me in many directions, since Derrida wrote about such a wide range of topics: the history of European philosophy, first of all, from Plato to Heidegger, from the Greeks to the twentieth century, not in the mode of history exactly, but in the mode of critical reading of key philosophical texts, both highly canonical, Plato, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, and thinkers of philosophical significance even though they are not generally treated as belonging to philosophy proper, such as Walter Benjamin, the anthropologists Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strauss, the psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Lacan, the linguists Ferdinand de Saussure and Emile Benveniste. Then Derrida’s later work especially takes up a host of issues -political, legal, and ethical as well as literary and aesthetic: nationalism, racism, friendship, the New Europe, hospitality, the gift, violence and justice, feminism, the legacy of Marxism, and the Animal. There is, I should, say, something for everyone, though not necessarily for all tastes, since he is frequently a difficult writer and a complex thinker. Choosing among all of these possibilities my take on learning from Derrida will necessarily be partial and personal, with an emphasis on the implications of his work for literary studies, though I’ll mention several other topics as well. But allow me to begin with a brief autobiographical account of my learning from Derrida. During my first year in graduate school, Derrida published three books, Speech and Phenomena, on Husserl, phenomenology, and writing, Of Grammatology, on the problem of speech and writing, and the logocentrism of Western philosophy, with special discussions of Ferdinand de Saussure and Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Writing and Difference, a collection of essays about various current figures and topics, including Levi-Strauss and Structuralism. Well, I was working on phenomenology and structuralism at that time, so these books were a

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challenge for me, which I did not really take up until the summer of 1968, after I had finished an M. Phil thesis on Phenomenology and literary criticism. My Ph.D., dissertation, which became Structuralist Poetics, included a final chapter, “Beyond Structuralism,” which tried to take account of Derrida’s critiques of aspects of structuralism, which it seems to me had been wrongly taken as arejection of the movement. [Happy to say more about this later]. But quite aside from the relation to structuralism, these works had much to teach. They undertook a reading of philosophical texts, not just for their arguments or statements but for their textuality, how they behave. One could call it aliterary treatment of philosophical texts, except that Derrida argued that such topics as metaphor are inescapability philosophical. So a first lesson was about the excessive narrowness of philosophy, ever since Plato, who wrote philosophy in the form of dialogues, a literary genre, but particularly in the Anglo-American world: philosophy is writing but does not like to think of itself as writing, embracing an ideal of transparency, to present the logos: truth, logic, and thought. Derrida’s writing at this stage for which we may use the term that became attached to it, deconstruction, undertakes a radical critique of fundamental categories of Western thought by exploring how these categories have been constructed in and by the discourses that rely on them. Exciting, radical, revelatory, unconditional thought (In an essay called “The university without condition,” Derrida speaks of a commitment to theory as a unconditional thought). His is a mode of analysis that examines not only the arguments of philosophical texts but also the rhetorical procedures and devices they employ and the tensions or contradictions between what is claimed or assumed and what the texts themselves do in order to support such claims. A major focus of this deconstruction has been the traditional binary oppositions that have structured Western thought since the time of the Greeks: for example, the oppositions between inside and outside, mind and body, literal and metaphorical, speech and writing, presence and absence, nature and culture, intelligible and sensible, form and meaning. Each of these oppositions is hierarchical, in the sense that one of its terms has been taken to be primary, fundamental, and the other secondary and derivative. Thus, nature is logically prior to culture; writing is seen as merely a way of representing speech, which is taken to be the basic form of language; meaning is what comes first and is then given expression by form.

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A deconstruction of these oppositions asks how the philosophical enterprise and thought in general have relied upon the privileging of one term and invites us to consider whether in fact such hierarchies should not be revised. In particular, one questions these hierarchical oppositions by showing how they have been constructed and, in the process, undoing that construction and establishing a new relation between the terms. We can see, for example, that the idea of “nature” is a product of culture: conceiving something as prior to culture is a specific cultural operation whose import and function needs to be assessed. In the opposition between nature and culture, the primacy of nature cannot, therefore, be taken for granted. What we have, rather, is an opposition elaborated within culture; what counts as nature in any historical moment will be a fact about that culture. To argue in this way is to invert and restructure the opposition (to “displace” it). Instead of a primary nature and a secondary culture, we discover a variable distinction between nature and culture within culture. For Derrida, the most telling and pervasive opposition has been the one that treats writing as secondary or derivative with respect to speech. According to this opposition, in speech ideas and intentions of the speaker are immediately present; it is a direct and authentic form of language, whereas writing is merely a graphic representation of the spoken word (a sign of a sign) and hence marked by absence and possibilities of discrepancies between form and meaning. By setting aside writing as a secondary and derivative, a mere representation open to misunderstanding, accounts of language have taken as their object an idealized form of speech, where the linguistic form is a direct expression of what the speaker, as we say, “has in mind.” But Derrida argues that linguistic forms can function as signs only to the extent that they can be repeated in different contexts, in the absence of any particular speaker’s presence or intention. Speech is only possible, in other words, to the extent that it has the qualities assigned to writing, such as absence, difference, and the possibility of misunderstanding. One mark of this, Derrida has shown, is the frequent recourse, in attempts to describe speech, of examples and metaphors drawn from writing. In effect, speech has been described as a form of writing, even when the claim has been that writing is derivative from speech (Derrida 1976). This deconstruction of the traditional hierarchical opposition between speech and writing argues not that there are no differences between speech and writing but that the traditional opposition is untenable and that both speech and writing are forms of a general writing (archi-écriture), which is the condition of possibility for

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any system of representation whatsoever. Derrida argues that treating writing as a secondary to speech is part of what he calls the “logocentrism” of Western culture: the presumption of an order of truth or thought prior to its representation by signs (Derrida 1976). Logocentrism tries to treat representation as inessential rather inextricably involved in the structure of phenomena, but an attentive reading of the texts of the philosophical tradition shows that they tell a different story. Derrida’s work attempts to demonstrate that discourses which treat writing as secondary in fact must make use of notionslinked to writing when they characterize speech and that thus speech can be seen as a version of a generalized writing, which is the condition of language and thought in general. This is an instance of the deconstruction of concepts seen as fundamental, such as “presence,” “truth,” “origin,” and “identity.” This work was an exciting philosophical critique of Western philosophy. Philosophy, Derrida argues, has been founded on a theory of “presence,” in which such notions as truth, being, and reality are determined in relation to an ontological centre, essence, or origin, based on the repression of absence and difference. But since his demonstration works not by erecting an alternative theory but by exploring how philosophical discourses have produced their concepts through rhetorical stratagems, such deconstructions offered students of literature a powerful practice of reading which would illuminate how texts--whether philosophical or literary--implicitly put in question what they explicitly maintain or what they appear to assume. Barbara Johnson, a leading American practitioner, calls deconstruction “a careful teasing out of warring forces of signification within a text” (Johnson 1981). This made literary study more exciting, more concerned with fundamental issues, than when it had been a matter of showing how all the parts of a poem contribute to a unified effect. But I will come back later to what we might learn about literature from Derrida. Another strand of his work from which I and others learned much is his discussions of the performative functions of language. The notion of the performative comes from the British Philosopher J. L. Austin, who argued that philosophical treatments of language were wrong to take as the norm sentences that made statements, as though the function of language were to make true or false statements. He distinguished this constative use of language from a performative use, where utterances do not state a fact but perform an action, such as promising, warning, declaring advising: “I promise to pay you tomorrow” or “I call this meeting to order.” Rule of thumb, if you can add a “hereby” you are dealing with a performative: I

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hereby orderyou to stop. I hereby promise to pay you tomorrow. In exploring the distinction, Austin goes on to conclude that there is a performative dimensions to every utterance. If I say “the cat is on the mat” that is tantamount to saying “I hereby declare that the cat is on the mat,” so performing an action of stating. For Derrida this notion becomes very important, looking at ways in which language performs actions. His first intervention is to reject an exclusion of Austin’s. Austin says his analysis applies to “words spoke seriously --I must not be joking, for example, or writing apoem.” He is concerned with a set of serious utterances by which people undertake to perform actions. But Derrida argues that in setting aside the non-serious Austin is failing to recognize a major aspect of the functioning of language, a general iterability that should be considered a law of language. For something to be a sign it must be able to be cited and repeated in all sorts of circumstances, serious and non-serious. He thus broadens the scope of the account. The second step Derrida takes is focusing on this question of the force of language, as act or event, which does not just, as in Austin, accomplish recognized purposes through codified formulae, but also inaugurates, creates something new, as a promise creates something that that did not previously exist, or as naming your child brings into being a new identity. In a wonderful little text entitled “Declarations of Independence,” Derrida analyses the American “Declaration of Independence,” the founding document by which the US declared its independence from England, as based on a complex combination of performative and constative utterances. The key sentence in this document runs, “We, therefore, ...do solemnly publish and declare that these United colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states.” The declaration that these are independent states is a performative that is supposed to create the new reality to which it refers: we hereby declare that we are independent. But to support this claim is joined the constative assertion that these ought by right to be independent states. Of course, the success of such performatives is never guaranteed: the Catalan parliament in Spain declared the independence of Catalonia, based on a referendum, but so far this has not worked, has not become a reality. At this point Austin’s distinction has been expanded and particularly redefined: the constative is language claiming to represent things as they are, and the performative is an act of language that purports to make something happen by organizing the world, perhaps bringing things into being, imposing linguistic categories, rather than simply naming what already is. This becomes especially important in the work of Judith Butler,

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for example, who drawing on both Derrida and Foucault, developed a performative theory of gender and sexuality in such books as Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Butler proposes that we consider gender as performative, in the sense that it is not something one is but something one does, something one enacts. Your gender is created by your acts, in the way in which a promise is created by the act of promising. You become a man or woman by repeated acts, which, like Austin’s performatives, depend on social conventions, habitual ways of doing something in aculture. This does not mean that gender is a choice, a role you put on: that would suggest the existence of an ungendered subject prior to gender who chooses, whereas to be a subject at all is to be gendered. The “i,” Butler writes, emerges only within this process or matrix of gendering. And the performativity of gender is not a singular act, as are Austin’s performatives, but a reiterative and citational practice, the compulsory repetition of gender norms that animate and constrain the gendered subject --at one point she speaks of gender as an assignment variously carried out -- but these acts are also the resources from which resistance, subversions and displacements can be forged. The scope of this dimension of linguistic and non-linguistic performativity is something I and others have learned from Derrida. But let me now turn to literature, which has been, of course my own principal field. The performative dimension of literary language, which strives to create something new as it tells us about the world, is something we have learned about from Derrida, enthusiastically embraced by literary critics, because it grants a new status to literary language, which no longer consists of pseudo statements but can be seen as a creative, worldchanging use of language. However, this situation is rather more complicated than is often allowed. (I’d be happy to talk about that more, if you like.) I would say that the early effect of Derrida’s work for literary studies, which was the domain in which his work was received in the Anglo-American world, was to offer new strategies of reading, based not on Derrida’s own engagements with literary works, which, as I shall explain, came later and involved different strategies, but based on his readings of philosophical texts. These involved close reading, attentive to rhetoric and its implications, and to apparently marginal or anomalous moments of texts, whereby language resists or undercuts what the text is apparently saying, or has been alleged to say. So, close reading, but with different presumptions than Anglo-American new criticism’s presumption of the unity of the text, the aesthetic resolution of paradoxes, self-presence and self-reflexivity, where showing that the text does what it says was the highest compliment. Derrida made available different possibilities, almost

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the opposite, as we attended to the resources with which a text resists, questions, what it appears to assume or put forward. A deconstructive literary criticism involves, in the phrase I quoted from Barbara Johnson earlier “a careful teasing out of warring forces of signification within a text.” I describe a range of examples, critical explorations of the tensions in literary works, in my On Deconstruction, but I could succinctly illustrate the sort of strategy herewith a two line poem by Robert Frost that I discussed on Literary/theory: A Very Short Introduction: We dance round in a ring and suppose But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

The poem depends on an opposition between knowing and supposing, between the human way of being and that of the secret. But we might ask whether the poem itself is in the mode of supposing or knowing. As a product of the human imagination, we might assume it is an instance of supposing, but it sounds very knowing indeed, positively proverbial or gnomic. But what does the poem show is about knowing? Well, the secret, which usually is something one knows or does not know, here is made the subject of knowing. By metonymically promoting the secret to the role of knower, the poem shows that a rhetorical supposition can produce the knower: the secret who knows is produced by an act of supposing. Its constative assertion, that the secret knows, depends on a performative supposing. The poem asserts that the secret knows but shows this to be supposition. Reading the poem against itself is one of the techniques of deconstructive reading learned from Derrida’s readings of philosophical texts. Such strategies also raised the stakes of literary analysis, where fundamental philosophical issues came to be in play. But in later years Derrida came to write about literature himself and to reflect on literature as an institution, and this gave us new things to learn. In an interview with Derek Attridge, ‘This Strange Institution Called Literature,’Derrida speaks eloquently of literature: Experience of being, nothing less, nothing more, on the edge of metaphysics, literature perhaps stands on the edge of everything, almost beyond everything, including itself. It’s the most interesting thing in the world, maybe more interesting than the world, and this is why, if it has no definition, what is heralded and refused under the name of literature cannot be identified with any other discourse. It will never be scientific, philosophical, conversational.i

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Literature can be ‘the most interesting thing in the world, more interesting than the world,’ because it exceeds the actual but includes its possibilities, opening their condition of possibility. This is a celebration of literature of a sort not much heard these days, when advanced critical approaches treat literature as one discourse among others, to privilege which would be an elitist mistake. It is important to emphasize that this celebration of literature is not, in fact, aprivileging of some distinctiveness of literary language or of aesthetic achievement. Derrida suggests that ‘there is an experience rather than an essence of literature.’ii This experience has various dimensions, but one which Derrida stresses is the experience linked to what he calls the suspension of the ‘thetic’ –the articulation of theses or propositional claims: ‘literary experience, writing or reading, … is a non-thetic experience of the thesis, of belief, of position,’ providing, in its fictionality an experience of what belief, position, thesis might be. Denying literature an essence, Derrida nevertheless gives great importance to literary discourse, but not as an aesthetic phenomenon apart; rather to its engagement with the world, on the edge of the world, and to the engagement that it calls forth in readers. In affirming the importance of literature in these terms, Derrida reminds us of its power and of the centrality of its structures to many other worldly phenomena. In a book of 2004 largely inspired by Derrida, The Singularity of Literature, Derek Attridge writes, ‘Derrida’s work over the past thirtyfive years constitutes the most significant, far-reaching, and inventive exploration of literature for our time.’iii Not simply of our time, for our time. This is true, though it is not widely recognized. One of the more grotesque aspects of the mediatic reception of Derrida in the US is the idea that somehow Derrida’s work and deconstruction generally have constituted an attack on literature. Derrida’s writing on and around literature is not so well known as his early work on philosophical texts or even so well known as later engagements with political and ethical texts and issues, such as Specters of Marx. This is particularly ironic, given the fact that Derrida has been most welcomed by members of literature departments, but perhaps it is not so strange after all, since we literary critics have a professional stake in believing that we already know how to read literature and are eager to learn other things from Derrida, such as how modes of analysis attentive to language and to the problematic of language can engage other discourses – of philosophy, ethics, politics, and so on. Perhaps also, the writers on whom Derrida has spent the most time – Maurice Blanchot, Francis Ponge, Jean Genet, Paul Celan – seem special cases, so that his writing about them does not seem so easily generalizable

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into an ‘approach’ to the novel, for instance, or to poetry.iv And indeed, Derrida‘s writing about literature is not easily assimilated to any approach that would present literature in historical periods (The Victorian Novel), as literary education has been wont to do. It engages literature in more novel ways. ‘Che cos‘è la poesia,’ a wonderful brief meditation that responds to the question ‘what is poetry?’ put to him by an Italian journal, stresses that to respond to such aquestion is to dispense with knowledge, to burn the library, to leave the paradigm of knowledge and respond in a different way. Such a text does not engage in critical practice. It boldly speaks of ‘the poem’ – the poem in general -- as, for instance, ‘une passion de la marque singulière’ (a passion for the singular inscription). This text offers an account of the poem as hedgehog, hérisson, prickly on the outside, rolled into a ball to protect itself, yet entirely vulnerable to being squashed on the highway. Outside this animal fable, it treats the poem as something addressed to an anonymous ‘you’ that asks to be learned by heart, that teaches the heart.v Although this essay certainly sparks thoughts about a theory of the lyric, it does not, any more that Derrida’s writings on Mallarmé, Shakespeare, Kafka, Joyce, or Baudelaire, provide a method of reading. These Derridean texts cannot be described as a deconstruction of hierarchical oppositions, an inversion and displacement of oppositions; nor do they invert or critique the illusions of the aesthetic –as some deconstructive writings about literature seem to do. They do not invest in a recognized mode of academic writing but invite readers to engage differently with literary works. It is not easy to say what these essays are – they are as different from one another as, on the one hand, the elaborate pursuit of the paradoxes of mimesis in ‘La Double Séance,’ on Mallarmé, the aphoristic reflection on proper names and naming of ‘Aphorism Countertime,’ on Romeo and Juliet, and the rigorous pursuit of a thematics of the gift and the counterfeit and of textual self-reflexivity in the chapters of Given Time on Baudelaire. I would stress the radical patience of these essays, and their focus on small units -- not Joyce or Mallarmé but a particular sentence.vi One might say about them that they attempt to respond to the singularity of the texts they treat, and indeed the singularity of the literary work is a major theme of Derrida’s literaryengagement. While his critical performances are partly consonant with the traditional notion that the task of criticism is the celebration of the uniqueness of each literary work, he notes that singularity is necessarily divided (se diffère), takes part in the generality of meaning, without which it could not be read, and so is not closed in on

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itself but iterable.vii The singularity of a work is what enables it to be repeated over and over in events that are never exactly the same. Stressing this aspect of singularity, as opposed to a traditional notion of uniqueness, Derrida never claims to offer a reading of a text as an organic or self-contained whole but, rather, intaking up a literary work, to write ‘a text which, in the face of the event of another’s text, tries to ‘respond’ or to ‘countersign.” This response to singularity opens onto the most general questions of meaning and the conditions of experience. And it is a provocation to reading. ‘Reading,’ Derrida writes, ‘must give itself up to the uniqueness [of the work], take it on board, keep it in mind, take account of it. But for that, for this rendering, you have to sign in your turn, write something else which responds or corresponds in an equally singular, which is to say irreducible, irreplaceable, “new” way: neither imitation, nor reproduction, nor metalanguage.’ (69-70) This writing on and in response to literature impinges on literary and critical culture inthat it makes the goal of one’s writing on literature not, as various hermeneutics of suspicion and historicisms may have seemed to teach us, one of mastery, in which the critic tries to demystify other contextualizations and outflank all other commentators, scrutinizing their assumptions. Nor is it a matter of producing knowledge about the literary productions of a period. Rather, you should try to respond with writing that is rich enough and idiomatic enough to provoke responses in its turn – not an easy matter, of course. ‘Good literary criticism,’ writes Derrida, ‘the only worthwhile kind, implies an act, a literary signature or countersignature, an inventive experience of language, in language, an inscription of the act of reading in the field of the text that is read’ (52).This is a tall order, not at all easy to do, of course, which helps explain why this critical work on literature has not so far been a model for literary studies, but it certainly offers possibilities for the humanities. Students in the US are greatly attracted to creative writing courses offered by English departments, and while much of this attraction may flow from the rampant modern ideology of self-expression, it is quite possible that a fundamental draw here is also here a desire to write in interesting, creative ways. Such desire could be channelled in new directions in literature courses if, instead of demanding ‘sound’ interpretive essays, they encouraged students to invent more freely. [I should add that this is not a lesson I have learned.]

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The responsive engagement that Derrida calls ‘inscription of the act of reading in the field of the text that is read’ is provoked, Derrida suggests, by an ‘impassioning’ linked to the secret, a theme in a number of his writings on literature, from ‘Passions’ to Given Time and ‘I Have A Taste for the Secret.’ [This is a complicated matter, but interesting, so I ask you toindulge me here] Derrida’s early reading of Plato’s Phaedrus began, ‘A text is not a text unless it hides from its first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game. Its law and rules are not, however, harboured in the inaccessibility of a secret; it is simply that they never can be booked [livré] in the present, into anything that could be rigorously calleda perception.’viii Here the notion of secret – which is rejected as a model --seems linked to something hidden that could be revealed, made present – which is not the case with a text, whose threads have to be teased out, or articulated in a reading. Much literary education has unfortunately, seemed to have proceeded on the presumption that there is a secret, that the text harbours a secret meaning (for some critical schools, what the author intended, for others not even known to the author) – a secret which the teacher doubtless knows and which students have to attempt to uncover or at least guess at: ‘what is this text really about?’ Derrida’s rejection of the model of a secret that could be known is potentially salutary. Twenty years after ‘Dissemination,’ in ‘Passions,’ Derrida repeats as a refrain the phrase, ‘il y a là du secret,’ which could be clumsily translated as ‘there is something of the secret there.’ The secret now functions as a limit – not as a content that might be detected or revealed. Derrida’s later understanding of literature links it to ‘a secret without secret,’ as what impassions us in our engagement with literature.ix Literature depends upon the call of the secret, which, he writes in ‘Passions,’ ‘points back to the other or to something else….the secret impassions us. Even if there is none, even if it does not exist. Even if the secret is no secret, even if there has never been a secret.’x What pulls us to literature is the sense of a secret, even though it is a secret that could not possibly be revealed –perhaps ‘secretiveness’ would be a more apt characterization: the sense of a secret despite our knowing that there is no truth to be revealed. A broader recognition of the centrality of this structure to the appeal and functioning of literature might help to free literary study from the students’ sense that they are, in their ignorance, being asked to discover and reveal the secret of the text.

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Derrida’s writing about Baudelaire’s prose poem ‘La FausseMonnaie’ in the last two chapters of Given Time is both a brilliant exploration of this structure of the secret without secret and an example of the sort of reading procedure Derrida describes in the interview with Derek Attridge: the reading of Baudelaire is inscribed in the field of a larger problematic –not that of the author, the genre, or the period, but that of the gift, with its anthropological and philosophical dimensions. In ‘La FausseMonnaie’ [The Counterfeit Coin -- or ‘Counterfeit Money,’ as it is translated], the narrator recounts that when his friend gave a large coin to a beggar, the narrator said to the friend, ‘You are right; next to the pleasure of feeling surprise, there is none greaterthan to cause a surprise.’ ‘C‘était la pièce fausse’ [It was the counterfeit coin], the friend calmlyreplied, ‘as though to justify himself for his prodigality.’ The narrator speculatively runs over what the friend might have intended, and he concludes that there must have been an attempt to create an event in the life of the beggar which is excusable, even if it involves a sort of criminal enjoyment, but just as he reaches this conclusion, he is convinced by the friend’s next response –‘Yes, you are right, there is no sweeter pleasure than to surprise a man by giving him more than he hopes for’ -- that on the contrary the friend wanted to do a good deed while making a good deal, to win paradise economically, with counterfeit rather than real coin. But what if the friend’s remark is ironic? The narrator is convinced by the friend’s demeanour that he speaks candidly, but the look of candour that the narrator observes is what an ironist would want to affect. In reading this text, which is about fiction – counterfeit money -- and the gift, Derrida in Given Time speculates on the numerous possibilities that the narrator‘s speculative inclination invites in his changing views of what the friend must be thinking (the narrator tells us that he has the exhausting faculty of seeking ‘midi à quatorze heures’—always reading something into everything) -- in the course of which speculation and expatiation Derrida poses a question that was not previously attested in the critical discussions of this work: what if the friend is not telling the truth?xi ‘Assuming that he did tell the truth. Assuming that there is any sense in speculating on it! For it is also possible –we will never know and there is no sense in wondering about it in literature-- that he gave real money and then boasted to his friend that he gave a counterfeit coin so as to produce a certain effect, not on the beggar but on the narrator.’xii Under those circumstances, it would be the narrator rather than the beggar that the friend deceived, to whom he in effect passed counterfeit coin. Since the problematic of the false and the counterfeit suffuses the whole text, and

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since the narrator himself offers radically contrasting conclusions about the friend’s propensity to diabolical adventurousness, this speculation about whether the Friend’s remarks can be taken as coin of the realm or a counterfeit or lie seems to be a question that one can indeed pose. If the narrator can conclude that the friend wants to create an event in the life of the beggar, by giving him false money that could lead him to prison as easily as to well-being, why not imagine the friend capable of seeking to create an event in the life of the narrator (as he manifestly has done) by falsely claiming to have given the beggar a counterfeit coin? Why does this hypothesis, Derrida asks, ‘correspond to the most powerful and most interesting speculation? Nothing in what is readable for us here can exclude or limit such a speculation…’xiii Indeed, Derrida goes on to argue that ‘the readability of the text is structured bythe unreadability of the secret, that is, by the inaccessibility of a certain intentional meaning or of a vouloir dire (wanting-to-say) in the consciousness of the characters and a fortiori in that of the author.’xiv The secret of the friend’s intentions tantalizes and generates effects but is not something that could ever be known, is not something that Baudelaire himself could know, though he too could speculate about it and could, of course, have made it function differently. ‘The interest of “Counterfeit Money,” Derrida concludes, “comes from an enigma constructed out of this crypt that gives to be read that which will remain eternally unreadable, absolutely indecipherable… there is no sense in hoping to know one day what the friend did, wanted to do, wanted to say…’xv This is a secret whose unknowability depends on the superficiality of the literary phenomenon, as a surface without depth, this exemplary secret without secret that assures the possibility of literature. That is what enables Derrida to suggest that with this prose poem, ‘we are perhaps witnessing something that resembles the birth of literature.’xvi This secret of what the friend meant to say and do is constituted by the possibility of the literary institution and revealed by that institution in its possibility of secret only to the extent that it is loses all interiority, all thickness, all depth. It is kept absolutely unbreakable, inviolate only to the extent to which it is formed by a non-psychological structure. This structure is not subjective or subjectile, even though it is responsible for the most radical of effects of subjectivity or subjectivation. It is superficial, without substance, infinitely private because public through and through, spread on the surface of the page… xvii A complicated matter.

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This structure of the secret without secret is nevertheless a condition both of literature and of democracy, and here Derrida’s reading of a literary text displays his conviction that critical writing is not revelation of a secret of the text but intervention in a broader field. ‘If a right to the secret is not maintained,’ Derrida writes in ‘A Taste for the Secret,’ ‘we are in atotalitarian space.’xviii He warns us to mistrust an insistence on transparency: to be compelled to reveal secrets is a feature of totalitarianism. The exemplary secret of literature has to do with the fact that the poetic or fictional sentence detaches itself from the presumed source; that voice is always doubled: author/narrator/ character. ‘Here we touch,’ he writes, ‘on a structure of the secret about which literary fiction tells us the essential or which tells us in return the essential concerning the possibility of a literary fiction. If the secret remains undetectable, unbreakable, in this case, if we have no chance of ever knowing whether counterfeit money was actually given to the beggar,’ it is, as I have said, first because there is no there there, nothing behind the utterance of the friend.xix This inviolability depends, Derrida writes, ‘on nothing other than the absolutely bare device of being-two-to-speak and it is the possibility of non-truth in which every possible truth is held or made. It thus says the (non) truth of literature, let us say the secret of literature, what literary fiction tells us about the secret, of the (non) truth of the secret, but also a secret whose possibility assures the possibility of literature.’xx But this exemplary secret ‘impassions us,’ Derrida writes, it engages us with literature, even though—or because – ‘there is no longer even any sense in making decisions about some secret behind the surface of a textual manifestation.’xxi That ‘impassioning’ opens the possibility of a reading which, in performing ‘the text’s engagements with linguistic power,’ counter-signs the singular signature of a work.xxii This model offers a challenge to literary education: a challenge to write more inventively about literary works, in a kind of translation or extension of their force. Thinking the literary text as singularity, a singularity that challenges the generality of truth that it nevertheless makes possible, goes along with thinking of it as an event. Once again, this is scarcely without precedent, but Derrida’s notion of iterability gives him a conception of the work as a temporal event, to be identified not with the experience of a reader, nor with the act of a historical author, but with a linguistic event whose nature is to repeat. Another way to put this is that since literature, as fiction, does not presume a reality already given and to be represented but posits its own truth, it inscribes its own context, institutes its own scene, and gives

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us to experience that instituting. The opening of Moby Dick, ‘Call me Ishmael,’ is only a dramatic version of that performative instituting, whereby readers simultaneously participate in and observe the instituting of the literary scene. What is said is the saying itself. This crucial aspect of literature is succinctly instantiated in apostrophic lyrics—‘O wild west wind, thoubreath of autumn‘s being…’ -- which in addressing something attempt to bring it into being as potentially responsive agent and thus above all display that saying as something gratuitous and hyperbolic, a testing of poetic power.xxiii Not only are literary characters and events brought into being by language but this performative instituting is foregrounded, as event -- an event dependent upon fiction and thus a performance of linguistic power. Whereas we treat much language instrumentally and may experience it as an event, with effects and causes, in literary reading we experience not just the event itself but its happening as linguistic event, in a show of linguistic power. The concept of iterability, crucial to Derrida’s account of signature, the event, and performativity, gives us a notion of literature as performative – perhaps the aspect of Derrida’s thinking of literature that has become best known, in that his theorization of the performative through iterability has resonated well beyond the realm of literary criticism –in the work of Judith Butler, for example. Derrida’s account of the performativity of literature speaks of an experience of writing that he calls ‘subject’ to an imperative: to give space for singular events, to invent something new in the form of acts of writing which no longer consist in a theoretical knowledge, in new constative statements, to give oneself to a poetico-literary performativity at least analogous to that of promises, orders, or acts of constitution or legislation which do not only change language or which, in changing language, change more than language.xxiv

Here is another opening to an important domain. In a passage that has become quite well-known, Derrida describes literature as a modern invention inscribed in conventions and institutions which, to hold on to just this trait, secure in principle its right to say everything [tout dire]. Literature thus ties its destiny to a certain noncensure, to the space of democratic freedom, (freedom of the press, freedom of speech, etc.). No democracy without literature; no literature without democracy. One can always want neither one nor the other, and there is no shortage of doing without them under all regimes; it

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is quite possible to consider neither of them to be unconditional goods and indispensable rights. But in no case can one dissociate one from the other. No analysis would be equal to it. And each time that a literary work is censured, democracy is in danger, as everyone agrees. The possibility of literature, the legitimation that a society gives it, the allaying of suspicion or terror with regard to it, all that goes together—politically—with the unlimited right to ask any question, to suspect all dogmatism, to analyse any presupposition, even those of the ethics or the politics of responsibility.xxv This last clause is particularly important, for Derrida is practically unique in connecting the political significance of literature to the status we designate with the term ‘fiction’: to itssuspending or bracketing of reference, including reference to the empirical author. The key role of literature in democracy, its integral relation to democracy, hinges, Derrida argues, on the fact that this authorization to say anything paradoxically makes the author an author who is not responsible to anyone, not even to himself, for whatever the persons or the characters of his works, thus of what he is supposed to have written himself, say and do, for example. And these ‘voices’ speak, allow or make to come --even in literature without persons or characters.xxvi

This is an elementary fact about literary discourse –that the views expressed, questions raised, arguments or associations proposed, are not to be taken as propositions endorsed by the author, even when there is no particular character to whom to attach them. It is a feature of literature that Baudelaire is not to be held liable for having dropped a flowerpot on the head of a poor glazier, after pushing him down the stairs, as the speaker of ‘Le MauvaisVitrier’ recounts having done. But of course this irresponsibility of literature, this double-voicedness, is always under attack, and Vladimir Nabokov was lucky to escape being held responsible for the paedophilia of Humbert Humbert in Lolita. Salman Rushdie was not so fortunate. Derrida continues, ‘This authorization to say everything (which goes together with democracy as the apparent hyper-responsibility of a “subject”) acknowledges a right to absolute nonresponse.’xxvii Absolute non-response might mean, for instance, Bartleby’s ‘I would prefer not to,’ in Melville’s story. The right to absolute non-response: this is startling, for this right, like the right to privacy, does not seem to have been incorporated in constitutions, or in the US Bill of Rights, for instance --

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but it makes a good deal of sense. The right to non-response can be an essential feature of democracy, for it is totalitarian to require that one respond, to call one to answer for everything. Literature as the authorization to say anything carries with it an absolute right to non- response, Derrida maintains. ‘This non-response is more original and more secret than the modalities of power and duty because it is fundamentally heterogeneous to them.’xxviii This heterogeneity, which is linked to literature, helps us to conceive of what Derrida calls ‘ahyperbolic condition of democracy,’ quite distinct from the historical conception of democracy, which is dependent upon a particular conception of the subject: ascalculable, accountable, imputable, and responsible, a subject having-to-respond [devant- répondre], having-to-tell [devant-dire] the truth, having to testify according to the sworn word (‘the whole truth, nothing but the truth’), before the law [devant la loi], having to reveal the secret, with the exception of certain situations that are determinable and regulated by law (the confession, the professional secrets of the doctor, the psychoanalyst, or the lawyer, secrets of national defense or state secrets in general, manufacturing secrets, etc.).xxix Current democracy has certain zones of secrecy, of which the most sacrosanct is perhaps the secrecy of the secret ballot, but this hyperbolic democracy, a democracy-to-come, is linked to a fictionalized literary subject rather than to the calculable, responsible citizen-subject. This is a surprising result, but we can understand, I think, that the calculable, accountable, imputable subject is already part of a system of power and authority that must be a particular determination of the state, and one of the virtues of literature is to help us think beyond this determination. The idea of democracy, especially a democracy to come, is broader, less limited. And I would stress that responsibility in Derrida is thus different from infinite responsibility to the other associated with Emmanuel Levinas.xxx It is better seen as a responsibility without limits, which means not limited to what you consciously intended, or to the responsibility to or for members of your own group or nation; it can extend to animals and to the inanimate world. Nor is it limited to one’s responsibility to try to calculate how these responsibilities intersect. It is unlimited, undecided. Derrida’s heterogeneous writings about literature, while breaking with a practice of literary education based on the study of literary periods, the accumulation of knowledge about literary works, and the production of literary interpretations that seek to tell us what the literary work is really about, model a more inventive responsiveness which connects literature, in

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its most characteristic structures, to a host of political and ethical issues. The analogy between literary and political performativity and the analogy between role of the secret in literature and in politics both prove discursively productive: literature, like the legal text, produces events, and democracy, like literature, involves the preservation of secret, and especially the resistance to the compulsion to reveal or determine secrets. But Derrida’s thinking of literature and democracy goes beyond analogy, in the dependency of the non-fictional on the fictional, on the one hand, and on the other, the dependency of the responsibility of the subject of and in a democracy on hyper-responsibility, the responsibility without limits, entailed by the possibility of fiction.Calling literature ‘the most interesting thing in the world’ is manifestly not a turning aside from the public sphere to an inner life of the private sphere but on the contrary a deconstruction of the opposition between the public and private, the political and the literary, and a rethinking of what is crucial for democracy. This rich vein of writing about literature contains possibilities that the humanities might exploit in breaking away from a conception of the humanities as cultural capital that no longer works and in trying to make literary study a site of thinking and inventiveness. Let us hope that, like the democracy-to-come of which Derrida writes -- a horizon that can structure our present thinking of politics -- a university-to-come animated by the sorts of intellectual drive manifested in Derrida’s engagement with literature can offer more than an uncertain prospect to the humanities.

Notes I Jacques Derrida, ‘This Strange Institution Called Literature,’ in Acts of Literature, Derek Attridge (ed.), (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 47 ii Ibid., p. 45. iii Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004), p.139. iv Essays of Derrida’s on Blanchot, Celan and Ponge, as well as Joyce, Kafka, Mallarmé, and Shakespeare, can be found in Acts of Literature. On Celan, see Derrida, Sovereignty in Question; on Ponge, see Signéponge/Signsponge; on Blanchot, see Demeure: Fiction and Testimony; on Genet, see Glas; and on Baudelaire, see Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money. v Derrida, Jacques, ĴChe cos‘è la poesia?‘ in Between the Blinds: A Derrida Reader, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia UP, 1991). vi Nicholas Royle, Jacques Derrida (London: Routledge. 2003), pp. 4, 25. vii ‘This Strange Institution Called Literature,’ p. 68, then 62, 69-79, 52 viii Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981), p.61.

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ix Jacques Derrida, Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992), p. 94. x Jacques Derrida, “Passions: An Oblique Offering,” On the Name, Thomas Dutoit (ed.), trans. David Wood (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993) pp., 29-30. xi Given Time, p. 96. xii Ibid., p., 150. xiii Ibid., p. 151. xiv Ibid., p. 152. xv Ibid., p. 152. xvi Ibid., p. 169. xvii Ibid., p. 170. xviii Jacques Derrida, ‘I Have a Taste for the Secret,’ in Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, trans. Giacomo Donis (London: Polity P, 2001), p. 59. xix Given Time, p. 153. xx Ibid., p. 153. xxi Passions, p. 29. xxii Attridge, p. 98. xxiii See Jonathan Culler, ‘Apostrophe,’ Diacritics 7:4 (Winter 1977). Derrida writes about the address of the lyric in ‘Che cos‘è la poesia?’ xxiv ‘This Strange Institution…, p. 55 xxv Passions, p. 28. xxvi Ibid., pp. 28-9. xxvii Passions, p. 29. xxviii Passions, p. 29. xxix Ibid., p. 29. xxx On the importance of distinguishing Derrida and Levinas, see Hägglund’s brilliant discussion, ‘The Necessity of Discrimination: Disjoining Derrida and Levinas. Diacritics 34:4 (2004), 40- 71, taken up in his Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008), pp. 76-106.

Works Cited Attridge, Derek. The Singularity of Literature.Routledge, 2004. Culler, Jonathan. “Apostrophe.” Diacritics, vol. 7, no. 4, Winter 1977, pp. 59-69. Derrida, Jacques. “This Strange Institution Called Literature.” Acts of Literature, edited by Derek Attridge, Routledge, 1992. —. Dissemination.Translated by Barbara Johnson, U of Chicago P, 1981. —. Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money. Translated by Peggy Kamuf, U of Chicago P, 1992. —. “Demeure: Fiction and Testimony.” The Instant of My Death/Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, Maurice Blanchot/Jacques Derrida. Translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford UP, 2000.

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—. Glas.Translated by John P. Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand, U of Nebraska P, 1986. —. Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, edited by Thomas Dutoit and OutiPasanen, Fordham UP, 2005. —. Signeponge/Signsponge.Translated by Richard Rand, Columbia UP, 1984. —. “Che cos‘è la poesia?”Between the Blinds: A Derrida Reader, edited by Peggy Kamuf, Columbia UP, 1991. —. “Passions: An Oblique Offering.” On the Name, edited by Thomas Dutoit, translated by David Wood, Stanford UP, 1993. —. “I Have a Taste for the Secret.” Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris: A Taste for the Secret. Translated by Giacomo Donis, Polity P, 2001. Hägglund, Martin. Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, Stanford UP, 2008. —. “The Necessity of Discrimination: Disjoining Derrida and Levinas.” Diacritics, vol. 34, no.4, 2004, pp, 40-71. Royle, Nicholas. Jacques Derrida.Routledge, 2003.

INTERDISCIPLINARY HUMANITIES AND THE FUTURE OF THEORY JONATHAN CULLER

Interdisciplinarity has become a central category in universities in the United States: appealing to administrators as a progressive development, in which new programs or lines of research can be produced without substantial new resources, and appealing to teachers and researchers as enabling them to draw upon other areas of interest in their work. In the humanities interdisciplinarity may even have become a substitute for “theory,” as we call it, which was once the dynamic and controversial avant-garde of the humanities but which, after some forty years, no longer seems especially new. “Interdisciplinarity” may be simply a more academic name forthe unbounded corpus of thought in the humanities that went by the nickname “theory,” and that I once defined, in a little book that has been translated into some 28 languages, as “works that succeed in challenging and reorienting thinking in fields other than those to which they ostensibly belong” (3). During the heady era of theory, we took for granted its interdisciplinary character; and resistance to theory often took the form of complaints that literary critics were spending too much time reading philosophy or political theory, that historians were being contaminated by psychoanalysis or the speculations of literary scholars, and so on. At the beginning -- in the 1960s -- “theory” especially exploited work in anthropology, linguistics, and continental philosophy for its implications for other domains of study. Later, analytical philosophy (speech act theory) and psychoanalysis, and then science studies and visual studies contributed a good deal to theory, whose reflections became important for a wide variety of fields, including law (critical legal studies), historiography, and even art history. The notion of interdisciplinarity consecrates the sort of productive exchange among fields that characterized the heyday of theory. This relationship between interdisciplinarity and theory led me, in thinking about interdisciplinarity and the future of the humanities, to survey recent publications about theory, and I am struck that arguing that theory is not

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dead seems to have become a growth industry: titles like, After Theory, or Theory after Theory, Theory Renaissance, proliferate. One way in which theory has definitely altered the terrain of the humanities is that we now argue about whether or not theory is dead. Of course, if it really were dead we would not argue about it, unless theory is like Elvis – it keeps being sighted -- or like Zombies, lumbering lugubriously about. The problem is, I think, that the alleged death of theory is not easy to distinguish from its triumph: if theory does not seem to be a hot topic, it might be that today everyone realizes that their projects are sustained by and function within some sort of theoretical framework. The more ubiquitous theory becomes, the less it seems something new and distinct. Feminism encounters a similar fate. Feminists of my generation complain that young women do not consider themselves feminists, although they take for granted all the goals and accomplishments of feminism, so in that sense it might be said to have triumphed. Is this the death of feminism or its triumph? One can argue the case both ways. I am joking, of course, in saying that a major effect of theory is to make us argue about whether theory is dead. One of the effects of theory is to have transformed the terrain of the humanities so that it is no longer simply the repository of the culture of the past. The temporal character of the domain has changed. When I was an undergraduate in the 1960s, people argued about what was the best way to study literature: biographical criticism, literary history, New Criticism’s focus on the words on the page? But it was an argument about what was right, not about what was new, or outmoded, what was cutting edge, or dead. Anything said to be the latest thing could be challenged as not having stood the test of time. Now we are much more attuned to the temporality of academic discourse, which is why you might bother to read a paper about theory now or theory today. Part of this change is due in the Anglophone world, at least, to the emergence of the capitalist, corporate university: universities are no longer thought to be simply in the age-old business of instruction. Like corporations, they are supposed to innovate or die, and the fortunes of theory in the 1980 and 90s owed a good deal to the fact that administrators came to want “cutting-edge” projects and worried less about “soundness.” People who could present their work as doing something new, offering innovative perspectives, might prosper, even if the powers-that-be did not particularly approve of what they were doing. But today it is hard to argue that theory or anything else in the humanities has triumphed, as the world-wide economic uncertainties have made

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students and especially their parents, vulnerable to this incessant media drumbeat for STEM disciplines (the American acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). The media had always been very suspicious of theory and were frustrated that their former complaints had no effect, but now theyhave their chance to joke about English majors learning to ask “Do you want fries with that?”; and they are enjoying the opportunity to mock intellectuals who considered themselves superior. This situation seems to leave the humanities as a domain to be defended as teaching about values rather than as an exciting realm of thought and research. But I think it would be a mistake to fall back on the claim that we just teach the classics of culture. What we need now, more than ever, is the most resourceful thinking about meaning and value, mankind’s place in the world and ways of organizing life. We also need a better abbreviation – if science and technology are STEM disciplines, should we be ROOT disciplines, or EDGE disciplines? At any rate, there is little doubt that, as a result of the flourishing of what we call by the nickname “theory,” undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty are now able to take seriously a whole range of topics and types of investigations that previously were just not on the table. One needs only think of the study of race, gender, sexuality, of Women’s Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, Media studies, and generally the investigation of the histories of many things which we had previously taken as given. The result of theory is the relevance of many other sorts of intellectual work to what happens in departments of literature and cultural studies. There are all kinds of interdisciplinary possibilities. In an essay called “The University Without Condition,” Jacques Derrida speaks of the commitment to theory as “unconditional thought” (208). Certainly its speculative character, its willingness to question what has passed as common sense and to revisit axioms of our disciplinary practices has transformed the terrain in which we operate. Literary and cultural study is taken to include questioning of the canon, and of our disciplinary assumptions and procedures, our institutional practices. So, what about theory today? Three recent books give you a quite different sense of the terrain. First, Jane Elliott’s and Derek Attridge’s Theory After Theory: This volume argues that theory, far from being dead, has undergone major shifts in order to come to terms with the most urgent cultural and political questions of today. Offering an overview of theory’s new directions, this

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ground-breaking collection includes essays on affect, biopolitics, biophilosophy, the aesthetic, and neoliberalism, as wellas examinations of established areas such as subaltern studies, the postcolonial, and ethics. (i)

Elliott and Attridge present theory as new radical thoughts that contest old positions and change the canon of thinkers, but they retain the basic model of theory as interdisciplinary work that contests and reverses previous ways of thinking, as in Derrida, Foucault, Butler. They present new domains of theory, such as speculative materialism, and new major figures: Rancière, Agamben. They say we should move away from idea that such figures are necessary for theory, but they note that the reason for such figures is as shorthand for transformational ideas. For them theory is not dead; it functions much as before, but in new domains, with some new authors and new positions. Against that, the second book, Theory Aside, edited by Jason Potts and Daniel Stout, two assistant professors, asks: Where can theory go now? Where other voices concern themselves with theory’s life or death, the contributors to Theory Aside take up another possibility: that our theoretical prospects are better served worrying less about “what’s next?” and more about “what else?” Instead of looking for the next big thing, the fourteen prominent thinkers in this volume take up lines of thought lost or overlooked during theory’s canonization. They demonstrate that intellectual progress need not depend on the discovery of a new theorist or theory. (back cover)

If theory is a miscellaneous, interdisciplinary genre, if it consists of works that succeed in challenging and reorienting thinking in fields other than those to which they apparently belong, it is because writings from outside the field of literary studies have been taken up by people in literary studies because their analyses of language, or mind, or history, or culture, offer new and persuasive accounts of textual and cultural matters. Theory in this sense is an unbounded group of writings about everything under the sun, so for these authors “what else?” involves reviving once important but now neglected thinkers: Erving Goffman, C. L. R. James, Ernst Bloch, I. A. Richards, Alfred North Whitehead, and the early 20th century Russian Formalist, Alexandr Veselovski (for historical poetics). For them the challenge is to rethink the theory canon for new lines of thought by reviving older thinkers. A third book is Literary criticism in the 21st Century: Theory Renaissance, by Vincent Leitch, who has devoted his career to chronicling theory and criticism (he is the editor of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism

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and author of a whole series of books that survey theory). Theory Renaissance announces: For more than a decade literary criticism has been thought to be in a posttheory age. Despite this, the work of thinkers such as Derrida, Deleuze and Foucault and new writers such as Agamben and Rancière continues to be central to literary studies. Literary Criticism in the 21st Century explores the explosion of new theoretical approaches that has seen a renaissance in theory and its importance in the institutional settings of the humanities today. (jacket copy)

Theory Renaissance is a collection of essays, combining personal reflections with discussion of the continuing fortunes of Derrida and Foucault, sociopolitical work in critical theory, and globalization. It offers a chart with a dozen broad domains, each with 6-12 subfields, again documenting a dispiriting excess. It has the virtue of indicating the impossibility of trying to cover the field of theory and, for my purposes here, of justifying a plan to discuss just two domains that I find especially interesting, but let me first offer a couple of observations about salient developments, First, a striking aspect of recent theory has been a return of interest in aesthetics, which for a time had been a dirty word: aesthetics was seen as elitist and was pushed aside by literary and cultural theory of late 20th century. Traditional aesthetic concepts, such as artistic genius, the autonomy and universality of art, and its inherent spiritual value, were inextricably tied to conceptions of the subject and of the independence of discourse from social forces that theory of various schools was engaged in combating. But without aesthetics, the French theorist Jacques Rancière has argued, there is no art: without specifically aesthetic values or perspectives, so- called art will merge with everything else --into a sea of consumer objects, we might say (Aesthetics).This is a very pertinent issue today, interestingly addressed by Sianne Ngai, for instance, in Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, which deals with both popular culture and high culture and engages aesthetic theorists such as Adorno (2012). Ngai argues that these are familiar transperiod categories applicable to a range of media and genres, both affective and conceptual; they resist institutionalization and are valuable precisely for their ability to help explain the remarkable smoothness with which supposedly resistant art has integrated itself in consumer culture. Jacques Rancière has been particularly important in reversing the critique of aesthetics as elitist. Western aesthetics, what Rancière calls “the aesthetic regime,” replaced in the early 19th century what he calls the

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“representative regime” inherited from Aristotle, a regime based on literary and artistic genres and structured by rules concerning appropriate and inappropriate subjects for art and for particular means of representation (Mute Speech). In the late 18th century, at the time of the French Revolution, these rules were challenged; henceforth anything could be the subject of art or literature. Victor Hugo wrote that he had put “un bonnet rouge” – a revolutionary hat -- on the old dictionary: no longer were there noble words and ignoble words. The Romantic revolution in literature and art was a democratizing project, Rancière has vigorously reminded us, leading to the breaking of links between art and aristocracy, to the foundation of museums, and to general projects of aesthetic education. Today, the questions of aesthetics and democratization are connected with the subject of new media. The world of new digital media, hypertext, and computer games poses new aesthetic questions: especially about the finished verbal artifact as the norm. --as electronic form makes texts into potentially mutable instances. Fortunately, such questions are no longer seen as outdated or elitist. Second observation: psychoanalysis, which for several decades was central to theory, has suffered a significant decline in importance, at least in the Anglophone world. For many years it was a major domain of intellectual speculation and analysis that belonged above all to theory, since it lacked any other proper academic home. Some of that intellectual energy has been diverted into trauma theory – the work of Cathy Caruth is exemplary here --and into affect studies (Eve Sedgwick was a pioneer and Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings an important point of reference: both dealing with dimensions of personal experience for which psychoanalysis might previously have been called in). Some of the energy has also gone into focus on the body in biopolitics, the study of the strategies and mechanisms of knowledge, power, and processes of subjectivation through which human life processes are managed. But my point is that the reading of Freud and Lacan has not remained fundamental for anyone working in theory, whereas work on, say, Foucault and Derrida still has. But I want to focus on two developments among many that seem to me especially significant. First, there is the revival of Narratology, the theory of narrative and formal study of narrative structure, which was a major aspect of structuralist literary theory. This had for some time been a rather neglected enterprise,

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not very dynamic, but it recently has undergone renovation, has been making a comeback. Instead of focusing mostly on 19th and 20th century literary narrative, recent narratology has given an important place to stories people tell in ordinary life, and also to a broader historical range of narratives; and it has also attempted, in onestrand, to draw on cognitive science in describing the operations involved in processing narrative-- a major form of intelligibility (Herman 2013). (It is not clear whether the socalled “cognitivist turn” is actually yielding new insights or just a new vocabulary –blending instead of metaphor – but time will tell.) The most important narratological study, Monika Fludernik’s groundbreaking Towards A “Natural” Narratology, takes storytelling, of the sort that happens in daily life as well as in fiction, as central and breaks with a plot-based narratology; for her something can be a narrative if someone experiences it. And she attempts to assimilate recent cognitivist work to narratology, without abandoning the fundamental achievements of the narratological tradition. Another excellent and original work is Rick Altman’s Theory of Narrative (2008). Altman, a well-known film theorist, explicitly sets out to construct a new theory of narrative based not on plot, much less on the assumption that the norm for narrative is an unbroken plot thread, but on what he calls “following.” A narrative follows one character or group or switches between one and another. So, narratives are distinguished by their different following patterns (different kinds of modulation from one scene or unit to another), which yield an elementary typology: there are dual-focus narratives, single-focus narratives, and multiple-focus narratives. In crafting a narratology that is truly based on narrative in general and not just on literary narrative, Altman uses many vivid cinematic examples. This can be considered part of what is sometimes called the intermodal strand of narratology today – interest in narratives across media, in different media. Altman is very deft at showing the advantages of his terminologicallysimple scheme over traditional narratological analysis and offers what ought to be a starting point for further refinements. But most interesting to me is what is called Unnatural Narratology – a reaction against Fludernik’s title but primarily against classic narratology, which posited, for instance, that a narrative is the narration of a sequence of events and thus involves a fundamental distinctionbetween the events – what happened -- and the telling, the discourse in which they are reported

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(with a particular point of view). And classical narratology maintained that every narrative has a narrator, even if not manifest – it seems natural to say that a story is told by someone. In principle, then, this is a narrator distinct from the author. And narratology classically assumes that a story may be either fiction, the projection of a fictional world, with no claim to truth, or non-fiction, with truth claims. Now of course, narratologists have always known that there are many narratives that do not fit this model --narratives where we for various reasons we cannot determine what happened, or where the narrative perspective cannot be understood as that of an ordinary person, or where borderlines between fiction and non-fiction are disrupted. Identifying such anomalies was one of the functions of normative narratological models, but as such cases are multiplied in what we often call postmodernism, the new Unnatural Narratology takes the sensible view that instead of regarding all such cases as anomalous narratives, narrative theory should decentre itself and bring into its ken the full range of narratives (A Poetics). Then narratives that fit the classical model can be regarded as a special case: one that follows a mimetic model where fictional narrative is an imitation of real-world narratives, a real-world narrative but set in a fictional frame, with a fictional narrator but telling what is presented as a representation of real events, with an identifiable chronology and a human teller with a particular point of view on it. Unnatural Narratology stresses the anti-mimetic character of a lot of fiction, which calls attention to its fictive nature in various ways. There are, for instance, stories such as Robert Coover’s “The Babysitter,” where it is impossible to determine what actually happened: there are multiple, contradictory fragments of scenarios, which are impossible to sort out, even if one decides to take many of them as fantasies of particular characters. There are narratives with narrators that are not ordinary persons: a very wide range of possibilities here, from non-human narrators -- a horse in John Hawkes’ “Sweet William,” a corpse in Beckett’s “The Calmative,” a man who has become a 150 pound female breast in Philip Roth’s “The Breast,” the disembodied voice that narrates Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable, or Saleem Sinai, who is a radio receiver for the thoughts of others, in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children – to such unidentifiable narrative voices, if they can be called that at all, as those of Finnegans Wake. Not so bizarre but also unnatural, in the sense that their capacities are different from those of real individuals, are character narrators, from Marcel of Proust’s Recherche, to Ishmael of Moby Dick and Nick Carraway of The Great Gatsby, who narrate things that they

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could not have known. There are, of course, unnatural narrative strategies that have become quite conventional, from the talking beasts of fables to so-called omniscient narrative voices. But Unnatural Narratology wants to stress, first, the exceptional character of much fiction –that it is not realistic narration with a fictional frame around it – and then, instead of simply registering these as anomalous cases, asks both what is the effect of these unnatural strategies and how readers process them. Here there is a major disagreement between Unnatural Narratologists oriented toward cognitive science, who want whenever possible to argue that we use the same models for processing strange fictional texts that we do for making sense of other narratives, and those narratologists who insist on the unnatural processing strategies that such fictions induce. The naturalizing strategies involve, for example, taking a strange narration to be unreliable, or a fantasy, or dream, whereas the unnatural strategies do not limit narrative possibilities to what is plausible in real- world narratives but often bring into play a meta-level, where the impossibility is recuperated as a special fictional technique. So, for example, with “The Babysitter,” instead of imagining that there is a narrator who is hopelessly confused or schizophrenic, we take this as a playful authorial commentary on narration itself and the rules of ordinary plot construction. With the less extreme examples, when Marcel, or Ishmael, or Nick Carraway tell us something that they could not have known, we should not assume, as the mimetic model would lead us to do, that they are imagining it or lying, or dreaming, but rather that this is an authorial technique for giving us authoritative information. A surprising unnatural narrative convention might be that when the narratorial functions are operating independently of the character functions --that is, when the narrative provides information not easily relatable to the reality of a character narrator—then, surprisingly, the narration will be reliable and authoritative, and the source of information is taken to be not the unknowing character narrator but the stipulating or world-creating author (Phelan). Taking as a point of departure resistance to mimetic reductionism, resistance to the assumption that we can make sense of narratives through models based on realist parameters, Unnatural Narratology seems to me a very promising branch of poetics, the investigation of the procedures by which we make sense of the strange texts that increasingly people the world of fiction with strange doings and unnatural voices.

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The second major development – though it might perhaps, rather be seen as a series of developments -- is what I am inclined to refer to as the mishmash of the post-human, a series of theoretical enterprises which have in common the resistance to the anthropocentric vision of the universe that has for so long been a mark of the humanities – Man is the measure of all things. I say “mishmash” because for instance, an Ecocriticism, devoted to the celebration of nature and of attempts to repair of the damage done to the environment by industrialization, does not sit very well with treatment of the human as cyborg. This latter form of questioning of thedistinction between man and machine has been a theoretical topic ever since Donna Haraway announced in “A Cyborg Manifesto” of 1985 that “we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs” (181). The cyborg, hybrid creature of science fiction, part person and part robot, she writes, “can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves” (181). The two other strands of my post-human mishmash are human-animal studies, which explore and resist the various ways in which we have made the distinction, have constituted ourselves as radically different from animals, and, last, the recent philosophical attempt to break out of the Kantian framework, which goes by such names as “object-oriented ontology” and “speculative materialism,” attempting to think a world of things independent of our faculties. The characterization of the animal as other has long helped to define the human. But how is the distinction between the human and the animal made, on what grounds? With what is called “the question of the animal,” “Human-Animal studies,” has become a burgeoning interdisciplinary field. Some critiques of the human/animal opposition foreground the commonalities and continuities promoting a “being with” animals. On the other hand, a powerful strain of recent theoretical work focuses on the discontinuities, the radical otherness and inaccessibility of animals, whom we cannot presume to understand (especially once we move beyond animals Westerners like to believe we understand, such as dogs and horses) (Calarco). Stressing the role that notions of the animal have played in defining the human, this approach demands respect for the otherness of animals and accuses proponents of the first approach of anthropomorphizing, treating animals according to human models. There is quite a lively debate here.

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Undoing of the boundary between human and animal and promotion of respect for animals is certainly consonant with Ecocriticism, which undertakes similar critiques of the opposition between man and nature that helped construct a humanism in which nature in the West even now is treated as matter to be exploited. This underlies an encompassing ecological movement that challenges the anthropocentrism of humans and that seeks to promote respect for the environment and all non-human others: the well-being of the full range of life forms, human and nonhuman, and of the environment is an end to which other purposes should answer. But traditional celebrations of nature, it is argued, still put man at the centre: nature as a place for us to restore ourselves, where we can escape the world that is too much with us, where getting andspending we lay waste our powers. Do we save the environment for ourselves – it is easier to mount these arguments: reduce greenhouse emissions lest our coastal cities be flooded – or do we save it for itself, striving to remain consistent in our opposition to anthropocentrism? Promotion of the concept of the Anthropocene, as the era since the beginning of the industrial revolution, when the irreparable human impact on the planet began, is an attempt to highlight the degradation of the natural environment as an inescapable fact of our world. But as well as putting man at the centre, as the term itself insists, this leads to the argument that there is really no such thing as nature or the environment, against which human activity can differentiate itself, since any background is already structured by, suffused with our action; and what we now call nature is often what has been artificially preserved or highlighted, as much a cultural product as anything else. But to treat nature as a human construction, it can be argued, plays right into the enemy’s hands by obfuscating the material reality of the world that we wish to protect and enhance. When Timothy Morton argues that “the environment is just a name for a flickering shimmering field of forces in constant flux,” and that “nature does not strictly exist,” the grounds on which to critique ecological damage also flicker (10). The ecological thinking of someone like Morton can be related to ObjectOriented Ontology, which is first of all a claim that nothing, and certainly not man, has special ontological status; instead of thinking of objects, even objects that humans have made, as there for us, they must be granted an independent existence, independent of human cognition. To put things at the centre of a new metaphysics implies that they do not exist just for us. This so-called democratic ontology can certainly promote care for objects – trees, stones, oceans -- but can posthumanism rigorously exclude

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anthropocentrism without reducing everything to the same? What is called speculative realism, associated above all with the French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux, seeks resolutely to oppose Kant’s Copernican revolution on which most modern thought is based: that we do not know things in themselves but only things as they are adapted to our faculties. What would it mean to think about reality without taking as central the question of the relation between the world and our faculties? Meillassoux calls us to focus,rather, on what he calls “the great outdoors, the eternal in-itself, whose being is indifferent to whether it is thought” (63). This corresponds, of course, with commonsense metaphysics: the world exists independently of whether we can know it or not. World cannot be contained or constrained by our access to it. But of course to say anything about the world seems to depend onwhat we can know. Whence the description of this realism is speculative. But Meillassoux, as support for his realism, makes a distinction between sensible qualities of objects that depend on a relation to perceivers and other, mathematically definable qualities that he claims do not. There are certainly affinities between this and a much discussed recent work of theory, Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, which advances the concept of distributed agency, stresses the range of ways in which non-human actors participate in events, not just as objects of our will but as compliant or resistant actors. This is a controversial book that rereads some of the history of philosophy in ways that are seen as stressing magical or mysterious forces that should not bemuse a contemporary scientific understanding, but it can be consonant with versions of Ecocriticism when it resists the separation of man from the environment, as in Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network theory, which insists that, living in the world, we are part of systems of “distributed cognition,” some of it embodied in our minds, some in natural systems, some in the smart environments that we and our machines have created. Actor-Network theory is connected with the more technologically-oriented strand of posthuman thought, as in Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman, which charts a shift in understanding of the human: from autonomous subjects to nodes of embodiment in increasingly complex systems with feedback loops. The systems of which we form a part are now able to fly airplanes, set stock prices, find information and do a host of other things more quickly and efficiently than mind by itself ever could. Though for many purposes we still have recourse to traditional notions of individuals, free will, and agency, these are seen as heuristic fictions,

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which we use to try to make sense of a world in which pattern emerges against a background of randomness, through recursive operations. What we call the human, for instance, would be a selection of features from machinic systems and natural processes: life and consciousness as emergent effects of machinic processes. The notion of the “post-human,” though above all an attention-getting device, is a logical development of the movement of contemporary theory, which has contested the traditional model of the human subject as autonomous, rational, self-conscious, and possessed of free will. Conscious agency, we could say, is a story consciousness tells itself in order to explain what in fact happens as a result of the interaction of a complex of factors: we are part of complex systems or circuits that we do not control. The fundamental claim is that we have always been posthuman, always other than that image of the human suggested by humanism. Computers and other devices have only made evident what was the case all along: the psyche with its drives, for example, was never a device that we controlled, and our bodies are extremely complex mechanisms that have always in many ways escaped the understanding. How far this line of thinking is really compatible with an Ecocriticism emphasizing our disruptive place in ecosystems we do not understand is far from clear. There are some respects in which they might be allies; others in which they seem temperamentally and ideologically at different poles. Boundaries between one and another form of post-humanism –deep ecology, Object-Oriented Ontology, are quite porous, although the affective charge and often political programs can be quite different. If I were younger I would take a serious interest in this mishmash, because it does pose a great many questions that are both conceptually difficult and crucial for the future. Let me make two points to conclude. First, human-animal studies and Ecocriticism are not just theoretical movements but political movements driven by a commitment to justice. For instance, after women’s liberation and gay liberation, a certain logic – the contesting of hierarchical oppositions that have marginalized certain groups to create norms -- might point toward animal liberation, then plant liberation. But at what point does this theoretical reflection become counterproductive? Machine liberation? An ontology that insists on the democracy of all objects may be resistant to manygoals we would want to defend. Writers on Object-Oriented Ontology are fond of lists of random objects: bonobos, buttons, bacteria, bulldozers -- are all equally worthy of our care? What is the relationship between these theoretical explorations

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and the causes that may have helped instigate them? Second, I should say a word about the relation of these interdisciplinary theoretical developments to literature and literary studies. For Ecocriticism, of course, it is literature that, since the Romantic period, has celebrated nature as a source of value to be set against a world of cities and machines, and, at the other end of the spectrum of ecological thought, Morton grants an important role to art –though not one I understand—in the “dark ecology” that flows from his disruption of the distinction between man and nature (Morton). For human-animal studies, the representation of animals in literature offers some particularly imaginative engagements with the paradoxes that beset the theoretical explorations, where the inclinations to anthropomorphize animals in questioning various boundaries between human and animal is countered by the insistence on the otherness of animals, which we should not presume to try to understand. There are representations of animals in literature, Laura Brown argues, that escape some of the paradoxes that theory has explored because the creatures ofliterature are simultaneously anthropomorphized and other, they “mingle human-associated and humanalienating impulses, anthropomorphism and alterity, in a way that takes the question of the human-animal relationship in a different direction” from the theoretical dichotomy: more varied and speculatively fantastical and thus more exploratory of true otherness (Brown 30). Animals may be used to bring abstractions into the realm of everyday experience, offering unusual perspectives on effects of hierarchy, diversity, and difference. Poems featuring animals may be unusually imaginative attempts to think in sympathy with the singularity of animals while nonetheless foregrounding the impossibility of finding words that do not appropriate them for human purposes. For theorists of the post-human such as Katherine Hayles, literature has always functioned as a technology designed to change the cognition of the reader, and now in new electronic systems feedback loops enable different levels of interaction between text and reader to continuously inform and mutually determine one another, transforming texts as readers perform them. In Jorge Luis Borges’s fantastical story “The Book of Sand,” the letters shift into new positions every time the book is closed. Now in electronic texts, words and images may shift, through algorithms or programs that create an infinite number of possible recombinations. We

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have been accustomed to say, of great literature, that the text always has surprises in store, so that readers always find something new in it. Electronic texts can literalize (and perhaps trivialize) this condition. More significantly, they can lead to a reimagining of the literary work as an instrument or game to be played. Will more focus on event and evaluation lead to a democratization of aesthetics in the electronic era? Hayles herself, while focusing on the various distinctive modes of interaction or “intermediation” that electronic literature engages, stresses the continuity between the functioning of these new textual modes and traditional literary works, which can also be seen as instruments to be played and devices to transform consciousness. Finally, for object oriented ontology it is literature that has done the most to try to imagine non-human perspectives, since poets and novelists have been quite resourceful in devising worlds where objects seem to take priority over humans and where human perspectives may seem absent. Here we rejoin, fortuitously, unnatural narratology, in that the imagining ofnon-human narrators or perspectives is a major fictional device, one that can gain new respectability from its association with a serious-sounding philosophical movement. Whatever happens, I do feel confident that there will continue to be a very active, extremely engaging, interdisciplinary theoretical enterprise that is highly germane to literary and cultural studies. Since theory is not just an evolving corpus of works, but thinking about thinking, it calls us to question how a discipline frames questions, asking whether there are not other, better ways to proceed, and what we would mean by “better.” The impetus to theory is a desire to understand what one is doing, to question commitments and their implications. Theory is driven by theimpossible desire to step outside one’s thought, both to place it and to understand it, and also by a desire – a possible desire-- for change, both in the ways of one’s own thought, which always could be sharper, more knowledgeable and capacious, more self-reflecting, and for change in the world which our thought engages, so there will always be new developments, will always be changes in the realm of theory, for discussions of theory today.

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Works Cited Albers, Jan, et al., editors. A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative. Ohio State UP, 2013. —. Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology. de Gruyter, 2011. Altman, Rick. Theory of Narrative. Columbia UP, 2008. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, NC, Duke UP, 2010. Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Book of Sand,” The Book of Sand, translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, Dutton, 1977. Brown, Laura. Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination. Cornell UP, 2010. Calarco, Matthew. Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida. Columbia UP, 2008. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Culler, Jonathan. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2011. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Fordham UP, 2008. —. “The University Without Conditions.” Without Alibi, edited and translated by Peggy Kamuf, Palo Alto, Stanford UP, 2002. Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Blackwell, 1991. Elliott, Jane and Derek Attridge, editors. Theory after Theory. Routledge, 2010 Fludernik, Monika. Towards A “Natural” Narratology.Routledge, 1996. Gregg, Melissa and Gregory J. Seigworth, editors. Affect Theory Reader. Duke UP, 2010. Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985), Simians, Cyborgs and Women.Routledge, 1991. —. When Species Meet. U of Minnesota P, 2007. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. U of Chicago P, 1999. Hearne, Vicki. Adam’s Task. Knopf, 1986. Herman, David. Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind. MIT Press, 2013. Herman, David, James Phelan, Peter Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robin Warhol, editors. Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates. Ohio State UP, 2012. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social – An Introduction to ActorNetwork-Theory. Oxford UP, 2005. Leitch, Vincent. Literary Criticism in the 21st Century: Theory Renaissance. Bloomsbury, 2014.

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—. Living with Theory. Blackwell, 2008. Loesberg, Jonathan. A Return to Aesthetics. Stanford UP, 2005. Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Continuum, 2008. Morton, Timothy. “Ecology as Text, Text as Ecology,” Oxford Literary Review, vol. 32.no. 1 (2010). —. Ecology without Nature. Harvard UP, 2007. Ngai, Sianne. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Harvard UP, 2012. —. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA, Harvard UP, 2007. Phelan, James. Living to Tell about it: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Ohio State UP, 2005 Potts, Jason and Daniel Stout, editors. Theory Aside. Duke UP, 2014. Ranciere, Jacques. Aesthetics and its Discontents. Columbia UP, 2008. —. Mute Speech. Columbia UP, 2011. Richardson, Brian. Unnatural Narrative. Ohio State UP, 2015. Sedgwick, Eve. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC, Duke UP, 2003. Shaviro, Steven. The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism. U of Minnesota P, 2014. Wolfe, Cary, ed., Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal. U of Minnesota P, 2003.

MEDIA CONVERGENCE AND VIRALITY: REFLECTIONS ON CONTEMPORARY CELEB-CULTURE ARUNLAL K

Recurrent media representation creates a special ubiquitousness for celebrities. Understanding celebrity culture entails an analysis of transformative spaces as disparate as new media and encyclopaedia. As it usually happens with celebrity culture, the manipulation of the visible aspect of celebrityhood validates the twenty-first century luminary’s social identity and belonging. Nevertheless, now more than ever, to be visually available for consumption is a means for a famous personality to ensure that he/she ‘exists’. On the darker side, the visibility factor invites control of and surveillance on their persona, less subtly as privacy intrusions, and more so through a disciplinary control of one’s behaviour. In the wake of modern mass media and ‘the mechanical reproduction of the works of art’, Walter Benjamin had argued that the “celebrity achieves an aura through mass reproduction”, which makes seeing them “in the flesh” even more captivating (236). Caught in the cusp of another media revolution and against the background of transformative humanities, one can redefine celebrity logics by understanding how and where the reproduction and circulation of celebrity happens on the contemporary scene.

Media Convergence and the New Celebrity Culture Essentially, the term ‘media’ refers to any transactional channel that interconnects a crowd of ‘consumers’. Celebrities, in a general historical understanding, are those who knew to stay in and use the media that was popular in the society of the time. Consequently, as the nature of the media underwent a revision, so did the profile (skillsets, factors of fame, social relevance, elements that added to their glamour, etc.) of the celebrity status. In the past few years, multifarious social media platforms—most of which take effect through a hyper-visual mode—have mediated the rise and obsolescence of famous personalities. Since a celebrity is a component

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of the market at large and the advertisement industry in particular, it is only natural that celebrity culture gets revised via the syntax of the online dimension of everyday life when market and advertising are both co-opted into a cyber culture. The digital revolution ensures that people are always connected and comfortable with a range of cutting-edge technologies that facilitate the birth of the digital native. ‘Socialized’ differently, these individuals are used to receiving information at a fast pace. The changing times and the emergence of digital speed in the contemporary world have had a tremendous impact on the making of a celebrity. Consequently, the social media has become a very powerful vehicle that celebrities board; interestingly, the social media produced its own brand of celebrities in the post-millennial decades, that could sometimes even rival the reach of a mainstream film star or singer. YouTubers, Vloggers, TikTokkers, and other social media celebrities gather millions of followers worldwide on their platforms. Even in the absence of specifically developed and traditionally recognised skill-sets, these micro-celebrities have been able to gain huge fanfare. A different sense of community culture is enclosed within each platform of the social media. The vagaries of hyper-mediation are used today to build one’s own audience and a sense of connection, especially in the case of micro-celebrities, whose fame is relatively narrow in scope and likely to be transient. Celebrities as cultural intermediaries are imperative, as they shape both use values and exchange values, and exert cultural authority as determiners of taste and as architects of new consumer dispositions. One of the new marketing phenomena that the management sciences were intrigued with in the beginning of the twenty-first century was ‘stealthmarketing’—a shrewd online strategy wherein companies paid ‘ordinary’ consumers to promote new products. The targets were ‘friends’ and ‘friends of friends’ of these people, whose disguised promotional messages (as email, Facebook post, YouTube video, or Instagram story) would push the brand in a very convincing manner to a very ‘personal perceptual space’. By 2010, management studies had named these brandpushers—influencers. With the arrival of the influencer, global celebrity culture underwent unprecedented scales of change. It is significant that these changes were more than local and surpassed the impact of influencer-like media figures. In today’s (social) media, the longevity of celebrityhood matters less; that which counts more is the mass impact of a particular moment. Celebrities mushroom across society and wield authority in their respective fields in various ways. The longevity of mass consumption is determined by

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divergent factors, including the field of expertise, the nature of the media that upholds the person, and the interval before the next viral sensation hits online platforms among others. The process paves the way for a discourse community with its structured communication and system of information. The nature and impact of the mass media before the advent of the cell phone and data revolution was largely regional. Social changes were communicated across the borders but with a good deal of delay and much loss of immediacy. The most important transformation in the media in the wake of the data revolution is the abrupt collapse of the boundaries that separated divergent mass media. With the emergence of cell phone apps, fluctuations in user experience have started to occur simultaneously across the globe. An app update could alter the very nature of Facebook transactions completely; a modification felt and responded to by all users of the app across the globe as the update reached the international consumer world in an instant. The data-based cell phone transactions affected a seamless convergence of media and created their own celebrities who did not have to, if at all they needed to, be aware of shifting from one media platform to another. From politicians to rock stars, to housewives who are expert cooks or students who dance well, everyone had more or less the same variables to deal with when it came to claiming their share of media attention and fame. The new media redefined the individual—the visual focus of the new media platforms contributed to the ‘selfie culture’, which is essentially a specific category of self-representation. Travellers, artists, politicians, and the aforementioned ‘ordinary’ promoters subscribe to this representational model. One could think of family influencers, digital media entrepreneurs, tech analysts and such online celebrities, all of whom could claim microcelebrity stature. Using the early studies on internet culture, one may still categorise them as people with individual blogs/accounts, albeit with accounts on most social media. These individuals accrue, in effect, sufficient cultural, economic, and social capital to enable them to occupy dominant positions in the everyday experience of the mass of consumers. It may be noted that a considerable number of print magazines have gone out of business in the last few decades, and that web editions of news dailies have become an important sub-field. If the traditional mass media embedded advertisements and promotional content in the spaces between their actual content, the postmodern marketplaces selfie-celebrities as a part of their content form. They appear to the masses as a simple picture comparable to an Instagram post and command a fee from the manufacturer-distributor chain. A set of skills are necessary to create this post, such as engineering a good photo angle, lighting, or ambience. By

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means of their physical charisma and the association with the products they sell, they are able to wield vital influence in the marketing world, live a luxurious lifestyle, and accumulate more followers on the social media, even to the point of being able to charge for personal appearances in publicity events. The internet transformed the definition of celebrity by giving it new attributes. Unlike those stars created by television, newspapers, print magazines, or any of the twentieth-century mass media, their counterparts born in the social media command greater proximity and a very high degree of immediacy. Celebrities of TV-era were segregated on the basis of their achievements in their special fields: celebrity actors, celebrity writers, celebrity musicians and so on. The media that celebrated, or rather ‘celebrified’ them sought to sanctify and justify their aloofness from the masses and bestowed on them a royal or divine aura through an enveloping mythology. The mass media churned out stories to make them stars in their unique fields. Moreover, the celebrities, in general, were not ones who would easily survive the media platform where their ‘mythology’— an easily consumable and inspirational version of the lives of celebrities— was made. To put it clearly, a literary celebrity, with all the hype, failed to impress an audience on television, on a stage-show, or on radio. In the same manner, an actor-celebrity would find it very difficult to sway a literary audience. These media were discrete units of myth-making and circulating and did not easily connect on an inter-platform basis. The contemporary celebrity exists in an inter-platform mode: the creation and commodification of celebrities as such have become a source of popular fascination. Minor celebrities are mass produced and then devoured with extraordinary speed. It is possible to see the ascendancy of celebrity culture as reflecting a cultural shift from the assessment of character to that of personality. The ‘celebrity victim’ (someone who gains fame for his/her failures, illness or misfortune) is another category that has also come to fascinate observers. This type of celebrity personifies a wider sense of powerlessness and estrangement and helps give meaning to the difficulty that many experience in coping with the problems of existence. The fame that society accords to those who are prepared to disclose personal problems and intimate thoughts is a development that has engaged the attention of writers in the realm of the confessional and therapeutic imagination. These quasi-charismatic figures do not have to justify their moral status. Nor does society expect contemporary celebrities to initiate a prolonged stretch of engagement. When the media eventually become disappointed in their performance, they locate a more convincing

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viral personality. The new model of sociability offered by the social media also creates more individualized social networks, each working towards a ‘celebritization’ (the societal and cultural embedding) of the self (and of the ‘celebrity’). Despite the ‘remoteness’ of the celebrity, the bonds of collective life are reaffirmed by the focused images deployed all over the media; a constant negotiation takes place between the celebrity, the media, and the audience that is glued to the digital screen. People also experience the stardom multi-sensuously, through activities, such as dining at celebrity restaurants or ‘performing’ their recipes at home. This phase is allusive of the abstracted, anticipatory, reflective, and conjectural consumption of celebrities as well as the physical consumption of their cuisine. Dileep, the Malayalam film actor, demonstrates the ways in which contemporary celebrities cash in on the excitement of making the masses feel that the superstar is right in the middle of their everyday experience. The actor chose the tag of ‘janapriyan’, which literally means ‘popular’. Similarly, Mammootty is hailed as a megastar and Mohanlal is a superstar. Rajnikanth also uses the superstar tag and Kamal is acknowledged as the ‘universal star’. In contrast, the ‘star’ tag was dropped by Dileep and the next generation of popular actors, though their claim to stardom did not wane much. Dileep took this strategy further with a chain of restaurants that used the theme of ‘puttu’, a food item that appears most prominently in the cuisine of Kerala. Dileep’s chain of restaurants successfully customized the recipe of making puttu; as versatile as bread in western recipes, puttu in the ‘DhePuttu’ kitchens took on a range of stuffing and complex moulds. A feat of celebrification, a transformation of the ‘ordinary’, this restaurant chain soon added to the popularity of the actor and worked as a very effective endorsement of the ‘janapriyan’ image. Cashmore and Parker describe instances of this sort as “the commodification of the human form” (215). It is the process by which people are turned into ‘things’—to be adored, respected, worshipped or idolized, and perhaps even more importantly, produced and consumed (Cashmore and Parker 215). The success of Dileep’s deployment of the tag ‘janapriyan’ instigated the ‘super’ and ‘mega’ stars of the 1990s to use endearing tags such as ‘ettan’ and ‘ikka’ (both terms meaning ‘brother’) with their evolved celebrityhood. Anthony Giddens has observed that in social analysis, the term structure, the “recurrent patterned arrangement” refers generally to “rules and resources”, and more specifically to “the structuring properties allowing the ‘binding’ of time-space in social systems” (15). These properties make it possible for similar social practices to exist across time and space and

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lend them “systemic” form. Celebrities, as per this logic, “perform” social actions through what Giddens identifies as “embedded memory” (42). The structure’s nature as both medium and outcome is conceived by Giddens thus: “...the essential recursiveness of social life, is constituted in social practices: structure is both medium and outcome of reproduction of practices. Structure enters simultaneously into the constitution of the agent and social practices, and ‘exists’ in the generating moments of this constitution” (42). Structures exist both internally within agents as embedded memory and externally as the manifestation of social actions. They have moved from the level of interpersonal interactions to a space of mediated reality in the contemporary cultural context. The sense of belonging and individualism that one experiences as a celebrity, therefore, becomes more pronounced with media convergence.

Virality and Insta-Fame Convergence itself is a problematic platform to understand new media behaviour. Insta-celebs serve as an example to understand this shifting terrain. The glamour of Instafame, for instance, derives from its visual or photographic focus. However, it is more than just a photographic medium, since the visuals are accompanied by texts, and the platform offers an account owner the options to receive and reciprocate to responses from other members. Admittedly, most of the verbal interaction is minimal and consists of short phrases at best, or often, merely a word or a few emoticons. Unlike Twitter, there is no restriction on the volume of text that a user can post, and some accounts feature more extended discussions than usual. The hashtag, as in the case of Twitter, serves an important communicative function—not just thematic (grouping together pictures on a similar topic) but rhetorical, often inviting certain interpretations. A rather different type of Instafame, and one that could not be predicted from studying the intended affordances of the medium, concerns a new generation of poets known as Instapoets. By framing a few lines of verse in a picture, these writers, completely unknown prior to Instagram, have grown significant audiences, signed publishing deals, and, in some cases, released best-selling volumes of poetry far outstripping anything produced in the conventional literary scenario. Rupi Kaur, a Canadian poet of Indian heritage, whose first collection Milk and Honey sold in excess of a million copies, is a pioneer in the field. Rupi Kaur’s creative activity extends to other art forms, notably performance art; she attracted substantial publicity when Instagram censored her for

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posting a picture of menstrual blood staining her sister Prabh’s trousers and bedsheet (Randal). While the company claimed that it had deleted the post in error, Kaur welcomed its restoration as a victory against conventional sexist taboos around menstruation. Tyler Knott Gregson is yet another personality who combined his interests in poetry and photography to upload a daily haiku over the years, win a fan following, and publish best-selling hard copy books later in his career (Gregson). As Adorno and Horkheimer point out, celebrity and capital are inextricably linked in the modern age—the former exists to prop up the latter (21). The idea foundationally put forward by Theodor Adorno—that popular cultural products can serve capitalism most profitably when they are reduced to a simple formula, replicated and re-introduced to the market with slight variations that produce the illusion of differentiation for the consumeraudience—works on a social media platform today. The widely prevalent spectacle of ‘ordinary’ people grabbing media spotlight as ‘celebrities’ is also an offshoot of the digital revolution that has made the world more accessible. The overt link between commerce and media performance marks the distinction between social media influencers and traditional discrete celebrities. This situation, where the celebrity gathers capital enough to become his or her own investor, has resulted in ‘self-branding’ par excellence. The hashtag-attached celebrity genre is, therefore, more than the digitized versions of former genres. For instance, that which in the preinternet world was looked upon as an unlikely source of fame—say standup comedy or mountain climbing—will now potentially create influential individuals with a substantial fan following on the social media through sponsorship activities, Instagram pictures, and YouTube videos. The profile identity matters much more than the athleticism or aestheticism of the celebrity in question. This fact has engendered a general anxiety around the usurpation of an ‘expert status’ by people who cultivate a large audience for claims that are not informed by traditional sources of knowledge or supported by hitherto accepted forms of evidence. Lifestyle bloggers with little or no education or training, who promote diets and health remedies, are typical cases in point. The twenty-first century has radically revised the rules of celebrification, so much so that the apotheosis of the celebrity is no longer confined to movie stars, singers, sports heroes, or even the easily-disposable, banal, reality television constructs. The term ‘celebrity’ has moved from a noun to gain the status of an adjective that signifies anyone who possesses the quality of attracting public attention. Success in virtually every profession,

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provided it is represented in the online world, is associated with celebrity status. The trajectories of the celebrity and the fan too have grown ever closer online. The fickle nature of the current media makes it very difficult for the ‘self-made’ stars of the previous decades to stay in the limelight for an extended period of time. Their ‘manufactured’ counterparts—celebrities born after the proliferation of data and cell phone, usually understood as manufactured celebrities ‘made’ famous through media publicity—also are susceptible to this process. Whereas the former set mainly includes actors, singers, or writers, the latter mostly comprise activists, netizen journalists, or accidental viral-video influencers. In either case, the celebrity is more than just a well-known person—he or she is the product of a cultural industry devoted to the fabrication of an interchangeable status. YouTube and Instagram have made possible the production of a factoryline assembly of celebrities. Today’s luminaries are promoted as both special and utterly ordinary. They are celebrated for their unique personality and attractive qualities even as the media strive to treat them as ‘ordinary’ people who face the humdrum problems and disappointments of life. This affectation of familiarity, reflected in endearing familial addresses such as Lalettan, Mammooka, and Dileepettan, conveys the implication of the removal of social and cultural barriers between the celebrity and the consumer of popular culture. Although they do not quite lead ordinary lives, their problems and predicaments are sufficiently familiar to the layman to allow for the forging of an emotional bond. Contemporary celebrity culture succeeds in transforming the powerful and the well-known into intimate and familiar figures. By reducing the psychic distance between the public and the elite famous, the celebrity is drawn into the routine everyday experience. There was even a celebrification of rescue volunteers during the 2019 floods in Kerala: the rescue gestures went viral online. Their presence and moral pull made the media experience of the flood a very potent and memorable one from similar catastrophes of the previous decades. The word ‘celebrity’ has become a social category of ephemerons occupying a position of ‘being known’, often devoid of charismatic effects and functioning more as ‘selfpromoters’. Ever since the mass uptake of the internet in the late 1990s, scepticism about online ‘disinformation’ has also been prevalent. ‘Digital dualism’ offered by online and offline platforms constitute discrete social worlds, the former being a poor simulacrum of the latter. This segregation is a contentious issue that feeds into many contemporary post-truth debates around knowledge, culture, legitimacy, and representation. One cannot

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overlook the power dynamics of identity and difference in relation to the recognition demands attached to the ‘celebrity status.’ The struggle for celebrityhood in a way also becomes a perpetuation of domination and oppression through the power relations of identity formation (the celebrity as a ‘site’, where power is enacted, resisted or reworked). The fame of the celebrity is also not confined to a localized one; it is not bound within the particular social assemblage of which he/she is a part but is inflated and extended. The celebrity’s online identity (determined through their interaction with others) initiates a shift from a monologic to a dialogic model of the self as well. Paradoxically, it also involves an inevitable dependence on others for identity formation, which renders the celebs vulnerable to recognition. The concept of being a celebrity has come to be redefined in contemporary times, thus making the new age celebrity more accessible and participatory, yet ephemeral.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer.Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by J. Cumming, Verso, 1989. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations.Pimlico, 1999. Cashmore, Ellis, and Andrew Parker. “One David Beckham?Celebrity, Masculinity, and the Soccerati.”Sociology of Sport, vol. 20, no. 3, 2003, pp. 214–31. Giddens, Anthony. Capitalism and Modern Social Theory: An Analysis of the Writings of Marx, Durkheim and Max Weber.Cambridge UP, 1971. Gregson, TylerKnott. tylerknott.com, 2020 . Accessed 20 Feb. 2020. Randal, Anna.“How Instagram Censored Rupi Kaur’s Photo of a Woman on Her Period.”Art-Sheep, 2019, art-sheep.com/how-instagramcensored-rupi-kaurs-photo-of-a-woman-on-her-period. Accessed 20 Feb. 2020.

NARRATIVE AS COGNITIVE MAPPING: READING ARUNDHATI ROY’S THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS PRADEEPKUMAR K

Frederic Jameson is perhaps the first Western thinker to connect postmodernism directly to an economic system (late capitalism or globalization) and examine it dialectically. Jameson historicizes the social moment of consumer capitalism and his evaluation of it, and makes it an object of political scrutiny. This contribution places him among the authentic critics of postmodernism. The Frankfurt school used the term late capitalism to denote the form of capitalism that became predominant all over the world in the twentieth century. However, Jameson posits that late capitalism as of now “has very different overtones from these” (Postmodernism xviii). Jameson’s presupposition about the present social system is a product of his vision of history. According to him, “to grant some historic originality to a postmodernist culture is also implicitly to affirm some radical structural difference between what is called consumer society and earlier moments of the capitalism from which it emerged" (“Politics” 367). He delineates the characteristics of the new era thus: 1. Globalised forms of business organizations, which transcend the boundaries of nation states. 2. Internationalization of business as new tendential ways of increased exploitation. 3. New forms of media interrelationship. 4. Revolution in the field of communication. 5. Aesthetic production as an integral part of or synonymous with industrial production, which assigns a commodity status to art. 6. Quintessential American characteristics of the postmodernist cultural system. (Postmodernism xix) In short, the postmodern situation is fundamentally different from—and, simultaneously, connected to—the old systems of modernity and former versions of late capitalism. The earlier aesthetic practices render themselves

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quite useless or obsolete for representation in the age of (modern) late capitalism. According to him: We cannot, however, return to aesthetic practices elaborated on the basis of historical situations and dilemmas which are no longer ours. Meanwhile, the conception of space that has been developed here suggests that a model of political culture appropriate to our own situation will necessarily have to raise spatial issues as its fundamental organizing concern. I will therefore provisionally define the aesthetic of this new (and hypothetical) cultural form as an aesthetic of cognitive mapping. (Postmodernism 50-1)

Jameson sees concerns of space as a fundamental tool for the development of a political culture as a return to older practices no more possible. This paper probes the extent to which the ambitious design of a resistance novel ingests a sense of mapping and enables a situational representation of the people in a turbulent political landscape. Arundhati Roy, arguably one of India’s most impassioned critics of globalisation and neo-imperialism, remains so knowing fully that “[f]or a writer of the twenty first century, that’s considered a pretty uncool, unsophisticated thing to do.” Nevertheless, she remains strong in her convictions: “I take a position. I have a point of view. What’s worse, I make it clear that I think it right and moral to take that position and what’s even worse, use everything in my power to flagrantly solicit support for that position” (The Algebra 197). Her war on neo-imperialism is not limited to nonfiction: “It’s a mistake to think that there is a sort of polar oppositeness between fiction and fact, fiction and truth” (“Literature of Politics”). She reiterated on another occasion that “fiction is the truest thing there ever was.” It is important for her “to tell politics like a story, to make it real” (“Fiction Is Truth”). There can be no doubt that her politics involves taking sides with the powerless multitudes to empower them by making them see their position in a clueless world. Jameson extrapolates the cityscape to a “mental map of the social and global totality” (“Cognitive Mapping” 4). The act of mapping on the part of the individual is situated in the realm of totalizing the effects of the work of the global finance capital. Jameson considers cognitive mapping as “something of a synthesis between Althusser and Kevin Lynch‘s formulations” (“Cognitive Mapping” 4). It is, in his opinion, capable of empowering the suffering multitudes to regain the capacity to act and struggle, which is at present neutralized by “spatial as well as social confusions” (Postmodernism 49). It may be instrumental in a political movement that seriously challenges the postmodernist world order. Roy’s position, that her fiction deals with truth and facts with more ease than nonfiction, holds the key to The

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Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017). When she says of her second novel that “writing fiction is like creating a universe and asking somebody to walk through” (“Fiction Is Truth”), she takes it upon herself to direct her readers through the maze of a globalised landscape to arrive at a political understanding of the time. The Ministry assumes epic dimensions by its sheer size, array of characters and incidents, diverse settings, and endless loops in the narrative in terms of time. Almost all sections of the marginalized multitudes in India, including displaced farmers, dalits, transgenders, tribals, women, and minorities, find a place here. Every kind of resistance has an embodiment in the ambitious design of characterization. The lives and struggles of all these people intersect and present the optimistic prospect of convergence, which contributes to the grand conclusion of the novel. In a sense, the work is an extrapolation of the nonfiction political writings of Roy. It is more so in terms of outlook and purpose but definitely not in form, structure and style. It is lyrical and subtle at its core. Roy effortlessly makes the novel a political statement in poetry. Even though the themes of Roy’s writing are universal, her focus is on India. She delineates the manner in which the forces of global capital resort to newer means of expanding its empire through more lethal and subtle weapons—fundamentalism, state torture, bigotry, and jingoism—all of which helps the present prime minister, referred to as Gujarat Ka Lalla in the novel, to assume power. The numerous narratives that run through the body of the novel unmask the social, cultural and political reality in India. Everything that holds these narratives together serves as landmarks in delimiting the borders of a globalised nation. The Ministry has two main strands running throughout the text. One strand follows Anjum in her odyssey from Khawbgah in Delhi to the one in which she “lived in a graveyard like a tree” (Ministry 3). Born Aftab, a hermaphrodite in old Delhi, she came to the old, abandoned graveyard after she closely missed her own grave after a run-in with the Gujarat pogrom in 2002. She builds a guesthouse there, named ‘Jannat’ (paradise). The other strand follows Tilottama, a dark-skinned South Indian architect, and three men who love her. These two strands get entangled when a child abandoned at a site of protest passes through Tilo’s hands and reaches Jannat. Later, Tilo herself comes to live here. Jannat Guest House and the child, Miss Jabeen the Second, become the unifying entities of the seemingly loose narrative. Jannat is built by Anjum—who tries to find meaning for her existence and in the lives of others, who strictly keep away from ‘Duniya’, the outer world. It becomes the confluence of many people, living and dead. Jannat

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is familiar terrain for them, whereas Duniya spoils their efforts to situate themselves in its vastness. Saddam Hussain’s father (killed by the ‘gaurakshaks’), Maase Revathy (the communist, killed by the state), and Mariam Ipe (Tilo’s mother), are all buried there. The reader cannot miss the irony of an abandoned graveyard that becomes a paradise for a group of marginalised people when the fabled paradise (Kashmir) is gradually turned into a burial ground. Jannat is surely a landmark in the confusing terrain of modern India. Is it a heavily loaded metaphor of a future India or a utopia? Obviously, Roy has other designs. Jannat is neither a nation nor utopia. It is a borderless place. All the characters of the novel, according to her, “have some incendiary borders running through them” (“Literature of Politics”)—that of gender in Anjum, the past in Tilo, the religious border in Saddam, the national one in Musa, and so on. It is the place that cancels boundaries of every kind. People go there from Gujarat, Kashmir, and many other regions. Arundhati Roy says: “If you look at who is living there, who are dead, who are buried, what prayers are said . . . from fatiha to recitation from Shakespeare to the internationale . . . . It’s the revolution we want” (“Literature of Politics”). Jannat, here, assumes the dimensions of a cognitive map situated in the “vaster and properly unrepresentable totality” (Postmodernism 5). Even though it is borderless, it is a land that was to be. An India that had been and that would be. The tribal women, the Muslim whose father had been lynched, the hermaphrodite, and others who inhabit Jannat are not voiceless people, “but people whose voices are either deliberately silenced or preferably unheard” (“Literature of Politics”). The politics of the novel is to take their side. Roy makes sure that her work is on the right side of history. Anjum’s curious homage to Com. Revathy—‘lal salaam vaaleikkum’—is also a political representation on the part of the people who fight suppression. This blending of communist and Muslim greetings anticipates a political union of the suffering people. It may be Roy’s version of a future course of action, as suggested in the recent ‘Neel Salaam’, a salutation coined by Kanhaiya Kumar to highlight his concept of the confluence of the ideals of Marx and Ambedkar (Jayasubha). The Ministry successfully avoids the possibility of becoming a parable about modern India. It is definitely an attempt at creating meaning amidst the grand narratives of confusion. In the process, it escapes passivity and remains overtly political. It fills a lacuna in the perceived separation of art from activism. She is a “writer in the most comprehensible sense”, as Richard Holme observed about

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Shelley (qtd. in Parul). The novel ends on an optimistic note and delineates a possible clear path to victory, and eventually to utmost happiness.

Works Cited “Fiction Is Truth.” Kerala Literature Festival. You Tube, uploaded by DC Books, 12 Jan. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DWiMbYIESk. Jameson, Fredric. “Cognitive Mapping.” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, U of Illinois P, 1988, pp. 347–68, usakochan.net/download/marxism-andthe-interpretation-of-culture. —. Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. ABS, 2006. —. “The Politics of Theory: Ideological Positions in the Postmodern Debates.” Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, edited by David Lodge and Nigel Wood. 3rd ed., Pearson, 2008, pp. 367–77. Jayasubha. “Kanhaiya Kumar: An Antithesis to BJP Fascist Regime.” Countercurrents.Org, 14 Apr. 2019, countercurrents.org/2019/04/jayashubha-kanhaiya-kumar-anantithesis-to-bjp-fascist-regime. Accessed 26 July 2019. “Literature of Politics: Arundhati Roy and Anjana Shankar.” Kerala Literature Festival. You Tube, uploaded by DC Books, 18 Jan. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9OEcxxeq4U. Roy, Arundhati. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.Penguin Random House India, 2017.

THE INFINITY AND ECSTASY OF MEANING: THE POSSIBLE WORLDS OF DHWANI THULASI DAS B

Na kavyarthaviramosthi—The meaning (of poetry) never ceases to be. —Anandavardhana The text of ecstasy is the text that imposes a state of loss, that discomforts, unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions; the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language. —Roland Barthes

‘Dhwani’ is a pivotal notion in Indian aesthetics, which evokes the indubitable impression of a distinctive ‘theory’. Propounded as an exegesis of meaning in poetry, the concept is self-conscious and multidimensional. Anandavardhana (c.820–890 CE) outlines the early concerns of the foundational tenets of dhwani in his epochal work Dhwanyaloka. In its unadulterated sense, the term dhwani implies ‘suggestion’, though the wider expositions of the term have deeper conceptual matrices. The earliest and the most discussed extant work on poetics is Bharata’s Natyashastra (c.500–200 BCE), which presupposes the aesthetic and the functional value of ‘Rasa’ in art. The precocious discussion on rasa is found in the Rigveda, where the term implies ‘sap,’ ‘essence’ or ‘taste’. The aesthetic overtones of rasawere later developed as an addendum to the discussion on the Natyashastra, which was codified and rationalized as the iconic text on Indian dramaturgy with a spiritual trajectory, around c.200 CE. The immediate and ultimate aim of dramatic performances was stringently finalized as the enjoyment of rasa. As adduced by Bharata, rasa is the perfect combination of certain elements—the ‘Vibhavas’ (objects and objective conditions by which emotions are manifested), ‘Anubhavas’ (the bodily manifestations of emotions), and ‘Vyabhicharibhavas’ (transitory emotions). Yet, rasa remained an elusive idea, at least for the later generations of literary critics and scholars, as it was not thoroughly substantiated by Bharata, who might have taken it for granted as a selfreflexive and self-explaining. It was Abhinavagupta (c.950–1016 CE), the

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eminent scholar and influential thinker and an ardent follower of Anandavardhana, who resolved the confusion regarding the axiomatic system of rasa, whichwas explained differently by allied theories and theorists. To safeguard his theoretical rationale on rasa, Abhinavagupta acknowledged his indebtedness to Anandavardhana’s theory of dhwani, thereby solidifying the intrinsic relation of dhwani to the principle of rasa. Thus, rasa was adjudged to be the ultimate experience of enjoyment to be embedded in any artistic/aesthetic creation, which was believed to have the power to exalt the audience to a spiritual realm. At this juncture, it is necessary to sketch the formal and functional ossature of the dhwani theory collated by Anandavardhana in Dhwanyaloka. Dhwani, or poetic suggestion, had been made into a discrete genre or theory, deeply imbued with the idea that rasa—the aesthetic and artistic enjoyment— could be found in strophic poetry or ‘kavya’. Anandavardhana proclaims that “suggestion is the soul of poetry” (Kavyasya athma Dhwani) (Bhattathiri 2). Rhetoricians, logicians, and other spokesmen of divergent schools of ancient Indian philosophy maintained the longstanding concern that any attempt to differentiate dhwani as a distinctive theory might not be veritable since it was already agreed to be a grammatical concept. A purposive definition of dhwani as the element of suggestion and the quintessential principle that leads to the realization of rasa had to undergo some probabilistic checks, mainly due to the fact that dhwani is inextricably linked to the idea of ‘Sphota’, the integral linguistic sign. Kunjunni Raja, in his seminal essay ‘Theory of Dhwani’ states: Anandavardhana uses the term dhwani for his theory of poetic suggestion. He says that this term is taken directly from the grammarians; just as the sounds of utterances (dhwani in the grammarian’s sense) reveal the integral linguistic sign (Sphota), so also a good poem with its sound, as well as the literal sense, reveals, over and above the literal sense, a charming sense which has great aesthetic value. On account of this similarity of function, the term dhwani is applied to suggestive poetry with the suggested sense predominates over the literal sense. The term is also used to denote the suggested sense or the function of suggestion. (287)

In the process of extending Bharata’s theory of rasa into poetics, Anandavardhana was careful to maintain its importance as the ultimate goal of poetry, thereby revivifying the idea of Dhwani as the mode, method, and means to achieve rasa. Anandavardhana’s exhaustive and meticulous attempt to unveil the intriguing manner in which the element of suggestion evokes rasa culminated in the formulation of his theory on the expressive capacity of the word to function as the primary, secondary, and

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suggestive sense-inceptor. The inseparable bond between a word and its meaning is called ‘Vritti’. Grammarians and rhetoricians agreed that the word had two expressive functions: ‘Abhidha’ and ‘Lakshana’, the primary sense and secondary sense of a word, respectively. An elaborate discussion on these two functions can be found in Chapter I of Dhwanyaloka. The work clarifies that the commonly agreed meaning of the word is called ‘Vachyartha’ (primary meaning), and the ‘significationpower’of the word—which acts as the expressive capacity to evoke the primary sense—is called ‘abhidha’. It performs the function of denotation and becomes comprehensible at the very moment of utterance. When it fails or malfunctions in suggesting the primary meaning, the second agency of the power of the word—‘lakshana’ (indication power)—comes into force. This secondary sense is ‘Lakshyartha’ and the word-power by which it is produced is ‘lakshana’. The latter can be broadly divided into ‘Gouni Lakshana’ and ‘Suddha Lakshana’. Lakshana has the potential to function as metonymy, metaphor, paradox, hyperbole, and irony. It is generated in the minds of the interpreter (reader/viewer) when the contextual acceptability of the primary meaning malfunctions. Anandavardhana’s estimation of ‘Vynjana’ as the tertiary expressive power of the word that subsequently evokes rasa, is the most germane and audacious claim that withstood phalanx of criticism from scholars of ‘alamkarasastra’. When the primary and secondary sense/meaning of the word fulfil their function and retire, vynjana becomes operational; there occurs the inception of the tertiary sense, which is called ‘vyangyartha’or suggested sense. It should be noted that by the idea of tertiary function, Anandavardhana does not suggest the possibility of a new signifier. Instead, there is the indication of the prolonged sense of the same word. It can be derived based on either the primary sense (‘abhidhamoola dhwani’) or the secondary sense (‘lakshanamoola dhwani’). The abhidhamoola dhwani is produced when the primary sense ceases after fulfilling its function and still the word has something more to signify. Similarly, when the secondary sense retires the lakshanamoola dhwani becomes active which can be substantiated by the classical example given in Dhwanyaloka itself, as cited by Kunjunni Raja: In the example gangayam ghosah (The village is on the Ganges) the primary meaning of the word ganga is the river Ganges; this cannot be applied in the sentence, for the village cannot be on the stream itself. This hitch is at the root of the secondary interpretation adopted. The term ganga is interpreted as indicating ‘the bank of the Ganges’…Even in the absence of lakshana the word ganga can suggest the qualities of purity and sanctity, lakshana does not give the suggested sense, but it points the way to the

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The Infinity and Ecstasy of Meaning richness of the ideas associated with the word…Thus, lakshana leads the way to the land of suggestion. (297-298)

The long-standing concerns of linguistics and poetics were poignantly ravaged by the substantive postulations of Anandavardhana, though the idea of the tripartite functioning of the word led to violent dispute and dissent among the scholars. He staunchly faced the tumult of criticism and furthered the discussion on dhwani with utmost scholastic subtlety. Dhwani is the suggestive sense found in poetic utterance, which gives an extraordinary charm to verse. Dhwani germinates from the tertiary sense of the word, the vyangya. The primary sense, the vachyartha, is an invariably concomitant attribute of meaning to a word, which is controlled and presupposed. However, the vyangyartha is unpredictable and contextual. Dhwani is the technical term attributed to the vyangyartha by Anandavardhana, when it appears in poetry, even though there is an implicit, delicate line of distinction between the two. Dhwani evolves when the vyangyartha acquires prominence over the vachyartha and lakshyartha. The vachyartha and the lakshyartha (primary and secondary sense) are essential for the sustenance of dhwani. Anandavardhana substantiates the operation of the primary and the tertiary sense by the analogy of the lamp and the pot, where lamp is the primary sense and the pot is the tertiary sense: “For just as when a pot is cognized by means of a lamp, the light of the lamp does not disappear, just so the appearance of the expressed when the suggested is apprehended” (Ingalls 558). It should be noted that the vachyartha remains even after performing its function and consequently becomes irrelevant. In the afore-mentioned analogy of the lamp and the pot, the lamp continues to shed light even after it performs its function, that is, making the pot visible. The presence of the vyangyartha alone cannot constitute dhwani. The vyangyartha should be impregnated with an aesthetic overtone; it should carry the element of charm and proliferate rasa. In a nutshell, dhwani is the element of suggestion in poetry; it stems from vyngyartha, which gives an overall charisma to the text by evoking an elevated, aesthetic ecstasy in the mind of the reader. Anandavardhana emphatically proclaims that out of the two types of universally acknowledged entities of meaning in poetry—the expressed sense and the suggested sense—the latter is the one which imparts ecstatic beauty to poetry. After enlisting and satisfyingly addressing the counter arguments raised against dhwani, Anandavardhana explains its possible

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subdivisions, based on its genesis from the primary (literal) sense and secondary sense, respectively. Accordingly, dhwani is broadly classified into two: the ‘avivaksita-vachya’, based on the lakshana; and the ‘vivaksitanyapara-vachya’, based on the abhidha. The avivaksitha-vacya type of dhwani can be subdivided into the ‘atyanta-tiraskrta-vacya’, where the literal sense is fully discarded; and the ‘arthantarasamkramita-vacya’, where the literal meaning is adjourned. The vivaksitanya-paravacya type, also known as the ‘abhidhamula-dhwani’, is based on the primary meaning of the word in which the literal sense subserves the implied sense. It is further divided into the ‘samlaksyakrama-vyangya’and the ‘asamlaksyakrama-vyangya’. Kunjunni Raja clarifies the categorisation thus: The samlaksyakrama-vyangya is again subdivided into vastu-dhwani where the fact is suggested and alamkara-dhwani where the suggested element is a figure of speech. It can again be classified from another point of view, into that based on words (sabda-saktimula) and that based on the meanings (artha-saktimula, in the former the actual words used are vital to the suggestion and cannot be substituted by their synonyms, while in the latter it is the contextual factors and the social and cultural background that are important in bringing out the suggestion. Or it may be based on both at the same time (ubhayasaktimula). (303)

In the samlakshyakrama-vyangya, the emotional complexes get suggested; rasa and bhava are illuminated along with the suggestive sense and the emotional overtone will have primacy over the literal sense. The samlakshyakrama-vyangya has eight sub-categories: rasadhwani, bhavadhwani, rasabhasa, bhavabhasa, bhavodaya, bhavasandhi, bhavasanti, and bhavasabalita. The rasadhwani is considered the most important one, as it is suggestive of rasa. Anandavardhana had to address many challenges from preeminent scholars vis-à-vis his inclusion of the suggestion of ideas/facts and figures of speech (which are termed ‘vastudhwani’ and ‘alamkara-dhwani’ respectively) under dhwani. Anandavardhana and his follower Abhinavagupta corroborated the inclusion by pointing out that both the vastu-dhwani and the alamkara-dhwani act as catalysts to the genesis and realization of rasa, thereby gratifying the aim of poetry. However, the sustenance of dhwani as the element which illuminates rasa, is a controversial issue in Dhwanyaloka. Edwin Gerow states: The contention that one of the natural functions of language is associated with poetic and non-declaratory utterance in effect resolves the historicalscientific paradox, but remains a mere contention unless it can be shown that here is an essentially different mode of apprehension associated with

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The Infinity and Ecstasy of Meaning ‘poetic’ as opposed to ‘scientific’ meaning…The best way to show that there was a difference in manner inherent in poetic comprehension would be to show that there is a distinctive kind of meaning otherwise inapprehensible. Instead of “manner” based on the presumption that all concrete “meaning” (or content) is indifferent to modes of its apprehension…we argue content; and it is asserted that the one content that never be apprehended through a declarative or denotative utterance is precisely that that had heretofore been reserved to the study of natya as its differentia: the emotional response to the work of art, the rasa. (Indian Poetics 256)

Dhwani is the resonance of meaning, meaning which leads to other meanings, or the extension of the same meaning up to infinity. In Dhwanyaloka, Anandavardhana asserted: Vani navathvamayathi, purvarthanvayavathyapi—the word, which is encompassed by suggestive sense, will continue to charm by its novelty, even if the primary sense is sustained (Bhattathiri 214). This statement makes the meaning (aptly suggested by dhwani) in/of a literary work context-generated. There is almost an undecidable nature to this suggestiveness, which calls forth the notion of ‘ananthya’ (infinitude). In poetry, when meaning leads to the heightened effect of rasa, it embarks on infinitude. Anandavardhana stressed the prospect of ‘aanathya’ as a compound of ‘anantha’ (infinitude, diverse and many-layered in the case of meaning) and ‘aananda’ (enjoyment, ecstasy). He gave more prominence to the infinite possibilities of the signified, than the signifier, and when ananthya is attained, the signified excels the context. In many ways, ananthya can be compared to the poststructuralist notion of the aporia or linguistic indeterminacy. In his work, On Deconstruction (1982), Jonathan Culler points out that “…meaning is context bound, so intentions do not in fact suffice to determine meaning; context must be mobilized. But context is boundless, so accounts of context never provide full determinations of meaning” (128). Yet, the claim that Anandavardhana’s theoretical notions on dhwani are exactly similar to deconstruction begs proper rejection. Culler observes: “What deconstruction proposes is not an end to distinctions, not an indeterminacy that makes meaning the invention of the reader. The play of meaning is the result of what Derrida calls “the play if the world,” in which the general text always provides further connections, correlations, and contexts” (134). What makes Anandavardhana an important figure at this juncture is that his theory of dhwani could anticipate this ‘play’ from a literary standpoint. The notion of ananthya isnot only suggestive of the multifarious possibilities of meaning but also to the jouissance one may have from the text. In ananthya, along with the

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suggestive sense, the primary sense (vachyartha, thereby abhidha, the sign itself) may also find significance (Ananthyameva vachyasya/Sudhasyapi swabhavatha—Bhattathiri 228). When meaning (signified) becomes endless, the sound (signifier) also becomes endless. Thus, dhwani gives rise to infinite possible worlds of meaning along with the immanent jouissance, which lends the text everlasting freshness.

Works Cited Bhattathiri, C. V. Vasudeva. Anandavardhanan: Dhwanyalokam (Malayalam). Kerala Bhasha Institute, 1996. Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction. Routledge. 2008. Gerow, Edwin. Indian Poetics.Otto Harrassowitz, 1977. Ingalls, H. H. Daniel, et al. Dhwanyaloka of Anandavardhana with the Locana of Abhinavagupta. Harvard Oriental Series, 1990. Raja, Kunjunni.Indian Aesthetics, edited by V. Seturaman. Macmillan, 1977.

FROM ‘NATIO’ TO NATION: IDEOLOGICAL AMBIVALENCE IN THE POSTCOLONIALCONCEPTUALIZATION PRASANTH V G

The concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ form part of the postcolonial discussion as historical developments that include colonialism, imperialism, and conquest on the one hand, and neo-colonialism, diaspora, and globalization on the other. These notions would make sense, not in isolation but in their totality, despite the number of inherent contradictions found within the formulation. This paper attempts to explore the historical, social, and political background that contributed to the development of the nation and the manner in which these elements get represented in literature. A nation is conceived of as a large group of people linked by a similar culture, language, and history. The citizens of a nation consider themselves connected to their fellow beings in the community, take pride in being a part of a larger population, and often celebrate their togetherness in the country to which they belong. The term nation-state in the present context refers to a single nation with its political apparatuses, where the people overwhelmingly share a language, history, and culture. The concept presupposes that the boundaries of a state coincide with the geographical area occupied by a nation. However, there are states that do not come under such a definition; their citizens speak different languages and have varied cultures. The concept of the nation has undergone significant changes from its initial conceptualisation. The term is derived from the Latin word ‘natio’, meaning a local community, class, tribe or people. Raymond Williams asserts that the nation as a term is radically connected with the word “native” (215), thereby establishing the intricate link with the locality. The modern concept of nation state was relatively unknown in Europe prior to 1500, where most of the people neither thought of themselves as being part of a nation nor hardly moved out of their villages to the larger world

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outside. The Thirty Years’ War, fought throughout central Europe from 1618 to 1648 between Protestants and Catholics, laid the legal foundation for the nation-state. The war involved various territories in Europe—many small German states, the Austrian Empire, Sweden, France, and Spain. The treaty that ended the war, called the Peace of Westphalia, decreed that the sovereign ruler of a state had the sole power over all elements of both the nation and the state, including religion and “possessing the monopoly of force within their mutually recognised territories” (Brown, et al. 88). This development eventually led to the foundation of the modern idea of a sovereign state. The nation as a present-day concept began to emerge after World War II, where every successful attempt to assimilate power was firmly grounded on national priorities. In 1983, Benedict Anderson made a breakthrough in the history of nation studies with his Imagined Communities, in which he constructed the nation not as an inevitable product of sociological factors such as language, race, religion and history but as an “imagined political community – imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (15). He explored the rationale behind people’s imagination of the nation in a capitalist world and observed that such formations were discursive. He makes this emphatic claim by modifying two earlier assumptions drawn by Ernest Renan and Ernest Gellner earlier. Renan delivered his legendary speech, “What is Nationalism” in 1892, in which he underlined that a nation is constructed by a common remembrance of a glorious past and by a common will to live together and maintain that memory. Gellner too argued thus: “Nationalism is not an awakening of nations to selfconsciousness; it invents nations where they do not exist” (169). The word “invent” gets replaced by the word “imagination” in Fanon’s version; he asserts that nationalism is the product of a collective imagination constructed through remembrance. Moreover, the essential link established between nation and imagination marked a turning point in the emergence of the studies on the nation. Anderson establishes that nations are acts of imagination with which the people of a nation establish a meaningful relationship with those in the other parts of the same nation. What makes such a connection feasible are the print media and fiction. Despite the absence of any substantial link among the people of a nation, the media and fiction enable them to transcend geographical, regional, and cultural barriers. A community is thus constructed on imaginative connections, without its inhabitants ever meeting at any one point. The embryo of the nation-state is conceived by the “visible invisibility” (Anderson 46) made possible by the print media, which created a virtual

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feeling of togetherness in society. A new imagined community is formed by the convergence of capitalism and print technology. Anderson’s arguments are grounded on the aspects of nation formation and the function of the imagination that attempts to integrate the national community into a single being. The rise of nations during the fall of religious belief is enabled not solely by the technological innovations of print capitalism. It is prompted by the universal human need to believe in a higher, trans-individual purpose in a post-Enlightenment world, where unquestioned faith in divine providence is no longer a certainty. Anderson observes that “with the ebbing of the religious belief, the suffering which belief in part composed did not disappear … What then was required was a secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning … few things were better suited to this end than the idea of a nation” (19). Aijaz Ahmad, in his In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, argues that as an ideology, nationalism enacts a dual role of resistance to colonial rule and imperialist domination on the one hand. On the other, is the passive submission to a unity in which the exploiter and the exploited strike a fictive harmony as equal members in a society or polity (37). In this analysis, Ahmad attempts to throw light on Anderson’s statement of the nation as “an imagined community of horizontal comradeship” (qtd. in Anderson 15). The question that looms large then is whether to conceptualize the nation as an expression of a primordial, pre-political or a socio-biological human urge to bond and cleave, or to understand it as a formation produced and transformed by the strategic instrumentalist calculations of political elites. Nations can indeed be emergent social and political constructions invested with variable cultural meanings. However, the analytical task at hand is not so much to unmask their contingency but to explain how they have come to be seen as real, despite their contingent origins and existence. One of the most influential and challenging interventions in the debate concerning the nationalistic representations is that of Homi K. Bhabha, who begins his introduction to Nation and Narration with the following observation: Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myth of time and only fully realise their horizons in the mind’s eye. Such an image of the nationor narration- might seem impossibly romantic and excessively metaphorical, but it is from those traditions of political thought and literary language that the nation emerges as a powerful historical idea in the west. An idea whose cultural compulsion lies in the impossible unity of the nation as a symbolic force. (1)

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Bhabha further challenges the historical and the nationalist notion that nations emerged from multi-nationalism and/or late capitalism. Referring to Anderson’s standpoint, he argues that the nation came into being as a system of cultural signification and as a representation of social life: If nation states are widely considered to be ‘new’ and ‘historical’ the nation states to which they give political expression always loom out of an immortal past and … glide into a limitless future. What I am proposing is that Nationalism has to be understood, by aligning not with self- consciously held political ideologies, but with large cultural systems that preceded it, out of which – as well as against which- it came into being. (Bhabha 1)

Bhabha identifies the idea of the nation as one of the major structures of ideological ambivalence within the cultural representation of modernity: “… the ambivalent, antagonistic perspective of nation as narration will establish the cultural boundaries of the nation so that they may be acknowledged as containing thresholds of meaning that must be crossed, erased and translated in the process of cultural production” (4). The post-World War II scenario was marked by the building of new cultural and political sovereignties in the context of the imperial withdrawal and decolonization. In contrast, the production of a nationstate entailed not just building a community or the popular mobilization around a national cause. It also involved the identification of institutional authority, which would lead to a further diffusion of mobilizational energies as the anticolonial nationalists who had confronted the colonial state were set to be transformed into the obedient national subjects of the post-colonial state. The predominance of nation states gets challenged by the turn of the century with two contradictory trends: globalization and devolution. While the former has erased national boundaries by accelerating the movement of money and goods across the border, the latter has given power back to local governments. A case in point is Scotland gaining a greater level of autonomy from the United Kingdom. This state of affairs increases the scope of central governments being replaced by local governments. The future of the nation-state is likely to be determined by these two apparently contrasting realities. Therefore, if globalization prevails, the transcendental governments or allegiances, such as the European Union, may replace the nation states. If devolution continues, regional governments will dominate the political landscape of the twenty-first century world.

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Works Cited Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures. Verso, 2000. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism.Verso, 1991. Brown, Garrett W., et al. A Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics and International Relations. 4th ed., Oxford UP, 2018. Bhabha, Homi. K, editor. Nation and Narration.Routledge, 2004. Gellner, Ernest. Thought and Change. Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1964. Renan, Ernest. What Is a Nation? and Other Political Writings. Translated and edited by M. F. N. Giglioli, Columbia UP, 2018. Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Fontana, 1983.

HISTORICISING NARRATIVE THROUGH THE CULTURAL MEMORY PARADIGM MANCHUSHA MADHUSUDHANAN

Invigorated interest in a land and its memories has led to the emergence of narratives that revamp identity and retell history from an aboriginal perspective. “The power of cultural memory rests in the conscious decision to choose particular memories, and give those memories precedence in communal remembrance” (Rodriguez 12). Literature here serves as a site of memory where facts and fiction contest, thereby resisting further untruths and appropriations. However, certain elements erode, as memories of nation formation are passed on from one generation to the next. This diminution makes it very important to study the relationship between memory, history, and narrative in recording and understanding the past. Narratives are more articulate when the reader is able to place it in a historical context. Works of writers from an aboriginal background across the world show remarkable similarity thematically and in their conceptual outlook towards identity formation. The novels selected for this study juxtapose countermemories, alternate histories, cultural identities, and collective memories in their attempt to find a niche for themselves. With the theoretical interventions of Paul Ricoeur, Hayden White, and Linda Hutcheon, among others, the notional difference between history and literary discourse has nearly been nullified. In his essay, “The Historical text as a Literary Artifact”, Hayden White says that “…fiction is conceived as the representation of the imaginable and history as the representation of the actual…we know the actual by contrasting it with or likening it to the imaginable” (234). He elaborates on the concept: “In my view, we experience the “fictionalisation” of history as an “explanation” for the same reason that we experience great fiction as an illumination of a world that we inhabit along with the author” (White 235). Fiction is, today, a narrative where the repressed cultural histories of a nation find a voice. This paper proposes to analyse Patricia Grace’s Chappy and Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria to shed light on the reverberations of power and

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hegemony and the subsequent subjugation of marginalised subaltern memories. The cultural memory paradigm addresses those transformative historical understandings that describe a culture even as time passes, and the group accustoms to new stimuli. Fictional texts that foreground historical, social, and cultural contexts in the form of memory narratives have proved that they have great power to endorse historical knowledge. Grace, a Maori writer from New Zealand, and Wright, a Native Australian writer, have received international acclaim for their contributions to literature. Native literature has the potential to become one manifestation among the numerous historical discourses of a nation. These works have almost equal rights to represent the past and its effect on the present. The tactic of mixing family stories and national history is a common subplot in many of these novels. The technique works as a form of “countermemory”, a phrase that Foucault used to challenge dominant discourses, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (8). Writers of fiction employ elements from history to evoke the collective memory of a group and rehabilitate historical figures and incidents, which are often overlooked in official versions. It is usually done by the inclusion of oral narratives, native poems, folklore and rituals, non-English words, non-linear narratives, and even landscapes that are unfamiliar to the dominant class. This process instils a sense of pride and oneness in the native reader. The writers considered in this paper have used many of these strategies to weave stories that help to revisit and re-assess the merit and authenticity of the stories that had hitherto been disseminated. Discussions regarding cultural memory begin with collective memory. Maurice Halbwachs, the French sociologist, was the first to emphasise the importance of social frameworks in memory. Until then, memory was regarded solely as a biological construct. Family, traditions, or religious beliefs may trigger memory. Halbwachs’ notes: “… collective memory is essentially a reconstruction of the past in the light of the present” (34). It enhances the group’s capacity to form and modify identities. Collective memory is informal and “based exclusively on everyday communication” among the members of a group (Assmann 126). In the early 1980s, Jan Assmann elaborated upon the ideas proposed by Maurice Halbwachs and introduced the term ‘cultural memory’. Cultural memory distances itself from the world of everyday activities. Hence, its temporal horizon is different from that of collective memory. “Cultural memory has its fixed point; its horizon does not change with the passing of time. These fixed points are fateful events of the past, whose memory is maintained through cultural formation (texts, rites, monuments) and institutional communication

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(recitation, practice, observance)” (Assmann 129). Cultural memories are reinforced and circulated through collective memories. Together they form the social memory of a group.

Patricia Grace’s Chappy New Zealand is a land with a mixed ancestry. By the nineteenth century, Maoris, the original settlers of the region, were pushed to a subordinate position by European settlers called ‘Pakeha’. Chappy depicts the lives, aspirations and tribulations of a normal Maori whanau (extended family), at the centre of which is Oriwia. Daniel, her grandson, who lives in Switzerland, visits New Zealand in his attempt to come to terms with his mixed identity. He is portrayed as a representative of modern youth in a polychromatic, multicultural, globalised society. As he puts it: “I came into this country in the first place needing to piece myself together, hoping there would be attachments” (Grace 2). However, by the end of the novel, Oriwia proves to Daniel: “You can be anywhere in the world, but you have a Turangawaewae that cannot be denied” (Grace 248). This story from New Zealand spans continents. The characters in the novel travel to Switzerland, Hawaii, Japan, India, and Germany. The oral storytelling instincts of Oriwia remind Daniel that all experiences in life are connected. “It’s all intertwined” (Grace 40). Grace makes Daniel go back to his ancestral world, the realm of the forgotten and the lost, to record the events, and to speak the truth about the past. It helps him to understand himself, his rootlessness, and his dislike for Switzerland. The paper highlights three subplots in Chappy to show how narratives help to re-inscribe traditional identities. When the Maori greet each other, precise pieces of information are gathered in the exchange. This short communication extracts the names of a person’s ancestors, mountain, and river, thereby placing the person in the frame of time/history/memory. Daniel’s rootlessness is attributed to his failure to share these precise pieces of information. During his stay with his grandmother, he learns about a similar predicament faced by Chappy, his grandfather. Chappy’s sense of alienation is summarised thus: “I am a man without a country, without a family, without a name without goods or money, without papers,” he told me. I’m from a disgraced family, except I no longer have a family” (Grace 93). The story of Chappy is transferred to Daniel through the oral and written narrations of Oriwia and her cousin Aki, both in their seventies. The narrative highlights the importance of having more than a

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name and a story to identify oneself. Chappy’s story is revealed through the perspectives of three different narrators. The second trope in the plot is the reference to ‘whakapapa’, a poetic narration by a trained member of the community at important cultural gatherings, such as birth, marriage, and death among others. Whakapapa, a genealogical recital, acts as a reminder that “these are moments when all time comes times becomes present and you understand that you are merely a bead on an unbroken necklace which is without beginning or end” (Grace 184). The content of whakapapa mostly comprises names, incidents, and remembrances pertaining to the past eighty to hundred years. These constant reminders make many identity indicators part of daily communication, and they are silently passed directly from generation to generation. Some of these memories, when analysed further, will reveal connections farther than eighty years. They are realised to form part of ancestral memories. Hence, a major share of whakapapa is kept alive through collective memories; the rest is embedded in cultural memory. In a description by Aki, one of the narrators in Chappy, the relevance of whakapapa as a site or source of cultural memory is attested thus: I realised as we sat in the fading light of my wedding day, my ears attuned to the language that I was becoming more and more familiar with … I realised that what I was hearing, there in Hawaii, was my own genealogy – the names from before the earth was made, the names from before the earth was peopled, the names from after the earth was peopled, the names before the sailing and venturing, the names to do with the sailing and venturing. My heart was bumping against its walls. I was hearing the same names that I had heard from the lips of my elders when I was a child with a held ear. (Grace 184–85)

Aki seems to remind the readers that whakapapa has the potential to establish relationships beyond the geographical and tribal context of Aotearoa (New Zealand). The common memory of voyages allows cultures in Oceania to reconnect for various purposes. A peek into the Polynesian background reveals that many centuries ago, the ancestors of present-day New Zealanders had crossed over in canoes from Hawaii. The whakapapa recitals at the marriage of Aki, a Maori, to Ma, a woman from Hawaii, reveal their spiritual connections to a collective ancestry. Aki’s knowledge of whakapapa enables him to be “the keeper, the guardian for a future time of certain knowledge, histories, genealogies, stories” (Grace 199). This fact is re-confirmed at a later wedding through the words of a Maori elder, who draws on the shared cultural knowledge in his recital:

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My Hawaiian family were at once alert when they heard the names that connected them in time and place with my home family, we of Aotearoa being junior to those left behind in ‘the great, far-distant, etched-on-theheart, longed-for homeland of ‘Hawaiki’. Beside me, so still it was as though he didn’t breathe, was old man ‘Amakualenalena’. (Grace 185)

These instances of establishing whakapapa show how continuity and repetition are essential. The process promotes an understanding of memory that goes beyond individual and group memories. Continuation, however, presupposes effective forms of transmission. Each community ensures this continuity through cultural bearers—specialists, or in the words of Assmann, “specialized carriers of memory” (114)—who are entrusted with the task of preserving the cultural memory of the community. Aki and Amakualenalena are trained community orators; they have access to a substantial volume of tribal knowledge. Therefore, the survival of, and the stories narrated through, whakapapa are very significant and have a prominent role in identity formation. The third area of analysis is the identification of the certain historical tropes used by the author in the plot. Chappy was a migrant who had escaped war and hunger to reach Aki’s land, New Zealand. He was forced to settle there. Later, he married Oriwia. His clan had to face atrocities at the hands of conquerors—British, Japanese, and Americans, in succession. Pushed to the margins and with only memories of a golden past to sustain them, the members of the defeated and subjugated race lead a confused life. Many important historical events, such as the Maori land acquisition, the Pearl Harbour bombing of 1941, and the subsequent atomic bombing of Japan—followed by its rebuilding and subsequent expansion in Chinese territories—among others, find mention in the book. Every fictional narrative borrows a part of its referential dynamics from similar ‘traces’. It is the mnemonic images that help in historical recall and form authentic sources of collective identity. Therefore, it is important to historicise the past through narratives. Years later, these traces are of great help when Chappy’s grandson travels from Switzerland to New Zealand to decipher his identity by re-visiting his grandfather’s life story. Oriwia tells Daniel: “What you’ve done already putting down the stories, is a big thing for all of us. It’s your contribution” (Grace 249). Daniel collects traces, records them, and emplots them in published format—a novel—thus, historicising a significant part of his Maori ancestry.

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Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria The symbolic representation of the struggles faced by a colonised individual and the society in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria attracted critical attention when it was published in 2007. The inaccurate details related to history taught and propagated through institutionalised centres of power unsettle the collective memories of many races, especially in the case of oppressed, aboriginal communities. The lack of a proper correlative seems to derail many characters in the novel. The first chapter, entitled ‘From Time Immemorial’, foregrounds the difference of temporality in the timeframe of the plot. The work is not a historical novel in the Eurocentric scale because it does not offer an “impeccable recorded history” (Wright 89). Nevertheless, it functions as a grand narrative that encompasses the entire aboriginal past of a native populace. The history of a nation is not complete without the stories of its people. The past is gone; what can be created is history, a mere representation of the past. Carpentaria is, at its core, a text about the natives of Australia and their belief in storytelling. The speciality of the little stories of the people, narrated through a non-linear plot and a highly erratic timespan, is evident from the following lines: “If you are someone who visits old cemeteries, wait awhile if you visit the water people. The old Gulf country men and women who took our besieged memories to the grave might just climb out of the mud and tell you the real story of what happened here” (Wright 11). Likewise, the mention of “those whose fractured spirit cried of rape, murder and the pillage of their traditional lands” (Wright 27) and the “up-to-no-good Mission-bred kids” who “accidently hanged Cry-baby Sally” under the rivergum (Wright 2) are highlighted as significant incidents in history that have become myths. The silence of the dead can be heard loud and clear through the representations in the novel. Age-old conflicts among the indigenous “poor old Pricklebush people” (Wright 23) fester and are brought to an ugly confluence under the pressure of racism and poverty. Land, another cause of conflict, also finds mention here. “People who had been getting on well”, writes Wright, “living side by side for decades, started to recall tribal battles from the ancient past” (26). The cultural past stored in the collective memory has the ability to form identities: One evening in the driest grasses in the world, a child who was no stranger to her people, asked if anyone could find hope. The people of parable and prophecy pondered what was hopeless and finally declared that they no longer knew what hope was. The clocks, tick-a-teetock, looked as though

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they might run out of time. Luckily, the ghosts in the memories of the old folk were listening, and said anyone can find hope in the stories: the big stories and the little ones in between. So… (Wright 12)

To tell a story in which ancestral characters shape one’s destiny, repeated reference to various manifestations of cultural memory is unavoidable. Memories, such as those described above, cannot be articulated through conventional forms of memory. The dreamtime mode of narration also accentuates the unconventional plot structure of the novel. To highlight the subtle interconnections between history, narrative, and memory in Carpentaria, this paper concentrates on three cultural bearers – the serpent, Normal Phantom, and Mozzie Fishman among many others in the text. The image of the ancestral serpent at the beginning of the narrative jolts the readers to notice the unconventional plot structure that follows: “The ancestral serpent, a creature larger than storm clouds came down from the stars, laden with its own creative enormity” (Wright 4). This serpent is a source of cultural memory. It has formed and organised the memories of the clan for more than a millennium. The serpent travelled over the marine plains, over the salt flats, through the salt dunes, past the mangrove forests and crawled inland … When it finished creating the many rivers in its wake, it created one last river … a river which offers no apologies for … people who don’t know it. This is where the giant serpent continues to live deep down under the ground in a vast network of limestone aquifers. They say it’s being is porous; it permeates everything. It is all around in the atmosphere and is attached to the lives of the river people like skin. (Wright 4)

The serpent scoring deep into the land from the sea creates one river after the other. This river is best understood and controlled by Normal Phantom, the main protagonist. It is a fixed point that has remained static in the imagination of the group. It is a site of memory to which they fall back when faced with an identity crisis. The myth of the Rainbow serpent reconfirms the presence of the aboriginals long before the arrival of the others on the landscape. Norman Phantom, a flawed, yet heroic, figure is the protagonist of the novel. He has disagreements with his wife and is not on talking terms with his son, Will, who is an activist. Despite his struggles to maintain a cordial relationship with his family and his community, Norm is a respected elder. His community, however, wrangles with the shame that accompanies the postcolonial traumatic lies imposed by the assumed superiority of the

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colonisers. He resists the power of racism and imperialism by an advanced understanding of aboriginal knowledge systems. Angel Day, his wife, finds a clock and a statue of Christ from the rubbish piled on their land by the Uptown people. She wrongly believes that the possession of these objects can change her position in the society. Religion and the twentyfour-hour clock are two systems used to decentralise native timeframes and belief systems, and, indirectly, their cultural memories and strategies of identity formation. Normal is their best storyteller. “Norm had a hypnotic voice, his eyes cast spells, he distilled memory like the flooding river emptying into the sea” (Wright 102). Normal has in him three tropes that make him a bearer of cultural memory—his workshop packed with stuffed fish, which “possessed a translucent gleam” (Wright 196) that will reverberate in the collective memory of his clan for years to come, a parrot that repeats all his stories, and, finally, his knowledge of the ocean. The next character is Mozzie Fishman, who is portrayed as the “cultural man” of Desperance, the town in the backdrop of the novel (Wright 121). He is a man haunted by the memories of the past. “He could see them killing Aboriginal people…some of those hands belonged to people who were still living and still sitting themselves on top of Traditional Law” (127). To overcome these nightmares, he begins “the spiritual dreaming track of the ceremony” (124), in which he helps the aboriginals to lead a better life, ‘a religious pilgrimage” (125). He moves along the ancestral routes of Carpentaria, accompanied by a large rally of vehicles. Hence, these characters, by their deviant nature, help Wright tell her story, a part of the history of her people, in a convincing and attractive manner. Carpentaria is a novel in which the past, present, and future collapse into each other. As in the case of the serpent “collapsing tunnels” (Wright 2) to surface to the present, Wright overturns western modes of storytelling to foreground the persecutions suffered by her clan. The past, as indicated earlier, pervades the narrative in the form of memory. However, memory is varied, unreliable, and malleable. There are “sweet reminiscences” (157), “childhood memories” (163), and “elephantine memories” (66). The reader even encounters a lad “writing memory with a firestick … made lightning look dull” (163). Even without written aboriginal histories, oral narratives, rock inscriptions, collective memories, and folklore are mixed with imagination to recreate the past “at random from any era of the time immemorial of the black man’s existence on his own land” (103). Hence

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one finds history emplotted in these novels, fragmented but running parallel to many other stories. Wright makes it impossible for the readers to not accept the novel as a complementary version to the official history texts in circulation. The written archives on which western historiography depends are unreliable. As an example, Wright refers to “one hundred years of impeccable recorded history” (89) of the local Smith family that goes up in smoke. The people of Uptown record their past in the archives or in other mnemonic objects. Consequently, they are forced to continually recreate their legends. On the contrary, the Pricklebush people undertook daily “memory tribunals” (51) as a means of keeping the past alive. The novel suggests that it is the people who are responsible for passing on the essence of history and culture to their families as lived experiences, not the official records stored in archives and managed by institutionalised centres of power. The novel seeks freedom from political oppression; it also seeks emancipation from the suppression of imagination: “Nothing must stop our stories” (Wright 429). The inside knowledge of the river, in which the serpent and gropers live, and the coastal region exists in the oral stories and the laws of the land. Norman is attributed with superhuman qualities. He “…could grab hold of the river in his mind and live with it as his father’s fathers did before him. His ancestors were the river people, who were living with the river from before time” (6). This power vetoes the official documents in which documented history appears only with the arrival of the Europeans. In Carpentaria, both the knowledge and trauma of ancestors are not distant aspects of the past but operative influences in the living present. Norman, who has “secret conversations” with the “heavenly spirits at night” (Wright 230) about the ways of the ocean and fishing locations, is pictured as a normal man. At many points in the novel, the white man is found bewildered, unable to grasp the secret of the native’s understanding of nature and its forces. At the end of the novel, nature wipes the slate clean in the form of a storm. The earth is covered by the sea. Norman and his grandson are stranded on an island. He is unafraid, but certain that the knowledge stored in the cultural memory of his race, long before he was born, will help him to start anew.

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Conclusion Literature, by integrating historical realities into fiction, demonstrates that it can prompt a reader to critically reflect upon the nature of historical knowledge. The term ‘history’ connotes a vast number of interpretations about past events. The works examined in the paper are not historical novels. Many of the events described in them are fictionalised. Yet, they manage to create a collective historical consciousness and interpret the existing body of historical knowledge from a decentred perspective. While presenting stories of ordinary people, the novels diffuse existing unrealities within the socio-political context of a nation. Historiography itself, at times, functions as a form of cultural memory. Memory Studies aids in the extraction of histories embedded in the cultural matrix of accumulated reading, which, in turn, remoulds the existing histories of the oppressed and the silenced. This discipline is all the more significant in the native scenario because indigenous people have been spoken about but never with absolute honesty.

Works Cited Assmann, Jan. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” Translated by JohnCzaplicka, New German Critique, no. 65, 1995, pp. 125–33. JSTOR,www.jstor.org/stable/488538.Accessed 10 Dec. 2019. Foucault, Michel. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited by Donald F. Bouchard, Cornell UP, 1977. Grace, Patricia. Chappy. Penguin, 2015. Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Translated by Lewis A. Coser, U of Chicago P, 1992. Rodriguez, Jeanette, and Ted Fortier, editors. “The Concept of Cultural Memory.” Cultural Memory Resistance Faith and Identity. Peter Lang, 2007, pp. 7-14. White, Hayden. “The Historical text as a Literary Artifact.” The History and Narrative Reader, edited by Geoffrey Robert, Routledge, 2001. Wright, Alexis. Carpentaria. Giramondo, 2007.

POSSIBLE BONDS: MEDICAL HUMANITIES AND INTERDISCIPLINARY THEORETICAL EXCHANGE SMRITHI M VENUGOPAL AND SHERON K P R

“I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person's family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick.” —Hippocratic Oath (modern version) (Hajar 157)

The history of medical practice shows the way perceptions of and approaches to diseases, diagnosis, and treatments have evolved in society. At different periods in time, medical science has undergone transformations, either by incorporating or converting the existing modes of healing and care. Hippocrates of Kos, regarded as the father of modern medicine, is a towering figure in the annals of medical science. The Hippocrates model laid emphasis on patient care and prognosis rather than on the diagnostic model of the present. During the age of enlightenment, physicians began to adopt more scientific methods, as science was held at high esteem. Since then, the rapid advancements in science, accompanied by the advent of new perspectives on the part of physicians, has led to considerable changes in medical practice. Modern medical technology has proved itself a boon to humanity as it has succeeded in saving countless lives. The developments in electronics, optics, diagnostic methods, and human genome sequencing, among others, have introduced innovative methods in the detection of symptoms and subsequent treatment. The shift to mechanical models and technology-oriented medicine eventually took place. However, ever since the ‘scientific’ element had marked its entry into medical practice, the latter became detached from the humanistic essence it was bound to nurture. In a cause-and-effect system solely based on

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diagnosis and prescription, human values, ethics, morals, empathy, etc., began to take a side seat. Medical science, with its undue emphasis on anatomy and physiology, ceased to acknowledge a human being as a body with a mind, with its own set of experiences, emotions, knowledge, biases, and much more. A blind emphasis on the body and its specific parts, conditions, and treatments assumes that these aspects are universally constant and replicable. Undue priority to the disease and ignoring the patient, attention to the cure but disregarding adequate care for the person, stress on laboratory results and other diagnostic reports although overlooking the purely subjective experiences of the sick, insistence on physical recovery to the point of neglecting the psychological needs of the individual, and a unilateral focus on the exploitation of technology at the expense of the social and ethical considerations of healing exemplify the fact that the humanistic spirit seems to have gradually faded from medical science. Consequently, at times, the treatment adopted might not yield the expected results. The spawn of other forms of cure, such as music therapy, laughter therapy, art therapy, humanistic therapy, narrative therapy, play therapy, interpersonal and transpersonal therapy, and cognitive behavioural therapy, proves that there is a growing demand to incorporate humanistic models into the exiting scientific model of medical practice. The awareness regarding the need to promote wellness and healing rather than the mere administration of drugs to cure a condition has gained popular attention. It is in this context that the discipline of medical humanities assumes contemporary significance. Modern medicine or allopathy, widely recognized as the most prestigious model of medical practice today, dismisses all other models, such as ayurveda, homeopathy, and naturopathy, as either alternative practices or pseudoscientific ways. The irony lies in the fact that most modes of alternative healing have long since embraced humanistic principles, contrary to modern medicine, which has eventually recognized the need to contemplate the human being as a whole. The integration of medical scientific spirit and medical humanistic spirit has become the need of the hour. Medical curriculum is increasingly borrowing from the humanities, which leads to a theoretical exchange between the disciplines.

Humanistic and Scientific Models In a general sense, disciplines that study the human condition in its entirety may be considered under the umbrella term ‘humanities’, while

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science can be understood as the systematic study of all things. Thus, the humanities include the various branches of knowledge that explore the process of creative intervention that humans make in imaginatively interpreting and expressing the meanings of their lived-in experiences (Kundu 5). The scientific method involves generating hypotheses that are testable. Empirical proof is considered the hallmark of a scientific exercise. The study of the humanities, on the contrary, lays stress on the analysis and exchange of ideas rather than the causal and quantitative explanation of phenomena. The classical notion of the exactness of scientific knowledge has been subjected to scrutiny for quite some time now. Paradoxically, every branch of science in the pursuit of objective truth has encountered the problem of the desirable method to arrive at the provable and verifiable truth. The recognition that diverse subject matter requires varied forms of interpretation is a fresh way to conceptualize science. It is important to admit that there are different ways of knowing the world. The process of acquiring knowledge is not based on any single method. In fact, it can range from a number of techniques to an amalgamation of many approaches to form a single, novel way. Medical humanities is one such perspective that provides an insight into human conditions, disease, and suffering, and the responsibilities of a medical professional towards oneself, patients, colleagues, and others. The idea has been incorporated into the curriculum of many medical universities across the globe so as to cultivate the sensitivity to, empathy for, and understanding of the human condition in medical practitioners. What, then, are ‘the medical humanities’ themselves? It is simplest to start by asking what ‘the humanities’ are more generally, in a wider context. I suggest that they are those systematic forms of study concerned with recording and interpreting human experience. Typically, they include things like history, literature, philosophy, ethics, anthropology, sociology, theology, psychology and so on – but the key point is that they all actively concern exploring the world as it appears from the point of view of frail, Àesh-bound, human experience – experience of the world and of ourselves within it, experience in all its varieties and within all the diverse models of reality underlying different cultural, linguistic, spiritual and theological traditions. If this is what ‘the humanities’ are in a general sense, then the medical humanities are just those same studies concerned with the speci¿c experiences of health, disease, illness, medicine and health care, with the practitioner–patient relationship and, above all, with the clinical consultation as a focal arena for such experiences. (Evans 510)

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The medical humanities represent an integrated, interdisciplinary approach, which is essentially a philosophical recording and interpretation of human experiences of illnesses, diseases, disabilities, medicine, and healthcare.

Medical Humanities: Birth and Growth Medical humanities gained institutional recognition with the founding of the Institute of Medical Humanities of the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston in 1973. The aim was to ensure that teaching and research in the humanities became an integral part of the education of future scientists, healthcare professionals, and physicians. In all four years of the undergraduate curriculum, the multidisciplinary faculty teach literature, art, drama, law, history, and philosophy. Currently, 69 of 133 affiliated schools in the US require that medical students take a compulsory course in medical humanities (Banaszek 183). A few Canadian medical schools are making exploratory forays into medical humanities courses. In the United Kingdom in 1993, the General Medical Council also highlighted the importance of the integration of the humanities into the medical curriculum to improve communication skills, study the ethical and legal issues pertaining to medical practice, inculcate a healthy regard for patients and colleagues, and consider the patient’s rights in all respects (Song 130). Canada, Germany, and Sweden are other Western countries that have recognized the value of the humanities and integrated its learning into the medical curriculum (Song 130). Medical ethics and bioethics, patients’ rights and informed consent, the doctor’s obligations and duties, risk management, and medical safety are some of the thrust areas of medical humanities in Japan. Since the 1980s, research in medical humanities has increased in medical colleges in China. However, due to various reasons, including the lack of organizational practices, the pace of the medical humanistic model in China has lagged behind that of its western counterparts (Song 131). In India, there has been a traditional divide between science and the humanities, which is difficult to bridge. Consequently, medical humanities is still not a specialization in the medical curriculum of Indian universities. Nevertheless, there is a strong sense of this requirement, which medical schools and the Indian Medical Association has taken up positively. Medical humanities comprises a series of intersections, exchanges, and entanglements among the biomedical sciences, the arts and the humanities, and the social sciences (Whitehead 1). As a highly interdisciplinary area of

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enquiry, the discipline is rapidly expanding and becoming increasingly globalized. The first wave of medical humanities, referred to as mainstream medical humanities, paid attention to the aspect of communication based on the narration of the lived-in experiences of the patient. The second phase, that of the critical medical humanities, laid emphasis on the fluidity of the discipline, with regard to scholarship, health focus, and political context changes. Medical humanities emerged as a discipline out of the recognition that the duties of medical practitioners are not limited to the treatment of disease. It also includes relieving the stress of patients and comforting them regarding the outcome.

Humanism and Healing Michael Epstein speaks of a crisis that the humanities faces (4). He provides us with eloquent statistics on the decline in the popularity of humanities subjects, the fall in the number of students majoring in the discipline in the United States, and the reduction in funding in humanities research, with the major share of stipends, grants, and funds flowing to science. Epstein proposes that the humanities should “rehumanise” the hard realities left out by science, as a soul, spirit, beauty, or a human face is absent or even non-existent from the viewpoint of the natural sciences (1–2). In order to survive, the humanities should uphold immaterial values as revealed and perceived by humans, while simultaneously transform itself to the wholesome development of human potential increasingly explored and implemented by science and technology. The two sides of the mission of the humanities, to remain human and to become human, should complement one another rather than disintegrate and degenerate. Medical humanities, as an interdisciplinary group, includes literature, philosophy, history, arts, cultural studies, and many other areas of knowledge. All the sciences in the medical humanities—be it medical science, human science, or social science—are key to the quality education of a medical student. According to Edmund Pellegrino, the noted bioethicist, the humanities should have a reasonable role in medical science (118). In his famous text, Humanism and the Physician (1979), Pellegrino suggests that the role of the humanities in medical education should not be read as a sign of courteousness and the kind character of the physician, a polite pretence overlying medical practice, or a reflection of the upbringing of the practitioner. Instead, the humanities should be a basic component that empowers physicians to make accurate and prudent decisions, a factor as important as scientific knowledge and skills

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(Pellegrino 118). In the light of the ethical and moral dilemmas that physicians are bound to face, the humanities becomes an indispensable part of the medical curriculum. In the medical school, the discipline of medical humanities must be committed to promote a way of being. The latter incorporates personal convictions regarding obligations to others and the development of a professional identity, the hallmark of which are qualities of compassion, engagement, integrity, respect for patients, and commitment to the human body and soul. An awareness of these aspects fosters empathy, cultural competence, personal values, critical thinking, leadership, teamwork, and cooperation, thereby preparing students to respond appropriately to clinical problems. Medical humanities is attracting attention as its incorporation into the curriculum promotes the development of culturally sensitive, compassionate, and empathetic physicians.

Implementation in the First World Nations In the developed nations, subjects traditionally grouped under the humanities, such as literature, art, language, philosophy, and history are widely used in educating future doctors. Many medical schools have created modules that specialize in a humanities subject and undergraduate students are given the option to choose areas that suit their interests and aptitude. In certain schools, medical humanities is taught throughout the duration of the undergraduate course, while the study is limited to specific semesters/years in others. As the scope and range is considerably broad, the method by which medical humanities is taught in different parts of the world is not uniform. However, most medical humanities modules feature the use of small engagement groups, a reliance on creative writing, narratives, and reflections, the dependence on an active learning strategy, and the exploitation of literature, paintings, and images in pedagogy among others. Narrations, reflections, and creative writing help students ponder on life and record their own experiences, thereby aiding them in the process of understanding the plight of the patients they are bound to meet and treat later. Literature offers them a plethora of experiences that enlighten them on the psychodynamics of human subjectivity and release them from the cobweb of medical discourses that view a human being primarily as a mere body. It reminds them that a person is an entwined being of natural and existential dimensions, a crucial fact that is central to clinical medicine but poorly prepared and largely overlooked in the curriculum. Art appreciation modules enhance the visual diagnostic skills of students. The study of medical humanities enables students to explore

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their extracurricular interests, which, in turn, empower them to deal with frustrations and compensate for the lack of a creative stimulus in learning. Over time, such a comprehensive outlook leads to a broader and more nuanced understanding of the craft and art of medicine, unlike its scientific precursor that stayed dedicated to objectivity and uniformity.

Conclusion The integration of humanistic principles into the pedagogy of science is the norm in different parts of the world. The acknowledged goals of such efforts worldwide are to harbour a humane temperament in highly competent medical talents that decide the future of the profession in the years to come. In the patronage of the humanities, medical science can shed its obsession with technology and focus on the well-being of the patient, which is the very essence of medical practice. Medical humanities can demand an emotional response from learners and help them understand patient stories and experiences better. In fact, these days, medical humanities is looked upon as a possible solution to the ‘dehumanization’ of medical practice. Medical humanities fits into the paradigm of preservation and transformation—human values are conserved, even as individuals undergo evolution by drawing on the benefits of technological advancement. Medical humanities provides the academia with the reassurance that the humanities is an eternally significant discipline. While areas of research in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics are paramount to our society, a solid grounding in critical thinking skills that liberal arts education provides is inevitable for success in any endeavour or profession. To sum up, the humanities is the cornerstone of any well-rounded and complete education. The discipline will thrive until the last survivor of human civilization perishes on the face of the earth.

Works Cited Banaszek, Adrianna. “Medical Humanities Courses Becoming Prerequisites in Many Medical Schools.” CMAJ: Canadian Medical Association Journal, no. 8, 2011, p. 441. Epstein, Mikhail. The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto. Translated by Igor Klyukanov, Bloomsbury Academic, 2012. Evans, Martyn. “Reflections on the Humanities in Medical Education.” Medical Education, vol. 36, no. 2, June 2002, pp. 508–13.

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Hajar, Rachel. “The Physicians Oath: Historical Perspectives.” Heart Views, vol. 18, no. 4, Oct. 2017, pp. 154–59. Kundu, Abhijit., et al. The Humanities: Methodology and Perspectives. Dorling Kindersley, 2009. Pellegrino, Edmund D. Humanism and the Physician.U of Tennessee P, 1979. Song, Pepei, and Wei Tang. “Emphasizing Humanities in Medical Education: Promoting the Integration of Medical Scientific Spirit and Medical Humanistic Spirit.” BioScience Trends, vol. 11, no. 2, April 2017. pp. 128–33. Whitehead, Anne, and Angela Woods, editors. The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities.Edinburgh UP, 2016.

MEMORISING THE HOLOCAUST TRAUMA: A NEW IMPERIALIST HEGEMONIC MECHANISM NINITTE ROLENCE AND SAIGEETHA S

Trauma is generally understood as a person’s inability to cope with a distressful situation, which causes a sense of helplessness, confusion, and insecurity. The American Psychological Association defines trauma “as an emotional response to a terrible event like an accident, rape or a natural disaster”. Michelle Balaev refers to trauma as “. . . a person's emotional response to an overwhelming event that disrupts previous ideas of an individual's sense of self” (“Trends” 150). This situation can result in physical, emotional, or psychological stress. It is a subjective experience in the sense that the response to a particular stressful event varies from person to person and is based on previous experiences in her/his life. Extreme suffering from within or outside one’s self at times creates an unfathomable void in the human psyche, a chasm that cannot find complete linguistic expression. The traumatic experiences remain dormant in the psyche of an individual in formless states as a deep-rooted wound beyond linguistic and narrative codes but still continue to inflict pain. Mediated by such experiences, the person undergoes adaptations that effect changes in emotional organization and perception of life. According to Caruth, trauma is “a shock that appears to work very much like a bodily threat but is in fact a break in the mind’s experience of time” (“Unclaimed” 61). It causes such disruptions in the psyche that it destroys the mind's capability to linguistically encode it and later decode it as life narratives. In Contemporary Approaches in Literary Trauma Theory (2014), Balaev states that theorists such as Cathy Caruth have suggested that “trauma is an unsolvable problem of the unconscious that illuminates the inherent contradictions of experience and language” (“Literary Trauma Theory” 1). Since the two World Wars and two of the most unfortunate happenings in the human history, i.e., the holocaust and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, trauma began to gain wider attention. These two diabolical incidents that unleashed cruelty and violence unheard till then shocked the

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entire humanity. It was intensely depressing and devastating not only for the victims but also for those who witnessed it through different modes such as the media representations, testimonies, diaries, etc. By the 1990s, studies related to trauma attained prominence within the firmament of humanities as an interdisciplinary area that involved psychology, literature, and history, among others, and was also concerned with concepts of memorising, forgetting, and searching for the self. The seminal works that are considered to have opened up the interest in trauma studies are Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (1992), Cathy Caruth’s Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995), and her monograph Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (1996). With the publication of Caruth’s works, trauma studies found a space within literary criticism. It draws much from the theories of psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and poststructuralism alongside the contributions of the neuroscientists Van der Kolk and Van der Hart. Wounded psyches, distorted bodies, races that have faced threats of annihilation and genocide, and the concept of nationhood, have all been incessantly delineated in literary narratives. In the wake of an impending disaster or obliteration in the contemporary context, war and its unending trauma have gained a new significance in discursive practices. The formulation of trauma theory in the 1990s brought about a distinctive paradigmatic shiftin the perception and treatment of trauma in literature. As it gained impetus, new reflections on traumatic experiences from theoretical viewpoints, including psychoanalytic and poststructuralist perspectives, among others, have evolved. Trauma theory asserts that certain ordeals create a speechless shock that causes a breach or even destruction of the identity. As this experience is recollected, some parts may be missing because the shock had rendered some incidents to totally disappear from memory. This process results in a certain hiatus in the recollected version of the experience. Trauma theory is concerned with the lacunae within this correlation because trauma, as Dori Laub puts it in the title of her essay, “... is an event without a witness” (1992). In the words of Thomas Elsaesser, a traumatic event has “the status of a (suspended) origin in the production of a representation (...) bracketed or suspended because marked by the absence of traces” (qtd. in Radstone 194). According to him, trauma theory means “not so much a theory of recovered memory as (...) one of recovered referentiality” (Radstone 201). It means that the narratives of trauma are highly mediated representations. A recollection of these abstract memories is arbitrated by the historical and cultural context to create knowledge and meaning of the past. These

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rememberings of the survivors of individual or collective trauma become potent narratives. Trauma literature invariably captures self-shattering traumatic experiences. It intends to share the anguish with the rest of the world and display it for epistemological scrutiny to create—or rather recreate—meanings of and about the past. These narratives are either about traumatic experiences and the consequent reverberations in the lives of the victims or it can be a firsthand narration of the victims and survivors. These renditions of trauma, be it firsthand as in the case of works such as the Diary of A Young Girl by Anne Frank, or fictional representations as in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye or Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Bill Konigsberg’s The Music of What Happens, and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Enemies, A Love Story, recreate the experience before an audience to the effect of generating discourses. Many writers have given expression to the conflicts within their inner psyche consequent to experiences beyond their condonable limits or have provided extensive narratives of anguish from an outsider’s point of view. The body and the mind of the victims of traumatic experiences become sites of power manipulation in one way or the other. The effect of a traumatic moment is not solely immediate; it is rather an activity of recollection, which later on returns in the form of dreams, flashbacks, hallucinations, and so on. However, this process of memorising is not a realistic recollection or remembering but a bafflement that lacks a specific temporality. Thus, the impact of this lived experience is specific neither to time nor any event. The effect is the consequence of a totality of experience, irrespective of the individual incidents that make up the whole traumatic moment. The holocaust is such an instance of a totality which has had its implications on a community as a whole and on everyindividual survivor. In the words of Alvin Rosenfeld, “the nature and magnitude of the Holocaust, were such as to mark, almost certainly, the end of one era of consciousness and the beginning of another . . . The human imagination after Auschwitz is simply not the same as before” (1– 2). Thus, the wounded psyches undergo a radical change, which raises questions of identity and of the very existence as human beings. The most widely discussed instance of trauma narrative is that of the Holocaust. The holocaust was in itself a process of annihilating meaning, while its narratives try to construct meaning out of that experience. The holocaust trauma is intergenerational. It got carried on to the succeeding generations in the form of narrations by the older generation of the survivors of the holocaust. They passed on stories of cruelty perpetrated on

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themselves and their relatives, a brutality that mounted up to the most heinous and demonic levels. These narratives were inherited by the younger generations along with the trauma of the victims. The holocaust narratives got established as a literary genre in the post-World War II decades. The literature can be categorised into two—diaries, memoirs and journals that survived the holocaust, and literature that uses holocaust as the background. The names of Emmanuel Ringelbau, Janusz Korczak, Chaim Kapland, and Anne Frank are relevant in this context. There are also writers who were not victims of the genocide but who wrote on the basis of research or after talking to the survivors. This study concentrates on the modalities of holocaust narratives gaining impetus in contemporary discursive practices. Roskies and Diamant have categorised holocaust narratives according to three postwar periods in which the real and proxy witnesses situate them: “a period of communal memory still internal and internecine, a period of provisional memory, in the 60’s and 70’s that witnesses the birth of a self-conscious Holocaust genre; to the period of authorized memory in which we live today following the collapse of the Soviet Union (1989-91) and the opening of the U.S. Holocaust Museum (1993).” These narratives are valued more for verisimilitude than for literariness. Diaries and testimonies are of greater significance since these texts render a sense of reality and authenticity to the theme. The diaries capture the chaotic condition of the time recording the day-to-day events, including details that may not find significance later on. The testimonies provide details of the most important incidents that have a relative significance then and later on as well. The memoirs not only narrate significant occurrences but also throw light on the culture and socio-political milieu in which the Jews lived at the time. The reader tends to have a more intimate experience through these narratives than with a historical text. History often records so-called facts from the point of view of the hegemonic powers. Holocaust narratives can be considered a response to the historical facts, which may have even been distorted or neglected. However, the notable point is that holocaust narratives seem to challenge the demarcation between art and history. When the Jewish survivors of the holocaust come up with their testimonial narratives, the reader tends to look at it more as history rather than as artistic pieces. Holocaust narratives are mostly about anti-Semitism and the consequent genocide. Significant features of this genre are that the works are addressed to a universal audience with a far outreach and represent multiple meanings using new symbols, forms, and materials. The narrators had to encounter the question of what meanings they had to convey and

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how. Symbolic materials, such as stones from the concentration camp sites, ashes and blood-soaked soil from the Nazi camps, hair removed from the dead bodies, the little possessions of the victims, etc., are used to establish the connections between the real events and their representations through various forms of narratives. Each object has a story of its own to be conveyed to the external world. It is not a tell-tale narrative but one that evokes empathy and a critical perception of the historical event that has accrued extraordinary speculation and has triggered a new realm of discourse. Initially, there had been anxiety regarding the representation of a callous and macabre historical event. Nevertheless, scholars explored the possibility of a critical perception across cultural and national boundaries as temporal distance increased. Consequently, the revived interest in holocaust narratives and the trauma they represent has acquired new momentum. A public consciousness has evolved towards these narratives as new instances of impending war pose a threat to the very survival of humanity, in the context of countries experimenting on disastrous weapons of annihilation. Holocaust narratives that have gained popularity are the ones that have been written by survivors, pertaining to the belief that these are actual representations of a true cataclysm and not works of art. Moreover, it is also a human preference to learn about other people’s experiences from themselves. From a critical perspective, this aspect is important as it tends to create a stronger public consciousness towards such issues and relate it to contemporary contexts. The most heinous of all the intentions in World War II was the agenda of genocide. The anti-Semitic rage that welled up in the Nazi regime took a heinously inhuman somersault during World War II that was not satisfied with the senseless massacre of the Jews but resorted to unfathomably cruel measures of torture and the murder of innocent men, women, and children. The methods adopted for the purpose were unheard of in any other war. The hair shaven from these bodies were used in making ropes and other kinds of fibre, and the remnants of these bodies were used in the felt industry. The extent of the hatred of the Jews becomes explicit here. In the contemporary scenario, the past couple of decades have been replete with political unrest owing to wars and terrorist attacks in many parts of the world. We hear of terrorist attacks in the most strategic points in the US and also in Asian and European countries; the Middle East and the neighbouring geographical areas are constantly under the threat of war and the no lesser menace of terrorism. The world is shocked by the atrocities in

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the Iraq war and the combats in Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria, and dumbfounded at the attack on the World Trade Centre. Peaceful life in many other countries has been put to stake by terrorist activities using communal and political cards. The world witnessed intolerable traumatic experiences as videos and pictures of the vicious acts were circulated in the media. Simultaneously, there arose counter claims that these were fake reports. Currently, a few argue that the holocaust itself is a myth, though these claims have been repressed in view of the concrete body of physical evidence that survived the holocaust. Many such unethical and tragic events that have shaken the conscience of humanity have at certain points been projected to be mere stories and creations of the media. Pictures from those sites are rejected as Photoshop entities. Thus, there has always been a distortion of reality. As time and space increase between the actual event and the ensuing discourses, the concrete historical events tend to dematerialise and get diluted or even lost. In such circumstances, the current reality and truth will later on be interpreted as false representations of history. However, the contemporary global scenario is not so hopeful for a warless, peaceful future. The conflicts over geographical domains and rich natural resources, terrorism with communal agenda, fear of losing monopoly over the rest of the world, anti-Semitism that is still ablaze, and racialhostilities— the list may go on—are alarming for the whole world. The revival of holocaust narratives becomes relevant in such a context. This renewed interest seems to be sponsored by hegemonic powers to warn the rest of the world of the consequences if their powerdom is put to stake. In the post-holocaust wars of the twentieth century, the Nazi regime is replaced by numerous smaller communal terrorist groups and a few dominant countries that are eccentrically power crazy to bring the whole world under their feet. If resistance raises its head, new imperialistic coercive strategies will be adopted to subdue any such attempts. These allies always create an ‘Other’, an enemy to be curbed. These ‘Others’ are the tools to tell the rest of the world to behave. Through the holocaust narratives brought into the limelight and discussed in academic discourses, the intensity of atrocity that can be unleashed in war has been inscribed in the minds of the people. It creates a neurosis in the entire humanity that the word ‘war’ itself echoes such savage brutality. Readers tend to relate holocaust to the more contemporary war violence and a constant fear is inculcated worldwide. Thus, the revived ardency with which holocaust narratives are treated now tends to trigger the argument that it is a mechanism of a new imperialist hegemony.

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Works Cited American Psychological Association. “Trauma.” www.apa.org/topics/trauma. Accessed 18 Dec. 2019. Balaev, Michelle. “Literary Trauma Theory Reconsidered.” Contemporary Approaches in Literary Trauma Theory, edited by Michelle Balaev, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 1–14. Balaev, Michelle. “Trends in Literary Trauma Theory.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, vol. 41, no. 2, 2008, pp. 149–166. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. —, editor. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. Routledge, 1992. Laub, Dori. “An Event Without a Witness: Truth, Testimony, and Survival.” Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, edited by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Routledge, 1992, pp. 75–92. Radstone, Susannah, editor. ‘Special Debate: Trauma and Screen Studies’, Screen, vol. 42. no. 2, Summer: 2001, pp. 188–216. Rosenfeld, Alvin H. “The Problematics of Holocaust literature,” Confronting the Holocaust: The Impact of Elie Wiesel, edited by Alvin H. Rosenfeld and Irving Greenberg, Bloomington, 1978, pp 1–2. Roskies, David G., and Naomi Diamant.Holocaust Literature: A History and Guide, https://www.brandeis.edu/tauber/publications/books/roskies-holocaustliterature.html. Accessed 28 Dec. 2019.

TOWARDS A BINARY ARTICULATION: FOOD METAPHORS IN JOANNE HARRIS’ FIVE QUARTERS OF THE ORANGE DUNA LISS TOM

When we talk about food, we are, then, in the midst of a rich and complex mosaic of languages, grammars, narratives, discourses, and traditions, all of which are tightly intermeshed. In this binding, they overlap and even “contradict” each other. (Montoya 7)

Along with other artefacts, such as films, pop music and advertisements, food enjoys a dominant role in cultural discourses. Food and its associated etiquette have moved from the dining table and the kitchen to occupy a central place in multifarious manifestations of human life. Food metaphors pervade literature, irrespective of time and place. Literary food studies analyses food symbolism to reflect on cultural identity, which encompasses a range of aspects from social position and sexual desire to gender relations and ideological standpoints. Food is a problematic subject—it has many roles and provides a critical context for the functioning of a community. As in the case of everyday artefacts, food has its evolutionary history and even demands divergent approaches for its intensive analysis. How we eat, what we eat, and with whom we eat are the most fundamental reflections of who we are physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Although food imagery has been used in literature through the ages, scholars have only recently begun to study texts for the significance behind cuisine and the art of eating. However, as food studies gains scholarly interest, literary theorists increasingly see the value of studying literature for food consumption, as food serves diverse purposes in literature. The study of food in literature serves to view a range of elements in a genre such as the novel in its structural and contextual levels. At the very basic level, food-related images, particularly when used with rich details and descriptions in literature, appeal to the senses of the reader and enhance the realism of the work. The images may be used to create a specific mood, offer a visual image for readers, help convey an idea,

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express an emotion, dramatize a situation, or increase the realism in a specific context. They often characterize people in literary works and enable readers to understand a character’s dilemma, social status, personality or even ethnicity, thereby contributing to plot and characterisation. In the mid-1960s, the study of food and eating evolved more significantly, with the writings on food and foodways by Claude Lévi-Strauss and Mary Douglas. Food metaphors also manifest themselves in theories that explore the relationship between the processes of individuation and socialization. Paralleling Barthes, Claude Levi-Strauss and Mary Douglas view food as adhering to the same practices as language because food is a code that expresses patterns about social relationships. (Lévi-Strauss 1968; Douglas 1980). “The Culinary Triangle”is a classic structuralist statement by LeviStrauss (2008), often critiqued for its view that food preparation can be analysed as a triangular semantic field, much like language. Within the European context, structuralism initiated an understanding of the structures of thought. One of these notions is the tendency to work according to binary operations. According to Strauss, cooking is a language into which a society unconsciously translates its own structure. Levi-Strauss attempts to capture all the dimensions of food in his work, including edible foodstuffs, modes of preparation and consumption, rules of compatibility and incompatibility, eliminatory functions, and the process of digestion. In his opinion, “all these networks of diverse information, of minor differences and frank oppositions” (qtd. in De Certeau 180) carry meaning. In this perspective, cuisine becomes a code that signifies a language, which unconsciously reveals the society of structure. Levi-Strauss identifies three levels on which the underlined coherence of these various elements is located: “a logic of perceptible qualities, a logic of forms, a logic of propositions” (qtd. in De Certeau 180). This paper tries to explore the ways in which food helps to frame different binaries for individuals and the society, as exemplified in Joanne Harris’ novel, Five Quarters of the Orange (2001). A renowned Anglo-French novelist, Joanne Harris expounds the story of the Dartigen family in Five Quarters of the Orange. Along with Chocolat (1999a) and Blackberry Wine (1999b), the work completes Harris’ food trilogy and explores the concept of the split narrative to its zenith. The plot moves around the story of Framboise Dartigen, the youngest child of Mirabelle Dartigen—a woman still remembered and hated for an incident that occurred in Les Laveuses during the Second World War, when Framboise was nine. Framboise was notorious for an unpleasant incident

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and the events in her village that led up to it. A widow of twenty years when the novel opens, she returns to the village on the Loire to restore the family's burnt-out farm. She introduces herself as a dried apricot baked and yellowed by the sun and uses her married name, Francoise Simon, as she does not want the villagers to know her real identity. Initially, nobody recognizes her; she opens a small restaurant in Les Laveuses and the business is successful. A notable food critic brings her story to prominence in a national magazine. This publicity results in a visit from Yannick, her nephew, and Laure, his wife, who are eager to profit from Framboise's sudden popularity. As the novel progresses, the author employs a number of binaries to differentiate between the characters, their behaviour, and even certain situations, to unearth the socio-political background of the work. First among the binaries is the image of the past/present, which is inextricably entwined, particularly in a scrapbook of recipes and memories that Framboise has inherited from her mother. This fragmented and fascinating book is packed with recipes, ‘abbreviations’, ‘cryptic references’, ‘blocks of tiny scripts’ in some unknown language, or a poem, all of which she gradually tries to decipher. Each of the ingredients in the recipe book is a key to the past and the present that Framboise cannot separate. Using the scrapbook, she recreates her mother’s dishes and serves them in her small creperie. Initially, she sold cakes, fruit tarts, biscuits, nut bread, and cinnamon snaps. Subsequently, she added other items: eggs, goat’s cheese, fruit liqueurs, and wines. It is through these recipes that Framboise talks about her life retrospectively: “I used my mother’s old recipes, working most often from memory, but consulting the album from time to time” (Harris 24). The narrative thus emerges from the perspective of Framboise at the age of nine: “My mother marked the events of her life with recipes, dishes of her own invention or interpretations of old favourites. Food was her nostalgia, her celebration, its nurture and preparation the sole outlet for her creativity....It is a whimsical touch which surprises and troubles me” (14-15). Framboise also demarcated the events of her life with divergent recipes. She tells a twin-track story of a village up the river Loire from Angers. Long ago, during the war, she, along with her siblings, was involved in a minor crime. From trading scraps of information for Gauloises, they fled from the parish, pursued by a mob that was convinced that the children's mother had informed on the apparent slaying of a German soldier by the Resistance. Etched in young Framboise’s memory is the German rumpy-pumpy in the village bar, with one dead body on the pavement.

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Yet, as she studies the scrapbook—searching for clues to unlock the contradiction between her mother’s sensuous love of food and her often cruel demeanour—she begins to recognize a deeper meaning behind each of the recipes. Consequently, the other binaries that appear in the novel through the recipe book are order/disorder, logic/reason. The first page of this scrapbook is given to her father’s early death and starts with a neat recipe for black-wheat pancakes. She says: “The recipes were clear enough, printed in blue or violet ink, but the mad scrawling, poems, drawings and accounts between them were written with no apparent logic, no order that I could discover” (35). On the one hand, the scrapbook is neatly printed with blue and violet ink; on the other, it is unclear. She does not understand the written half of the book. Their mother, Mirabelle Dartigen, was a difficult woman, prone to crippling migraines and more tender with her fruit trees than with her own children. Mirabelle’s behaviour is quite apparent from her attitude towards cooking. My mother had a passion for all fruit except oranges, which she refused to allow in the house. She named each one of us, ...after a fruit and a recipe— Cassis, for her thick blackcurrant cake, Framboise, her raspberry liqueur, and Reinete for her greengage tart, after the reineclaude—which grew against the south wall of the house, thick as grapes and syrupy with wasps in midsummer....At one time we had over a hundred trees....My memories are flavoured with their scents, their colours, their names. My mother tended them as if they were her favourite children. (20)

Faced with the responsibility to bring up three children and run a farm alone, Mirabelle had to be very tough. Unfortunately, this toughness translated into a lack of outward affection towards her children. Hence, Framboise remarks on the “...arrogance, perhaps, or the kind of defiance that led my mother to name us after fruit rather than the Church’s saints” (24). When the war came and the Germans occupied Les Laveuses, Mirabelle had to be braver than ever; the children, with no one to supervise them, ran wild. Eventually, they fell under the spell of Tomas, a young German soldier. He first bribed them with black-market goods, such as oranges or chocolate, and then manipulated them into secretly giving him information about their friends and neighbours. Framboise, the youngest child, who was nine at the time, and whose relationship with her mother was especially tortuous, became close to Tomas. She now blames herself for the series of events that resulted in Tomas' death, the retribution killing of ten villagers by the Gestapo, and Mirabelle's flight from the family home.

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Another binary that emerged through the food metaphor is that of disaster/success. The children knew about their mother’s dislike of oranges. She had a passion for all fruits except oranges, which she refused to allow in the house. One day, after stealing an orange from a grocer, Framboise used its skin to induce her mother’s migraine. At that time, the orange “...felt like a live grenade” (98), a weapon to punish her defiant mother. However, unlike Framboise, Paul had never seen an orange before. “At first he thought it was a ball. He held the fruit between his cupped hands, almost reverently, as if it might spread magical wings and fly away” (100). Thus, the orange becomes another metaphor to explicate the binary of disaster and success in this novel. Fifty-six years later, Framboise relives these traumatic events and tries to understand the way they have shaped her life and relationships. Eventually, as the truth emerges, she learns to face the bullies who threaten her, to forgive herself and her mother, to give herself permission to love, to reconnect with her two estranged daughters, and to finally put the past to rest. Another binary used by Harris is that of food itself as a metaphor for life and death. Food is the fuel for the existence of living beings. From time immemorial, eating and drinking have been considered important because they are necessary for survival. In this regard, food is associated with the life principle. Nevertheless, by referring to the Cafe in Les Laveuses as situated opposite the war memorial, the author explicates the eerie association between death and food. The villagers earn money by selling food to those who visit the memorial. Joanne Harris has also tried to mark boundaries between certain other binary categories, such as tragedy, revenge, suspicion, and love. Thus, along with various other cultural markers, food is a significant means of cultural expression and is often used as a general means of commentary on a society. Food is also increasingly pervasive in contemporary popular culture in persuading the way humans perceive and represent themselves as individuals and as members of social groups. Though fundamentally a biological necessity, culinary practice is also associated with lifestyle and is even the ultimate metaphorical source of the concept of taste. In addition, food possesses immense psychological and emotional significance. It also addresses issues of taste, status, class, gender identities, domestic power relations, tradition, migration, the civilizing process, new technologies, and commercial exploitation.

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Works Cited De Certeau, Michel, et al. The Practice of Everyday Life: Living and Cooking. Translated by Timothy J. Tomasik, vol. 2, U of Minnesota P, 1998. Douglas, Mary. Food in the Social Order. Routledge, 1980. Harris, Joanne. Five Quarters of the Orange. Black Swan, 2001. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Origin of Table Manners. Jonathan Cape, 1968. —. “The Culinary Triangle.” Food and Culture: A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan and Penny VanEsterik, Routledge, 2008, pp. 37–43. Montoya, Angel F. Mendez. Theology of Food: Eating and the Eucharist. Blackwell, 2009.

THE HETERO-NORMALISATION OF THE TRANSGENDER IDENTITY: A CRITIQUE OF NJAN MARYKUTTY ANU KURIAKOSE

Transgender studies have become a significant arena of knowledge production in the interdisciplinary arena of medical, anthropological, ethnographic, sociological, legal and cultural discourses. The term ‘transgender’ encompasses a unique potential for personal expression— transsexual individuals, cross-dressers, intersex people, drag queens, drag kings, and bi-gendered or multi- gendered individuals fill the spectrum of transgender identity. In the early 1990s, the term ‘transgender’ as an identity politics and transgender studies as a twin of queer studies emerged in the west, to intertwine with feminist politics. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, in their ‘Introduction’ to Transgender Studies Reader (2006), agrees with Judith Butler’s perspective on gender performance, which was published in 1988. Transgender people are those individuals, who deviate from the binary assumptions of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’; the identities are ‘lived’, ‘embodied’, ‘experienced’, ‘performed’, and ‘encountered’. They are complex and are varied from the binary sex or gender ideologies (qtd. in Stryker and Whittle 3). The regional transgender identifications in India are distinct from this understanding of the concept. The fluid identities receive greater visibility due to the social and historical queer political activism. This paper locates the transgender identity and its representation in the public sphere of Kerala, a state in the south-west of the Indian subcontinent. It critically looks at Malayalam cinema as a cultural text and analyses the film Njan Marykutty (2018, dir. Ranjith Sankar) that has a transgender (trans woman) person as the protagonist. The paper is based on the premise that though the film is celebrated as a step forward to the visibility of transgender people in Kerala, it fails to acknowledge the plurality of trans identifications when it adheres to the hegemonic social construction of a hetero-normative cis female body.

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Representing Transgender Identities on Screen Cinema as a cultural process and practice mirrors the shifting dynamics in the patterns of disciplining and punishing the body to recognize the nonnormative gender and sexual identities. Malayalam films that feature transgender characters intersect with the changing socio-political and cultural aesthetics. The public sphere in Kerala side-lined transgender identity as a subject matter of discussion; therefore, Malayalam cinema also turned a blind eye towards the depiction of such identities on screen in the past. Most of those portrayals served the purpose of comedy and disguise for visual pleasure, as the spectators mostly enjoyed watching subversive masculinities and gender parodying on-screen. From Chanthupottu (2005, dir. Lal Jose) to Njan Marykutty (2018), one sees an effort to carve a Malayali identity for transgender and gender-queer people. Less than a decade ago, Kerala started to renegotiate itself to accommodate transgender identities in the public sphere. This change in perspective is reflected in Malayalam cinema as the transition from the objectification of their bodies to the celebration of their transgender identities.

Re-looking the Transgender Identity in Njan Marykutty Njan Marykutty, in which a cisgender actor has enacted the lead role of the transgender person, heralds a paradigm shift in Malayalam cinema. The plot revolves around the identity crisis and the establishment of the transgender character as a successful figure in the public sphere. The film depicts the life of Marykutty, a transwoman in a predominantly Christian village in Kerala. Marykutty is victimized by the family, the society, and even by the government machinery, which is represented by its police force for her trans identity. In tune with many popular films that choose the pattern of a ‘happily-ever-after’ closing note, Njan Marykutty ends with the protagonist establishing her career as the first transgender police officer in the state. In the film, the transgender person is celebrated as ‘Shero’ (coined by joining the words ‘she’ and ‘hero’), which may be seen as a counter discourse to the flaws in marginalized transgender representations in mainstream Malayalam films. The media in Kerala sensationalised the film as “a step into the world of trans people and their mindscapes and their emotional and physical trauma” (Nagarajan), that served “to remove the myths and prejudices about transgender people to an extent” (Cris).

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Though the film is branded as a true depiction of the struggle of a trans individual for societal acceptance, this article tries to point out that it ironically endorses the hetero-normalisation of the identity while visualising the central character as a transsexual person, a trans woman. In his “Introduction” to Transgender on Screen (2006), John Philips points out that David O. Cauldwell, an American psychiatrist, used the word ‘transsexual’ to refer to people who sought to change their sex, for there are individuals whose gender identities did not correspond with their physical sex (qtd. in Philips 10). On account of the cis heteronormativity in the society, there has been a conspicuous absence of transgender people in the public sphere of Kerala. Since knowledge on transsexuality as a medical entity is only a recent phenomenon, cross-dressing was the only available option in the past. Rather than undergo surgery, many who felt gender identity disassociation from the assigned sex at birth, chose to cross-dress. The film opens with a discussion on the sex reassignment surgery and the gender reaffirmation of the central character. Mathukutty’s (Marykutty’s previous name) gender nonconformity and ‘his’ distress of embodying a male body is the point of focus in the initial scenes. Mathukkutty approaches medical practitioners with a plea for the surgical alteration of the sex identity/body: “I am uncomfortable with my body, I am trapped in a wrong body, I am uncomfortable to use the gents’ toilet and to interact with men, I feel ashamed of myself every time...I am a woman inside, I want to be a woman by body, by sound, and by personality” (00:02:57-00:03:10). The sex reassignment surgery is suggested as the only panacea to ‘her’ distress. Marykutty’s anguish as a consequence of the gender dysphoria is stressed in the film; it is later depicted as an effort to be in consonance with heteronormative assumptions of a binary gender identity. However, it is significant to observe that the surgery creates an eroticisation on the trans woman’s body in Njan Marykutty. The film demarcates a transition from the masculine gender identity of Mathukutty to the feminine gender identity of Marykutty by means of a medical procedure. It is interesting to observe that Marykutty is engaged in a discussion with her friend—who accepts and supports her transgender identity—on medically reassigning her gender identity. She mentions the oestrogen assistance as she consumes medicines, such as Premarin 625, to lose weight and shed all masculine demarcations. Here, the film is engaged in a narration of transgender identity using medical literature, and the text slightly moves away from its discussion of transgender identity as a cultural and social construct and the fluidity in performing gender roles.

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While examining the fluidity of gender performance, Judith Butler states that “gender is a repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being” (Gender Trouble 33). Butler has emphasised gender as a ‘performance’ and adjudges it as a ‘fluid’ aspect. Koumudyunderlines the images of transgender identities that have been produced and circulated for popular consumption. The strong endorsement for Sex Reassignment Surgery (SRS) and the re-appropriated body in the film are emblematic of heteronormative notions of gender identities, which, consequently, makes the gender queer identity a marginal one. This perspective points to the earliest assumptions of Judith Butler. With the help of phenomenology, Butler observed that gender identity is “a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo” (“Performative Acts” 520). In the film, the person who feels ‘trapped’ in the male body surgically alters the body and the gender performance is appropriated with the social construction of the feminine gender. The film visualises a cis heteronormative feminine embodiment in the transgender character for the consumption of the hetero-normative spectators. It embarks upon a journey to establish the trans identity in the public sphere by dismissing further identifications in the trans identity spectrum. Chanthupottu ridiculed the feminine central character, an approach that evoked protest from the queer community in Kerala (Tharayil 76). Njan Marykutty also uses a cisgender actor to establish the transgender identity in the public sphere but with a difference. Many transgender people in the state are found to have been moved by the depiction of the transgender character’s adherence to the hetero-normalcy and have applauded the authentic portrayal. These seemingly innocent endorsement from the transgender spectators should be evaluated critically. By promoting a sari-clad, feminized trans woman on the screen, the film appeals to the masses, who blindly consume whatever they see on screen as the only reality about transgender identity. The spectators may not comprehend the image as merely one among a spectrum of trans identities. As the film created a hetero-normalized transfeminine body in the mind of spectators, they tend to reject the non-castrated, cross-dressed, transgender people as spurious. In an interview that followed the first screening of the film, a few representatives of the transgender community appeared to be impressed by the genuine depiction of their trauma in life. Nevertheless, they were silent on the representation of the trans body and the politics involved in the visualization. Incidentally, a person who identified himself as a transman stated in the video that there were transmen in the society, who remained unheard and were muted; films

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ought to be made about their identities too (“Njan Marykutty”). Thus, by mainstreaming a feminised trans body in terms of cis heteronormativity, Njan Marykutty carefully ignores gender fluidity and the possibilities of other gender identifications within the ‘trans identity’. I shall now provide an overview of certain elements in the film that support cis heteronormative assumptions of femininity. Recurring reference to medical literature is a significant aspect here to endorse femininity in the trans person. Physical features, including the transformation from a low-pitched masculine voice to a high-pitched feminine one, is highlighted in the film as the character attributes her in-between voice to the ongoing hormone treatment. The gender affirmative healthcare in the narrative is phenomenal, and unlike earlier Malayalam films. However, this aspect also appears as an endorsement to the cis heteronormative imagination of femininity in Marykutty. Apparently, the film tries to blur the boundaries between trans femininity and cis femininity in various scenes. Marykutty is depicted as a feminine teacher, who is endearingly addressed as ‘Mary aunty’ by the children, and as a ‘female singer.’ With the help of technology, Marykutty’s in-between voice in the film is further made more ‘feminine’ post the recording of her song. This fact adds to the construction of cis heteronormative femininity, and the film, in this sense, dismisses trans femininity itself as a transition phase. Marykutty prefers to use the pronoun ‘she’ throughout the film, a trait that repeatedly accentuates her femininity. In a particular scene, a gazette officer denies Marykutty’s application for an identity card and harasses her using the words “neither man nor woman” (aanum pennum ketta). She retorts angrily: “I am also a woman like you, Madam (...) you do not know the value of a woman” (00:35:36–00:35:42). The act of claiming the feminine gender in this particular sequence reinforces the cis heteronormalcy rather than the transgender identity. The spectators are directed to an ambiguous understanding of transgender identity at this juncture. The transgender identity in the film veers away from the fluidity of gender performance when it conforms to the normative feminine body through physical appropriation and clothing. The promotional posters of the film also spotlight images of the sari-clad Marykutty as per the hetero-normal imagination. Since the majority of the spectators are cis heteronormative, these posters are designed to appeal to them. Marykutty is seen polishing her nails and her posture is carefully depicted as ‘feminine’. In another poster, she is playing football with a group of boys, but she has worn a sari instead of sports attire. Such stereotyped endorsement of cis femininity forms a pattern in all other

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posters. The tagline in the poster that announces the release of the film Njan Marykutty—“she is the woman from today” (innumuthalival ‘aanu’ pennu in Malayalam)—ironically endorses cis femininity (“Njan Marykutty Theatre List”).However, it is also to be noted that the stereotyped image of Malayali women with long hair is subverted in the image of Marykutty. Consequently, in its effort to visualize the transgender identity, the film moves back and forth from hetero-normative models of masculinity and femininity. The film is popularised as a genuine take on transgender identity, but these lapses in the portrayal appear as a conformation to normalising a trans body in terms of cis femininity, and the film thus thwarts its purpose of celebrating transgender identity.

Desirable Figures: Celebration, Objectification, and Marketisation of Transgender Bodies The popular support for the transgender lead character in the film is branded as a huge success saga by the media; however, it also makes the transgender identity as a product to be consumed. Following the release of the film, media reports on the lead actor visiting the legislative members in the state, his interaction with transgender people aired in news channels as entertainment programmes, and the launch of the trailers gained public attention. The film was released by five transwomen: makeup artist Renju Renjimar, IT professional Zara Sheikh, trans entrepreneur Thripthy Shetty, social activist Sheethal Shyam, and legal advisor Riya, at the Lulu Fashion Week held in Lulu Mall, Kochi (“Jayasurya’s”). The efforts to support the cause of transgender identity happens to be an endorsement for the heteronormative values of the gender performance when the surgically reappropriated body is celebrated, applauded, and marketized as an achievement in this way. It can also be observed that the transgender becomes a pleasurable visual spectacle and a desirable object in the public sphere with the advertisements regarding the film and its release. The movie was celebrated in a manner that made trans women in the state wish to realign their self in accordance with Marykutty’s character. The term ‘transgender’ became popular in the public sphere since its adoption in the state government-sponsored transgender survey in 2014, that aimed to officially acknowledge this segment of the populace. Following the survey, transgenders began to receive benefits and motivation from the authorities and the public. Trans women and feminine-presenting men were until then ridiculed in the local slang as Menaka, Penpoosu, and Chanthupottu among other derogatory terms. The despair of the

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transgender identity and the marginalization of the particular community, whose members were forced to either remain silent or migrate to transgender communities in other Indian states in search of identity and solace, are reminiscent of the transphobic treatment they received from society. The scenario is not better in the other states. Julia Kristeva’s notion of the ‘abject’ in contravention to the Lacanian concept of ‘object petita’ or ‘object of desire’ is worth mentioning here. The abject body refers to a threat to order—“what disturbs identity, system and orders”— and refuses to “respect borders, positions and rules”, whereas Lacan’s idea is of an object that evokes desire (qtd. in Felluga). Judith Butler also illustrates the tendency of the heteronormative society to disavow those who deviate from the mainstream—lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender people—and to relegate such people to the “domain of abject beings, those who are not yet subjects, but who form the constitutive outside of the subject” (Bodies That Matter 3). The film Njan Marykutty and the entertainment talk shows and interviews aired on TV channels are emblematic of the shifting perspectives in social attitudes; they tend to project transgender people as desirable objects (as in the Lacanian notion) from the earlier abject tagging in society. In the film, the paradoxical abjection and objectification is quite evident when the transgender identity of Marykutty is ridiculed and condemned by many. She is depicted as a sexual object and her body is desired by certain cis male characters in the film as they derive a voyeuristic sexual pleasure. There are two sequences in the film in which Marykutty’s advocate gazes at her buttocks as she turns and walks out of his room. She is further sexually objectified by a Sub-Inspector of Police also, who stares at her back and makes a sexist comment. In all these scenes, the camera acts as an apparatus that shares the voyeuristic pleasure with the spectators as they too visually consume the body of the trans woman. Laura Mulvey, in her essay titled, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1989), argued that the pleasure in looking has always been gendered. Her analysis of the ‘male gaze’ sees that the camera has active and passive roles that satisfy the spectator (14– 26). Assuming that the camera is a male apparatus, the gaze it provides becomes the ‘male gaze’, and the transgender’s body is fetishized as it evokes a scopophilic pleasure in the viewer. Thus, the feminized body of the trans person becomes a sensual object that fulfils the fantasies of the audience too. The sexual frustration of Malayali cis men is underlined as the cause for sexual violence against trans people in the state. Marykutty is molested in a bus and is violently disrobed by a group of men in a public space; the police who are supposed to protect her also sexually harass her and keep

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her imprisoned in the nude. It is pertinent to note that the two policemen derive a sadistic sexual pleasure from their heinous behaviour. The curiosity of the transphobic patriarchal cis heteronormative society on trans bodies is brutally exposed when they force her to exhibit her nudity at the police station: “Remove your clothes, let’s see how you have altered your body” (01:00:41–01:00:47). The film should also be critically analysed for its treatment of homosexuality. The heteronormalizing of the transgender identity incidentally becomes a ploy to mock queer desires. Though the sexual orientation of Marykutty is never voiced in the film, the queer undertones in the subtext are to be noted. The advocate whom Marykutty approaches for help makes sexual advances on her. However, he is made fun of by the public as “kundanvakkil” (gay advocate) when he accompanies Marykutty (00:12:23-00:12:25). ‘Kundan’ is a colloquial word used to refer to the homosexual culture in Malabar (Osella 538), and the slang signifies an effeminate or ‘soft-looking’ young male, who would play a potentially ‘passive’ role in a same-sex encounter. Kamala Das used this term repeatedly in Januamma Paranja Katha (2009), to refer to young men in such contexts in the Malabar region. Majorie Garber, in her analysis of bisexualities, observes that “eroticism and desire are always to some degree transgressive, politically incorrect” for heteronormative society (31) and that desires are structured and policed at individual and collective levels. The use of the slang ‘kundan’ stands against the film’s claim as the positive treatment of the non-normative gender identity and sexual desires. The word reiterates slapstick humour and spreads homophobia. When a queer is made fun of, it also stereotypes the trans person as a sexual object as transgender identity and same sex orientation are deviation from ‘normative’ social unconsciousness.

Conclusion A critical reading of the function of cinema as a medium of entertainment and public awareness creation about the marginalised segments of the population forms the crux of this paper. The construction and the representation of transgender identity in Njan Marykuttyis strictly under the confines of the hegemonic model of cis masculinity and femininity. The portrayal of the transgender person in the film as a medical entity is underpinned in the hetero-normalisation of the gender identity in its visualisation. It demarcates the film’s efforts to present the hitherto abject body of the transgender person as an object of desire and an appreciable

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figure through the image of the sari clad transwoman, who emerges as a successful figure. She stands tall as an icon of motivation for other transgender people and for the society that type casted them as aberration. Though the film could add momentum to the queer political activism in Kerala and acknowledge the visibility of transgender people in the state, the branding of the lead character as a normative model for transgender identities has many limitations in the text. The self-reference that Marykutty makes about her transsexual identity is not emphasised when it is celebrated as a transgender film. Yet, this film is phenomenal for its effort to undo the stigma on trans bodies.

A Note on the trans terminology used in this paper The terminology used in this paper has tried to adhere to the standard practice of reference, and they are constantly under revision in the emerging field of transgender studies and trans activism. Transgender & Cisgender: Transgender is an English term for people who do not identify or conform to the sex they were assigned at birth. It is used as a prefix or adjective derived from the Latin word meaning “across from” or “on the other side of.” Many consider trans/trans* to be the most inclusive and useful umbrella term. Cisgender is a term used to refer to people who prefer to use gender identity that conform with their assigned sex at birth. The term ‘cis’ presents an attempt to address social privilege and its otherwise unmarked position (Gottzen and Straube 223). Genderqueer: An identity commonly used by people who do not identify within the gender binary. Genderqueer person may identify as neither male nor female, may see themselves as outside of or in between the binary gender boxes, or may simply feel restricted by gender labels. Not everyone who identifies as genderqueer identifies as trans. Feminine Presenting; Masculine Presenting - (adj.) a way to describe someone who expresses gender in a more feminine or masculine way, for example in their hair style, demeanour, clothing choice, or style. Heteronormative/Heteronormativity: These terms refer to the assumption that heterosexuality is the norm, which plays out in interpersonal interactions, society at large, and furthers the marginalization of queer people.

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Trans woman/Trans man: Trans woman generally describes someone assigned male at birth who identifies as a woman. Trans man generally describes someone assigned female at birth who identifies as a man. These individuals may or may not actively identify as trans. [Source: “Trans Terminology”, foster-ed.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/TRANS-TERMINOLOGY.pdf]

Works Cited Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal, vol. 40, no. 4, 1988, pp. 519–31. —. Gender Trouble and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990. —. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. Routledge, 1993. Cris. “Njan Marykutty Review: Jayasurya Delivers His Career Best Performance.” The News Minute, 15 June 2018, www.thenewsminute.com/article/njan-marykutty-review-jaysuryadelivers-his-career-best-performance-83127. Accessed 14 Dec. 2018. Das, Kamala. Januvamma Paranja Katha. Current Books, 2009. Felluga, Dino. “Modules on Kristeva: On the Abject.” Introductory Guide to Critical Theory, www.purdue.edu/guidetotheory/psychoanalysis/kristevaabject.html. Accessed 14 Dec. 2018. Garber, Marjorie. Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life. 2000. Routledge, 2009. Gottzen, Lucas, and Wibke Straube. “Introduction: Trans Masculinities.” Norma International Journal of Masculinity Studies, vol. 11, no. 4, 2017, pp. 217–24, www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/18902138.2016.1262056. Accessed 21 Dec. 2018. “Jayasurya’s NjanMarykkutti Trailer Out.” The News Minute, 14 May 2018: www.thenewsminute.com/article/jayasuryas-njan-marykutty-trailerout-81261. Accessed 16 Dec. 2018. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Visual and Other Pleasures. Palgrave Macmillan, 1989, pp. 14–26. Nagarajan, Saraswathy. “Njan Marykutty Steps into the Mindscapes of Transpersons.” The Hindu, 1 June 2018, www.thehindu.com/entertainment/movies/ranjith-sankar-on-his-newfilm-njan-marykutty/article24045561.ece. Accessed 14 Dec. 2018. Njan Marykutty. Directed by Ranjith Sankar, performance by Jayasurya, Dreams N Beyond, 2018.

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“Njan Marykutty Theatre List.” 2018, www.topmovierankings.com/theatre-list/njan-marykutty-2018. Accessed 16 Dec. 2018. “Njan Marykutty: Transgenders Heart Touching Response after First Day First Show.” You Tube, uploaded by Koumudy, 15 June 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yzCxYJG31k. Accessed 18 Dec. 2018. Osella, Filipo. “Malabar Secrets: South Indian Muslim Men’s (Homo) Sociality across the Indian Ocean.” Asian Studies Review, vol. 36, 2012, pp. 531-49. Tharayil, Muraleedharan. “Shifting Paradigms: Gender and Sexuality Debates in Kerala.” Economic and Political Weekly, 2014, pp. 70-8. “Trans Terminology.” Foster-ed.org, foster-ed.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/TRANSTERMINOLOGY.pdf. Accessed 21 Mar. 2021. Whittle, Stephen, and Susan Stryker, editors. The Transgender Studies Reader.Routledge, 2006.

THE DIGITAL GAZE: UNVEILING THE TRANSITION OF GAZE IN THE DIGITAL ERA RAFSEENA M

The Historicity of Gaze The notion of gaze, which has been pervasive since the birth of humanity, rests upon the act of looking at someone or something, either discreetly or non-discreetly. An attempt to locate the notion of gaze in the academic discourse takes us to Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon model, which became a point of discussion in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Foucault’s observation served to address the form of surveillance in disciplined societies, which played upon the subjugation of the subjects in relation to the spatial configuration. However, it was Sartre, in Being and Nothingness, who provided a philosophical analysis of the concept of gaze (252). An oblique conceptual discussion on gaze could also be seen in the works of Freud that centred on the concept of desire and Lacan’s breath-taking psychoanalytic reading of the identification of the self through the famous formulation of the mirror stage in “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” (75). The concept of gaze gained a wider appeal with Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema” and the Male Gaze Theory, which primarily focused on the objectification of women in cinema (833). By way of perceiving what gaze represented in terms of its literary, social, cultural, philosophical, and psychological manifestations, it could be easily deduced that the problematics of gaze had been rather unidirectional.

The Normativity of Gaze The conceptual framework of the notion of gaze has been cemented in the dichotomous structure of the world, where race had been used as a tool of demarcation into being what is acceptable and what is unacceptable. The status quo, being fixed to perceive the white as the normal race by

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categorising all the others as the other of the normal, continued to maintain its power dynamics well into the modern times. The normative structure premised on whiteness as the decisive factor, however, turned out to be very dangerous. The binary of the superior and the inferior resulted in many destructive operations across the world. Another hard fact is that for decades, the interpretation of the normative gaze revolved around the male, the agency of power. Despite the ontological and physiological realities of the ways in which the nature of gaze has played in objectifying one or more groups based on the racial identity, the development of technology and other automated social spaces began to have a crucial role in designing and defining the nature of gaze. The gaze transcends the dichotomy of race or other constructed social realities. The burgeoning of the media and film industry became the space for the male gaze to be established as the normalized one. It also heightened the schism between the masculine power and the feminine subjugation. Mulvey’s critique of the male gaze in the ‘Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema’ context of the film industry appears to have initiated serious discussion on the social sanctioned objectification of women (20). John Berger et al., in Ways of Seeing, has rightly asserted thus: “We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice” (8). This proposition on the act of looking underwent a gigantic revision with the onset of the media platforms, which rather captured images through the high definition camera lens regulated by the directional team at work. Gaze has now surpassed the traditional definitions and is used to engage, modulate, and control the socio-cultural realizations of the present era. The turn of the twenty-first century not only announced a technological revolution through the launching of high end internet enabled gadgets but also made people all over the world to be redefined as netizens, who, at a single touch, could be an objectified subject of the digital age. Though the world has been read as patriarchal in essence, the virtual reality has turned the equations and status quo, thereby favouring a shift from the established order to a new order. However, addressing the problematic nature of surveillance in the postmodern era of CCTVs, microsatellites, GPS and smart technology, one is in the very system of digital surveillance and forced to change one’s subjectivity into that of a digitized self. This normalization process is so fast paced that the majority of netizens are unaware of being the objects of gaze every nano second. What seemed to be the greatest achievement of the human race in the form of the introduction of technology, however, could pose a major threat to the human race, though the nature of the danger has been successfully

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enveloped in the invisible cloak of visualising technology as a mere instrument. The digital identity of a person, which is apparently in a state of perpetual transition, makes the individual endure a multimodal existence, and caters to the specific nature of the particular digital space. As Steigler put it: “The protagonists get immersed into digital spaces and perceive their identities according to the rules of digital platforms” (12). In the new space offered by digital culture, the individual, in order to construct a mediated self or rather a digitised self, depending upon his experience of the digital world, opts to create different identities or avatars to endorse a substitutive reality. Multifarious profiles of an individual in diverse social media accounts point to the possibility of the construction of “different conscious self-models” (Steigler 38). What evolves in the process is that the individual willingly suspends his ontological reality and enters the space of virtual reality, which is at once admirable, acceptable, and commodifiable.

The Neo-Normal Gaze The contemporary era, which witnessed a burgeoning of multiple digital platforms, offered its viewers the opportunity of utilizing these virtual spaces at their convenience. This new accessibility opened up the vistas for a new modus operandi, where netizens could decide when their screen time should go active. The flexibility offered the viewers a freedom, which lured more and more viewership, thereby increasing the TRP (Television Rating Point) of the shows broadcast through such virtual platforms. The small screen industry too shifted its space to the customized platform enabled with app purchases, which led to an outbreak of (Over the Top) OTTs in the technologized world. The leap of the microworld of social media and parallel commercial channels on the worldwide web to a decisive stakeholder in the techno world happened within a matter of a few decades. Herein lies the essence of the shift—the transition occurred not merely in the mode of viewership or the platform of operation. The shift is in the power, which is not unidirectional; it now oscillates between the agency and the agent, between the ontological self and the digital self. The shift, whose functionality is discreet, rests on the notion of who the onlooker is and the one being looked at. The digital ‘I’ carries a greater symbolic power since the new digi-self is very much decisive and transformative in the realm of humanities.

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The OTTs, with their web series of different nationalities, has played an enormous role in making the digital gaze the most acceptable normal truth of the times. The new screen culture that got a boost with the user friendly app, such as YouTube, began to offer recommendations to viewers, based on their choices; it also led to the creation of mediated realities, and alternate and parallel worlds to live in. “In the last decades, digital technologies have established a range of semantic units to communicate, which ultimately are “a filter to all culture, a form through which all kinds of cultural and artistic production is being mediated” (Steigler 94–95). One perceives the formation and exchange of transnationalism in a much wider manner, with the digital platforms now taking charge of intercultural communication and the subsequent exchange of ideas.

The Neo-Normal Gaze and OTTs A perfunctory study of a few randomly selected medical, family, adventure, and Chinese fantasy dramas aired through some of the popular OTTs (now available on Netflix) would help us to locate the relevance of digital gaze in defining the new media. For the purpose of this study, the South Korean TV Series Dr. Romantic (2016-2020) and Doctor John (2019), have been analysed to understand how the virtual world has simulated itself into the senses of the viewers. The novelty and mass appeal of these highly-rated TV series force us to go beyond what has been made visible and, to ascertain how the digital gaze has become the power analogue of the contemporary times. Dr. Romantic is a two-season South Korean medical drama telecast between 2016 and 2020, as Dr. Romantic 1 and Dr. Romantic 2. It focuses on Dr. Boo Yong Joo (Teacher Kim), a triple-board certified surgeon at Geosan University, one of the top medical schools in Seoul. A very skilled and efficient doctor, Dr. Boo Yong Joo was forced to leave the university, and, unknown to his enemies, practise at Doldam hospital as Dr. Kim Sa Bu, the chief surgeon. There he trains young doctors to be more dedicated to their profession. Dr. Kim Sa Bu, along with the other staff at the hospital, never failed to treat patients in emergency situations. Though the authorities at Geosan University held a grudge against Dr. Kim Sa Bu and tried to defeat him in many ways, the optimistic nature of Dr. Kim Sa Bu and his colleagues made them overcome all obstacles. What is interesting about this South Korean Medical drama is the way in which the daily activities in the ER of Doldam Hospital are captured, along with the strenuous routine of dedicated doctors.

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Doctor John, another South Korean medical drama aired in 2019, deals with euthanasia, one of the most controversial topics of all times. The story revolves around Dr. John, the youngest professor in anaesthesiology, who was sentenced to imprisonment for three years as he had performed euthanasia to a dying patient. Dr. John, after serving his term in prison, joins service as the head of the Pain Management Team at Hanse Hospital. Known as Dr. Ten Seconds, Dr. John, who specializes in pain medicine, is revealed to be a Congenital Insensitivity to Pain with Anhidrosis (CIPA) patient; he cannot realize pain himself but is a genius in diagnosing the disease and getting to its root cause. What makes this medical drama unique is the way in which euthanasia is discussed and brought forth. It is very difficult for a common man to know the intricacies of the procedure and its related medical ethics. However, the drama has touched upon this highly sensitive topic to offer crucial information to the public, which is very essential in an age when data and information available online can be misleading and moulded as per vested interests in many respects. Analysing these medical dramas from the perspective of a layman would easily help us to decipher how the digital gaze works. Foremost, without these artistic pursuits, the daily intricacies involved with issues related to pain, trauma, health, safety, and medical care would remain a mystery to the relatively uninformed public. Though the visualization of what happens inside the medical world may seem unethical and against the medical law and practices, these dramas have enabled the audience to make an attempt to understand the seriousness involved with such decisions. Subsequently, they uphold the message that humanity must be respected at all costs, even in dire situations. The South Korean TV series, which is very popular among the youth across the globe, has a big fan base. Apart from being thrillers, these dramas allow the audience to mediate their gaze according to their personal choices. The recommendations of shows to subscribers in the digital space of Netflix, Amazon Prime, and so on enable users to exert their choices in a hazzle-free manner. What has to be realized is that such recommendations are the products of the digital gaze, which functions in a two way mode, where the interface of the user is tracked to generate recommendations. The subscriber accepts such interface recommendations as normal, and hence, the digital gaze is then directed upon the audience. While the individual is gazing at something, the digital gaze is directing its gaze upon the individual, thereby making the gaze quite legitimate (Awobadejo 1).

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Speaking of the reception of the normativity of digital gaze, one has to acknowledge the reality that it entails an unconditional surrender of culture to technology. The subject position, which human beings have enjoyed for long, drastically changed to that of being an object; man has become ‘the tool of our own tool’ (Steigler 25). Facebook and Instagram are the best examples of how the digital space can regulate and modulate the private as well as the public space of an individual, the equation here being the productive and counterproductive amalgamation of the social and cultural realities of the person with the technology-aided life. Real life emotions and experiences getting exchanged and replaced with digitized mode of experiences, and sharing of coded information is the new order of the day. Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and other such social-networking apps have stretched their octopian hold over human lives to the extent of deciding how the identity of an individual gets defined—it rests now on how many digital IDs the person has linked to his name. The immersive experience of the individual in the digital mode thus offers a better view of the possibility of the multimodal existence of digital selves. What counts more is the virtuality of the individual than his corporeal existence. The digital ‘I’, which evolved as a virtual representation of the individual, has also led to the construction of an audience that is invested with the power to look and judge what it watches on the digital space. The audience is simultaneously the subject as well as the object of the gaze. This situation leads one to look at the role of the fourth wall in the digital space—the digital space is in itself the fourth wall. The concept of the fourth wall was first used in theatrical performances, where it is believed that an imaginary wall exists between the audience and the actors on the stage, thereby separating the audience from the stage. The impression is further heightened with the actors pretending not to see and hear the audience while the play is in motion. With the breaking of the fourth wall, the audience can communicate with the actors on the stage, which indicates that the audience is accepted and acknowledged by the actors. By enjoying the notion of being the subject and the object simultaneously, is the audience empowered to break the fourth wall? Does the digital gaze allow the audience to transcend the space of the fourth wall? If so, where does the fourth wall cease to exist and what remains/persists after the rupture? The myth of the fourth wall in the digital space seems to undergo a rupture. The special status of being the subject and the object simultaneously allows the audience to decide upon what information related to an individual should go public and what should be kept as private. The option to make

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one’s social account private or public on Facebook and Insta, as well as granting permission or blocking other users in one’s social account, may appear to be a matter of choice. However, the choice bestowed upon the individual makes the person the designer of the digital image. Here, the inevitable act of breaking the fourth wall occurs since the individual has his story represented in a way that he or she wants the readers/audience to know, which is subjected to the analysis and judgment of the audience. Aishwarya Rai Bachchan’s Instagram account, which has over 9.5 million followers, (where the actress is seen to be following the Instagram account of her husband alone) reveals that the digital space in which she is active can be viewed by others, but the actress has customized her account to suit her preference. The fourth wall offered by the digital space of Instagram has been customized according to the user’s choice, thereby decoding the myth of the fourth wall itself. Moving on to the interface mode of the digital space, where the distinction between the subjective and objective gazes is no longer relevant, it could be said that the rise of the digital gaze as a neutral one can be counted as revolutionary. The revolutionary nature assigned to the digital gaze rests on the notion that each individual is endowed with the agency of power. Hence, there is no linear or designated system of narrative assigned to a particular event or text, which allows the individual to move beyond the restraints of the socio-cultural or gender specific identifications. The time has passed when gaze was equated along the lines of gender or the agencies of power. More than being ‘his’ gaze or ‘her’ gaze, the digital gaze, to which I would prefer to assign a neutral value, surpasses the contours of being subjective or objective. It could even be said that the digital gaze encapsulates both the subjective and the objective natures of gaze within its paraphernalia; it is this catalytic nature of the digital gaze that makes it more appropriable, adaptable, acceptable, and even feasible. While the digital world offers an immense scope of techno-development and restructuring of the world beyond the ontological limitations of the human world, there is a different side to the digital reality about which we willingly suspend our belief, at least for the time being. “It enables us to see others watching us, to become objects of consumption – to be immaterial digital commodities, to be commodified” (Ibrahim 1). What we bring upon ourselves is a commodification of our selves at the cost of satiating our own desires. Selfie culture is one of the best choices to testify how technology has manipulated the narcissistic tendencies of an individual to maintain one’s techno-existence in the digi-world. “While the self captures the world and posts it to others, the self itself is being

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captured and codified” (Ibrahim 8). It is the new normal, and hence, the acceptable version of the present reality. The Insta stories of the Indian cricketer Virat Kohli, who has 133 million followers, and Bollywood celebrities, such as Priyanka Chopra with 65.3 million followers and Shraddha Kapoor with 63 million followers, reveal how the digital space has been used to promote and market one’s popularity, thereby maintaining the digi-narcissistic version of their self. According to the data provided by Karl in “The 15 Biggest Social Media Sites and Apps (2021),” Facebook tops the chart with 2.74 billion active users, followed by YouTube with 2.291 billion active users, WhatsApp with 2 billion active users, Facebook Messenger with 1.3 billion active users, and Instagram with 1.221 billion active users. These accounts, likewise, clearly show that a digital presence is the order of the times. Any discussion on the evolving space of the digital world is incomplete without looking into its contribution to uphold the humanitarian cause. The world is designed not to be self-centred alone. At times of crisis, these digital spaces have been used effectively to lend help to the needy in the most appropriate manner. The images of floods in Kerala exemplify how the digital gaze of the social media platforms had been used to communicate as well as provide immediate help and care to those who had been hit hard by the natural calamity (FE Online). Another act that validates the existence of humanity occurred when generous netizens joined hands to collect Rs. 18 crores by crowdfunding to save the life of a small boy with spinal muscular atrophy, a rare genetic disorder (Raghunath). The reach of these digital platforms in moments of crisis in different parts of the globe establishes that the digital gaze can persuade the world to be more humanitarian in its activities. Nevertheless, it would be inaccurate to assert that the digital space and its accompanying gaze have only positive outputs. What remains unaddressed is the myriad forms of exploitation and victimisation that the digital space has never been able to actively resolve. It has neither been able to nullify or lessen the intensity and frequency of incidents, such as attacking an individual on grounds of religious, political, cultural or social affinities. The digital ‘I’ has been unable to curb the disparity between the rich and the poor as well. While the digital space has allowed the gaze to transcend its definition solely along the lines of the status of the audience, to the point of permitting them to exercise their agency in being the subject and the object at the same time, the changing dimensions of the present realities of the

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world forces one to doubt. Has the digital gaze allowed human beings to have a better life? Though a neutral position is what the digital gaze would want to be attached as its signifier, the question that looms large in the background is how far the digital space has been into addressing the safety of women in its coded world. The queries related to gender construct have not been addressed in this paper since gender discrimination is a much debated topic. The time to identify and address the new social construct in the neo-normal condition has arrived when the flow of the world is towards the construction of the digitised self.

The Future of Gaze To be looked and looked upon is a never-ending process. The unprecedented rise of the virtual space has undoubtedly been instrumental in bringing about revolutionary changes in the way the world has been perceived. The new space of operation via the digital medium is a challenge in itself. However, the new space which enabled the human world to think beyond the binaries can be liberative as the digital gaze announces the sense of freedom and transformation to create better living spaces. The presence of the digital gaze announces the breaking of the fourth wall of the digital space. This development encapsulates the crux of all that technology stands for.

Works Cited Awobadejo, Adesewa. “Social Media and the Digital Gaze.” The University Observer, 28 Nov. 2019, universityobserver.ie/socialmedia-and-the-digital-gaze/. Accessed 21 Sept. 2021. Bentham, Jeremy. The Panopticon Writings, edited byMiran Bozovic, Verso Books, 1995. Berger, John, et al. Ways of Seeing. BBC Enterprises, 1972. FE Online. “Kerala Floods 2019 Updates: Over 100 Killed, 59 Missing; Heavy Rains Predicted Tomorrow.” 4 Aug. 2019, www.financialexpress.com/india-news/kerala-flood-2019-latest-newsimages-videos-karnataka-rains-live-updates-wayanad-landslide-rahulgandhi/1672356/. Accessed 10 Sept. 2021. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Pantheon Books, 1977, pp. 410–416. Freud, Sigmund, et al. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Hogarth Press and the Institute of PsychoAnalysis, 1953.

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Ibrahim, Yasmin. The Politics of Gaze: The Image Economy Online. Routledge, 2021, pp. 1–132. Karl. “The 15 Biggest Social Media Sites and Apps (2021).” Social Media Marketing, 13 Aug. 2021, www.dreamgrow.com/top-15-most-popularsocial-networking-sites/. Accessed 10 Sept. 2021. Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” Écrits: A Selection. Norton, 1977, pp. 75–81. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, Oxford UP, 1999, pp. 833–834. Raghunath, Arjun. “Rs 18 Crore Raised Through Crowdfunding for Kerala Boy’s Treatment.” Deccan Herald, 17 Aug. 2021, www.deccanherald.com/national/south/rs-18-crore-raised-throughcrowdfunding-for-kerala-boys-treatment-1005280.html. Accessed 20 Jan. 2021. Sartre, Jean- Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Washington Square Press, 1966, pp. 252–302. Steigler, Christian. The 360° Gaze: Immersions in Media, Society, and Culture. The MIT P, 2021, pp.

VISUAL DISCOURSES OF TRANSFORMATIVE PERFORMATIVITY: READING WOMEN’S ART INSTALLATIONS SAJAN N

On retrospectively looking into the oeuvre of the installations of the women artists of the twenty-first century in India, it could be discerned that they engaged themselves in a transformative performativity by using a new kitsch of media that comprised videography, performance, painting, photography, and sculpture. Since the 1990s, India has become largely globalised and the reality that posed unprecedented issues before the people emanated mainly out of issues of class, migration, and volatility in South and West Asia. Gayatri Sinha, in her introduction to the anthology of essays and interviews with contemporary artists entitled Voices of Change: 20 Indian Artists, avers that the exhibition of Indian artists, entitled The Empire Strikes Back held at Saatchi Gallery, London in 2010, brought to the foreground Indian artists who shared hues and frames of South Asia resonant with postcolonial retaliatory gesticulations (8). The Indian artists simultaneously shed their postcolonial identity and got assimilated into the non-hierarchical domains of postmodernity. Since the dawn of the new millennium, Asian nations were ascendant with new forms and political equations and Indian art has been distinctively located within a network of new global cultural exchanges and interfaces. The Empire Strikes Back thus marks a transformation in the diachrony of post-independence artistic engagements with socio-political reality. This exhibition was a prominent landmark in bringing to the fore the installations of women, who belonged to the contemporary generation of Indian artists. The event went on to definitively effect a transformation of the paradigms of Indian art in the domains of western art. Four women artists—Jayashree Chakraborty, Anita Dube, Anju Dodiya, and Bharti Kher—are selected for close analysis here as they share common grounds and contexts of the Asian Postmodern, with their new performative paradigms of artistic expression. They stand as interpreters of contemporary urban culture and urban realities in India. Their modes of expression and media were potent

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enough to critique modernism with their feminine fear and desire. Gayatri Sinha holds that the presence of such Indian artists at the Asia Pacific Triennale since 2000 has resulted in south-south participation at the Havana, Gwangju, and Fukuoka Art Triennale (9). This presence led to the emergence of shared contexts of the Asian Postmodern, which had transformative themes, such as identity formation and dissolution, the place of tradition within rapidly changing societies, the issue of religion and spirituality, the role of women in society, and also the myriad social and political concerns that reflect everyday reality. As Sinha comments on the post globalisation scenario, “the city as consumer/marauder and safe haven in time of global expansion came to share new media’s instrumentality in evoking polyvalent images and voices” (9). In Bollywood, the pop cultures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and myths were re-cast and re-appropriated to frame the happenings in contemporary polity. The domain of visual culture found enough transgressive space to subvert the past in the context of the present. The experience of various forms of violence in the socio-political milieu gave sufficient material input to the artists of the younger generation to explore and resort to innovative methods of representation. The younger generation of artists was faced with “the altered experience of violence as a national universal paradigm” (Sinha 10). The 1990s witnessed the assassination of the Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi; the terror and armed conflict against the state machinery in Punjab and Kashmir; the demolition of Babri Masjid; communal violence at Godhra; and sporadic killings by radical Maoists. All these incidents have made violence internal and endemic a part of the definition of nation and statehood. In the immediate neighbourhood, the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and the acts of terror in Pakistan have all been viewed on either desktop or mobile devices. Sudden explosive violence has become a staple news item in the public domain and has also made its way into the registers of visual and installation arts. An altogether new performativity became necessary for the re-working of external landscape as personal or psychological narratives. The artists were working in the visible spaces under the surveillance of the media and also within the thought frames of critical theory. The enormity of the compelling transformations in the humanities, with the emergence of hybrid sciences, such as Tectronics, Mnemonics, and Culturonics, have prompted writers and artists to take up this challenge by deploying pluralistic strategies of representation of the socio-political issues in the post-anthropocene era, that perceivably began in India in the twenty-first

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century. Paul Grutzen coined the term “anthropocene” to designate the contemporary geological period that had followed the anthropomorph (Epstein 18). At present, the word is problematised at all the major deliberations on natural disasters as repercussions of human activities on the environment. The anthropocene era has ushered in several other terms to conceptualise the complex catastrophic realities that have been erupting in various parts of the globe. One such prominent term identified by Mikhail Epstein is “Proteism.” The term is derived from its Greek root “proto-” which means “the first”, and paradoxically, Protest describes not a pre-historic reality but the existential condition of the new millennium. The term “proto” signifies a consciousness of the reality that we exist in the early phase of an unknown civilization, which has chanced upon a secret source of power and knowledge that can annihilate humanity on the earth. In his manifesto of Transformative Humanities, Mikhail Epstein sums up the proteic paradox as “a field of self-consciousness and a dramatic sensitivity to the new as immediately becoming “the old” in the face of the future. Proteic humans perceive themselves as remote prototypes of some unknown future, and …. is an elegiac optimism that in the birth of new things foresees their demise” (33). This kind of a proteic reality determines the performativity in the artists’ installations analysed in the article. There is a shift from the multi-cultural to the transcultural happenings, and this transition is well reflected in the new performative visual strategies adopted by the major women installation artists in the country. Jayashree Chakraborty’s untitled landscapes are non-conventional and figuratively enmeshed with narratives rooted in “time and space” (Dutta 36). She has an intellectual pre-occupation with nature, which germinated in her right from her childhood spent at Agartala in Tripura. She got acquainted with post-independence narrative art from Baroda, which was more of a transitional space between Agartala, Shantiniketan, and Provence in France. Through her interface with post World War II American abstract art at Baroda, she attempted to apply the visual syntax of abstraction. Most of her abstractions were the landscapes of childhood where she cast herself as a subject intervening in the natural spaces. Her hazy visual images on canvas with acrylic and oil paint are mostly untitled and are redundant with metaphors of her desire to re-invent the sites she had moved out of following the constraints of adult life to be in new urban spaces. Every time Chakraborty shifted from one place to another, her idea of home shifted correspondingly, and her own self got merged into her visual spaces. She pasted strips of paper with painted areas one on top of the other and her canvasses were installed paper works. Her major

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painterly works are illustrated and elaborated upon by Adip Dutta in the article entitled “Landscape in Time and Space” (37–46). Splashes, drips, spatters, and fluid colours build up cartographic visuals of the habitats experienced long ago in the past. There are imprints of palms and fingers merge with dots, dashes, broken lines, and blobs of colours. Chakraborty candidly states that her “choice of organic materials is reflective of a deep sensitivity to nature and its vagaries while calling out to the audience to observe, heal, preserve this collective legacy” (28). Her pictorial practice amplifies questions and resolutions about connectedness and material memories: “What is form and non-form? And how is the artist present and absent at the same time? As parts of this worldly mosaic, we are all special but we are inter-dependent as well” (Mahajan 72). Vague signs of life collide, overlap, and erase the earlier spontaneous figures, and bring about a gestalt of idiosyncratic and irrational juxtapositions submerged in a chaos of personal metaphors. The turmoil of the psyche is etched out on canvas at deeper layers beneath the surface of clashing forms and patterns. Chakraborty uses her canvas surface on its multivalent planes and goes on to excavate her dark memories from within a turbulent self. She does not want to get cooped up in the imprisoning cocoon of domesticity and visualises that “women are indeed closer to nature than men, and bring more nurturing values to relationships between people, and between the people and “nonhuman” nature” (Agarwal, Bina 53). Nevertheless, outwardly, the turmoil is muted by a calmness prevailing on the surfaces of her automatic drawings. Chakraborty’s images of the past are signposts that point towards the present travails of her life. Adip Dutta observes that her paintings direct “the viewer to the most essential idea of visiting and re-visiting one’s own past from the standpoint of the present” (39). The problems of migration, the idea of home, ecology, and habitat are addressed, and there are echoes of her political voice flowing through the sketches and figures. Her human forms bear signs of her own consciousness about the anthropocene world of the 1990s. The human and non-human figures reflect the myriad channels of relationships, clashes, and reconciliations between the objective and non-objective forms. The huge human head spread over a chaotic milieu is an intimation of the solitary subject caught in a web of experiences and memories of a strange urban chaos. She narrates the ambivalent interface between the natural and cultural domains of the late twentieth century world. In her conversation with Adip Dutta, she says that she looks “at the world -the habitat in a process of constant movement- and though the approach is like that of a natural scientist the

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artistic intervention makes the presentation subtly reflective of a sense of loss” (47). Here the personal merges largely into the collective and the global as well. Jayashree’s aquatic creatures, such as fish, snail, and snake are localised inhabitants of the Salt Lake of Kolkata, which became her home later. She is greatly bothered by the displacement of the habitats of the natural creatures by the intervention of the anthropocene subjects. She reveals that her “practice is to excavate deep below the layers of time to establish a connection with the past and make its relevance felt in the present” (qtd. in Dutta 47). Anita Dube’s installations overlap into the multiple media of photography, videography, performance, and site-specific erections. Her aesthetic strategy is characterised by the juxtapositioning of materials of mutually contradicting properties, such as the pairing of the hard with the soft, the natural with the handcrafted, and the organic with the non-organic. Simultaneously, she examines the binary terrains of harmony/disharmony, presence/absence, inner/outer, and abstract/concrete. Dube introspects herself as the lover, who is analogous to a sieve experiencing the phenomenological and historical aspects of the world. The installation of a red human heart with spokes, entitled Anthem, 1994-95, is done as a synthesis of wood and metal, which creates nuances of violence rampant in the air in contemporary times (Dewan 89). In Blood Wedding, Dube uses skeleton and covers it with red velvet embellished with lace and beads, which, in fact, are components made from the body and for the body (Dewan 91). Dube explains that she “decided to work with five words—“waste,” “woman,” “wisdom,” “wound,” and “war”—exploring them through different materials, different scales, and different kinds of placement” (qtd. in Dewan 99). The blood in her schema functions retroactively both as a contaminating and cleansing agent; the red colour is auspicious as well as profane, and ushers in nuances of lesbian marriage, or rather, incestuous relationships. The artist crosses the boundaries between the body and the conceptual by using thirteen multiple materials. The installation Intimations of Mortality, done with ceramic beads arranged on a wall in a vaginal shape, have infinite eyes that look back at the onlooker from their collective existence (Dewan 90). Dube intends each eye as representing a single person, and collectively they constitute a mob, or rather, the migrants who were forced out of their homelands by violence, civil war, or by their urge for material prosperity. They have been forced to migrate from rural to urban spaces or across national boundaries. The eyes are chimeric as they appear to disappear into the corner; sometimes, they virtually emerge out of the walls to create the effect of something alive and in motion. They contain within themselves

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the psychological condition of migration as they diffuse into the walls of their home, dissolving the surfaces of the concrete walls, and anthropomorphise or even go to sexualise the inanimate wall as a fertile pubic space. In Sea Creature, Dube transforms her own body as a canvas and uses it as a sculpture by fixing ceramic eyes all around (Dewan 92). Her body becomes all eyes and awakens into a state of new being. In Soap/Lick from the series Wayside Deities, she takes out a vituperative critique of religious fundamentalism using pedestrian materials, including ceramic sanitary wares, toilet drain pipes, and bathroom fixtures covered in saffron velvet (Dewan 93). The work Soap has a take on hypermasculinity and religious conservatism that rule the roost in contemporary Indian politics (Dewan 94). The installation features seven glazed, wallmounted, vulva-shaped soap dishes covered in saffron velvet pierced through with the phallic metal trident. Sanitary wares are suggestive of cleansing and religious purity; at the same time, they bring together the idea of pollution. The profane and the sacred are brought together into play when the erect trident of male linga and female yoni join aesthetically for a cosmic union as found in Indian tantric art. The work critiques contemporary politics, which has appropriated and vulgarised the philosophic concept of cosmic reality and made it into a travesty. Dube’s sacramental objects interrogate the collective madness adopted in the name of religion, which has degenerated from spiritual sublimity to totalitarian aggression against singularities in a pluralistic society. Kissa-e-Noor Mohammed from the Garam Hawah series is a masquerade photo installation of her own self, where Dube inverts her gender identity by showcasing her bodily self as a drag male Muslim. She harnesses her body as a sculpture to question socially imposed categorisations, such as gender, sexuality, class, caste, and religion (Dewan 95). Further, in Keywords: Exploring the Movement from the series Body to Movement, she cuts letters out of raw, boneless beef and creates phrases, such as “sexual love”, “about ethics”, and “permanent revolution” (Dewan 97). The meat block letters are then installed on ice blocks and placed in a room, and they explore the transformation from body to concept. The flesh becomes the word in a sort of artistic transubstantiation and then explores how ideology shades culture. The fissures of meaning happen on the level of the performative, where the same word melts into different meanings for different individuals. Anju Dodiya’s female subject masquerades as a conquistador as well as cartographer; it also appears as a cloud hunter and sword maker. The images of sword, key, rose, and stag dominate her visual diction. Dodiya’s

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preoccupation is with female being and female desire; she does not affiliate herself to any active feminism and then critique the male gaze. Her candour is found in her casts of the female self with all its tenderness, vulnerability, and fallibility. She blackens her female images with charcoal dust to expose the dangers of the eerie aspects of the subjects. The images in Dodiya’s frames have planes of vision disturbed by tormenting landscapes with burnt or gouged features. The artist achieves a visceral materiality with stuffed up mattresses hung like pregnant sculptural forms on the wall, and she gets into her frames to perform acts of remorseless cruelty in alternation with the desire for limitless freedoms. The massive installation entitled Throne of Frost is set at Durbar Hall of Laxmi Vilas Palace in the city of Baroda, where it presents a larger-than-life palace of jigsaw puzzle of narrative shreds. It opens up a narrational collage of mirrored reflections with a visual cacophony of paintings, window glasses, and chandeliers (Adajania, “Anju”169). The throne of frost fetishistically seats a fairy queen, who could be the personification of the greed for material wealth, and the interiors critique the culture of consumption and detachment of human life from its natural habitat and rhythms of life. A lavish piling up of hybrid objects of opulent luxury is done so much so that the artist wants the visitor to run away from the cloying visuality of the materialistic embellishments of life. As far as Dodiya is concerned, painting is a sort of masochistic sublime that tortures her self when she self-reflexively confesses: “Painting is very cruel to me, I know this sounds romantic, but it isn’t a choice, it is a curse” (qtd. in Adajania, “Anju” 161). Her art works stage masques, exchange robes, and enter/exit dream zones of erotic fantasies. Leda is a multi-media installation, where the Leda of the contemporary times is positioned with childlike caprice and sexual arousal (Adajania, “Anju” 159). The body of the girl is tinged with expressions that cross beyond her age and she is no easy prey to be ravished away by Zeus, who waits, disguised in wings. Through the transparent screen that unfolds above Leda, she sees the image of her hyperbolic fantasy, a symbolic phallus in blue light. The artist considers this installation as a postmodern sculpture, where Leda appears as a feminine subject, wise and alert to an unpredictable sexuality that could not be completely configured. Leda critiques the onlooker’s notions and assumptions about female urges and sexual inhibitions. Dodiya arouses the viewer with expectations but soon distances him/her from entering into the inner self off the subject. In The Stumble, the adolescent girl falls down and is caught in a stasis with her short skirt flying up, exposing her thighs and under garments, but she maintains her calm poise, like a doll (Adajania, “Anju” 160). The discomfort of having her vulnerable body

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parts exposed does not disturb her ease as she is juxtaposed alongside the pomegranate sofa with hints of fleshy breasts. In Maze of Slowness, the snail is the subject signifying the inevitable passage of time as it leaves its trail of its slime and droppings in the protagonist’s face (Adajania, “Anju” 164). The droppings resemble jewels on the human body or the gem-like fruit of pomegranate. There are two forces acting in Dodiya’s paintings—the centrifugal force, which reaches out into the diversity of archival sources, sensuous stimuli and aesthetic investments, and the centripetal force, which draws everything into oneself. The artist presents a series of approximations of a selfhood that goes fluid, auto-destabilising and seductively appealing. Adajania thinks that Dodiya has a “constant need to stage a masque, to change and exchange robes, to enter and exit chambers of dream, performing an erotics of dissembling in which the chief gesture is not exposure, but instead, new ways of dressing the self” (“Anju” 161). Bharti Kher’s art installations nurture darkness and even go on to release it upon the face of the viewer. They evolve from darkness to normality and, more often, erupt with jolting images with a wild energy. Kher opens up perspectives that give birth to monstrous forms of the human self. In Kher’s world, the domestic objects seem to be possessed with daemonic spirits. There are the disturbing spectacles of a snarling vacuum cleaner with blood thirsty urge; the porcelain tea set infected with teeth and hair; and a cat woman brandishing her feather duster as a hunter on the prowl. Kher’s visual idiom strongly resonates with images of Horrorism, which, according to Mikhail Epstein, is “the state of a civilization in fear of itself because any of its achievements can become a weapon for its own destruction. Even white powder and nail files can be perceived as a potential threat” (177). Kher uses a wide range of media, such as painting, sculpture, video, and photography in her monstrous illustrations of the life of a woman domesticated to slog inside the kitchen. She inducts into her pastiche of human/animal forms elements of the strange, the alien, and the foreign, and this choice could very well be because of her nurturing in England and later getting settled with her artist husband Subodh Gupta in Delhi. The artist is seriously pre-occupied with the global level transformations happening in the age of the anthropocene. In an engaging conversation, Donna Haraway expresses her view to Martha Kenny, about the contemporary destructive world of the anthropocene/capitalocene in categorical terms: “We live and die in a time of permanent war, multi-

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species surplus killings, and genocides” (Davis 256). In the context of such a gruesome juncture of social life, Kher must have had her culture shock on seeing the life of the educated middle class women within the familial surroundings in India. Her artistic portrayal of the hybrid self could be the reflection of her own intercultural experience of a threshold persona, one who can come and go between cultures and yet never feel at home in either India or UK. In the 2004 series entitled Imposter, the human forms are morphed into, or rather, possessed by monstrous gorillas and chimpanzees and these works interrogate the identity of the human subject (Adajania, “Bharti” 232-33). The artist de-anthropizes the non-human into her frames, which portray the animal self with the human subject. Her visual frames question the supremacy of humankind over the animal species wherein we find animality as a visual trope that opens up problematic ethical, scientific, and anthropological perspectives on human understanding about life and nature. Significantly enough, she is also is able to liberate “the non-human (‘nature’) from the anthropogenic gaze” (Agarwal, Ravi 47). The nonhuman subjects in Feather Duster and Angel from the Hybrid series convey the idea that human society is inescapably trapped within a web of power structures (Adajania, “Bharti” 228-29). The mutant characters, humanoids, and chimeras pulsate with aggression, sex, and hunger as the working of instinctual self. Kher is seized of the ontological reality that the human body “itself is the embodied self” and it is “selfness, rather than bodiless, that cannot be objectified because it belongs to the irrevocably subjective experience” (Epstein 210). Kher’s works problematise the unresolvable conflict between the primitive self and the embellishments of civilisation. She lashes out at the facade of human civilisation with a well-crafted aesthetic of ugliness. When Kher arrived in India, she had to build up new performative metaphors in her visual taxonomy as she found the culture of her native land to be punctuated with unspoken codes of inclusion/exclusion and acceptance/rejection. Kher has a deep fascination for the unspeakable and the horrifying elements within the human subject and her half human-half ape creations can best be put into perspective by the concept of Horrology, “which explores civilization as a system of traps and self-exploding devices, making humankind a hostage of its own creations” (Epstein 173). The Girl with the Hairy Lip Said No, 2004, portrays a young ape-girl carrying a cup and saucer for the bride-seeking man (Adajania, “Bharti” 235). Her hybrid identity dissolves the distinction between the animal and

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the human; this character is not there to fulfil male fantasies. In Arione, 2004, the female with naked breasts carries a tray of strawberry muffins and she is placed as a domestic being in a cast of wilderness (Adajania, “Bharti” 230). Adajania looks upon Bharti Kher’s monstrous humanoids and highlights her “gift for hacking through hypocrisy to hurl an aesthetic of ugliness” as the “fruit of a holistic engagement with art as well as society” (230). Most of Kher’s installations are the outcome of globalisation, inter-religious conflicts, the dissolution of multi-religious inclusiveness, and the sociological issues of violence, sex, and hunger. Bindis, which form an inevitable part of Indian life and culture, are profusely used to have a resting mammoth elephant inside the drawing room in the installation The Skin that Speaks the Language not its Own (Adajania, “Bharti” 239). Bindis, which are minuscule in dimension, are used here to animate the dialectic between the strange and the familiar. The performative metaphor of the elephant in the room transcends to become a grotesque reality from which the contemporary generation of humanity has no escape. The mountainous grotesquerie also provokes a sort of socio-anthropological perspective on the invincibility of the female species despite being exploitatively treated in social and domestic domains of life. The proteistic performativity of these four artists is characterised by their preoccupation towards the microscopic litotes and nano objects that help them delve into the constitutive micro-atoms of human reality. Again, a major commonality of their vision is that they penetrate deeper into the micro reality of everyday life and its spatio-temporal aspects. There is a marked miniaturization of all objects as they focalise upon the physical universe of civilisation and its malcontents. They portray a large world by insightfully coursing towards its micro-entities. These artists present a “visual alternative, standing alongside news and media reports, cinema, and popular representations of events shaping Indian history” (Sinha 21). Their installations explore the extra-linguistic, sub-semiotic singularities, which have been overseen by societies in favour of the externality of the material world. They develop a new performative diction to perceive realm of animate and inanimate beings, and also introspect the non-verbal terrain of trans-semiotic singularities. Humanistic endeavours have successfully negotiated borders of divergent human sciences and have brought into works of art new performative modes of representation using diverse media and material, which were once beyond the ambit of the canons of visual representation. In the

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twenty-first century, artists, who acquired a strong ecological consciousness, have come to realise that human pursuits of material prosperity have led to the escalation of apocalyptic threats to the very existence of the human species itself. This awareness has actuated the rise of new voices and visual idioms of new performativity.

Works Cited Adajania, Nancy. “Anju Dodiya: Beauty’s Dark Underside.” Sinha, Voices of Change, pp. 158-171. —. “Bharti Kher: Of Monsters, Misfits, and the Biggest Heart in the World.” Sinha, Voices of Change, pp. 226-239. Agarwal, Bina. “Nature and Gender: Myth vs Reality. Marg: A Magazine for the Arts, March, 2020, pp. 52-61. Agarwal, Ravi. “De-anthropizing the Non-Human.” Art India: The Art News Magazine of India, vol. 24, no. 3, Quarter 3, 2021, pp. 46-47. Chakraborty, Jayashree. “Healing Nature.” Art India: The Art News Magazine of India, vol. 24, no. 3, 2021, pp. 46-47. —. Untitled, 2004. Sinha, Voices of Change, p. 37. —. Untitled, (In the Very Face of Time) 2005. Sinha, Voices of Change, pp. 38-39. —. Untitled, (In the Very Face of Time) 2006-07. Sinha, Voices of Change, pp. 40-46. Davis, Heather, and Etienne Turpin, editors. Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environment and Epistemologies. Open Humanities P, 2015. Dewan, Deepali. “Anita Dube: A Lover’s Discourse.” Sinha, Voices of Change, pp. 88-101. Dodiya, Anju. Leda.Sinha, Voices of Change, p. 159. —. Maze of Slowness.Sinha, Voices of Change, p. 164. —. The Stumble. Sinha, Voices of Change, p. 160. —. Throne of Frost.Sinha, Voices of Change, p. 169. Dube, Anita. Anthem.Sinha, Voices of Change, p. 89. —. Blood Wedding.Sinha, Voices of Change, p. 91. —. Keywords: Exploring the Movement. Sinha, Voices of Change, p. 97. —. Kissa-e-Noor (Garam Hawa). Sinha, Voices of Change, p. 95. —. Sea Creature.Sinha, Voices of Change, p. 92. —. Soap/Lick from Wayside Deities. Sinha, Voices of Change, pp. 93-94. —. Intimations of Mortality.Sinha, Voices of Change, p. 90. Dutta, Adip. “Jayashree Chakraborty: Landscape in Time and Space.” Sinha, Voices of Change, pp. 36-47.

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Epstein, Mikhail. The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto. Translated and edited by Igor Klyukanor, Bloomsbury, 2012. Kher, Bharti. Angel. Sinha, Voices of Change, p. 229. —. Arione.Sinha, Voices of Change, p. 230. —. Feather Duster.Sinha, Voices of Change, p. 228. —. Imposter. Sinha, Voices of Change, pp. 232-33. —. The Girl with the Hairy Lip Said No. Sinha, Voices of Change, p. 235. —. The Skin Speaks a Language Not Its Own. Sinha, Voices of Change, p. 237. Mahajan, Savia. “Down to Earth.” Art India: The Art News Magazine of India, vol. 24, no. 3, 2021, pp. 72-73. Sinha, Gayatri. Voices of Change: 20 Indian Artists. Marg, 2010. [Editor’s Note: All the installations referred to in this paper have Gayatri Sinha’s Voices as the source. The individual art installations have been mentioned here for the record even as they do not exactly adhere to the MLA 8 in-text citations format.]

THE EPIC ROMANCE OF SIRAT ‘ANTAR: NEGOTIATING CONTOURS IN ARABIAN CHIVALRIC COURTLY TRADITIONS PINKY ISHA

‘Antarah’ (Antar ibn Shaddad al-‘Absi, meaning ‘the valiant’) was an extremely celebrated black warrior poet in the Arabian Peninsula shortly before the rise of Islam. As in case of many other pre-Islamic figures, Antarah does not possess a single authentic biography, though various scholars and literary critics have established his timeframe by both historical and mythical standards. Literary and historic sources say that though he was born into slavery, he obtained independence through heroic battles and also attained the status of a great poet. His single greatest work is his odes, counted among the ‘Mu ‘allaqat’ (Hanging Poems), which have been ranked as poetic masterpieces of pre-Islamic Arabia. After Antarah’s death, the poems and legends that compounded his historic rise to fame were expanded into the Sirat ‘Antar (Epic of Antar), which pioneered the genre of the chivalric romance in Arabic lore. The Sirat ‘Antar attained considerable length and was put to writing well before 1466, which is the date of the earliest known manuscript, which was originally in the custody of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II (reigned 1451-1481), who had it translated into Turkish. The printed versions currently available in Arabic began to take their present form in the second half of the nineteenth century, when publishers in the middle east began dividing it for convenience’s sake on the model of Alf Layla wa Laylah (stories under such subtitles as ‘edifying’/‘instructive tales’, ‘moral’/‘realistic tales’, etc.). In 1895, a version in Judeo-Arabic (colloquial Arabic), by Yosef di Shemu’ el Nataf, was published in Tunis (Tunisia). Besides the Alf Laylah wa Laylah (The Thousand and One Nights), which comes under the domain of popular epics and displays a range of styles in poetry and prose, there are at least twelve major epics extant—ranging from the Sirat ‘Antar to the Sirat al-Amirah Dhat al- Himmah, which follows the life of a formidable warrior princess. These popular pseudo-

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histories glorify tribal allegiances in pre-Islamic conquests, perhaps the only exception being Qissat ‘Ali Zaybaq’, a parodic cycle set in Cairo, in which the heroes are rogues and the police are the actual adversaries. Some legend cycles were so popular that they often formed part of another cycle of tales. A good example of this phenomenon is the Epic of the Yemeni King Sayf ibn Dhi Yazan (from Qissat ‘Ali Zaybaq), which had such a magical and fantastic plot that it was incorporated into the Alf Layla wa Laylah. It is important to note that these epics were episodic in nature, had their roots in oral storytelling traditions of the early Islamic period, became popular, and were recorded in the Mamluk period. Some popular epics, such as the Sirat ‘Antar, existed in textual form, while maintaining a parallel existence in oral performances as well. Another important feature is that these epics show a mix of straight prose, rhymed prose and poetry, and are written in middle Arabic, the Mamluk medium for popular narrative. Each epic, in turn, had the infinite capacity to be expandable; as a reciter’s manual, it would help performers to lengthen episodes at will. With the hero’s name amplified from Antarah to Antar, the Sirat continued to be performed by professional reciters in Egypt and Syria until the beginning of the modern period. The Sirat ‘Antar served to glorify and often exaggerate Antarah and his life, and raised him to the status of a national hero of the Arab-speaking world. According to some of the earliest historical sources, Antarah was the son of an Arab, called Shaddad, and Zabibah, (a slave mother) from Abyssinia (modern day Ethiopia). In this regard, it is interesting to note that only three pre-Islamic Arabs (Khffaf Ibn Nadbah, Umayr Ibn al-Hubab, and Sulayk Ibn alSulakah) had African mothers. A few contesting sources state that Antarah was the son of Amr and the grandson of Shaddad, while others argue that Shaddad was a distant uncle who adopted Antarah after his father’s death. Nevertheless, historians agree upon the servitude of this warrior poet, as children of slave mothers were also considered as slaves. According to Ibn Qutaybah (died 889)—whose al-Shir’ wa Shu’ara draws on the earlier account of Ibn al-Kalbi (died circa 820)—a group of raiders attacked the tribe of ‘Abs and plundered their flocks, and Antarah was summoned by his father to take charge and follow the marauders. Antarah was initially reluctant because of his servile identity but finally conceded and ferociously attacked the enemy, rescued the flocks, and was so valiant in his endeavour that he was immediately set free by his adopted father. According to another biographical legend, Antarah’s career as a poet

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happened quite by chance, when a fellow tribesman made disparaging remarks about his black skin and accused him of having no poetic talent. Antarah’s angry retort, as reported by Ibn Qutaybah, is an exemplary list of virtues so very characteristic of a pre-Islamic Arab hero: By God, people should help each other with gifts of food; but we have never seen you share your food—not you, or your father, or your grandfather! People should heed the call to fight and display courage on the raid; but we have never seen yours among the stallions that surge to the fore. And weapons should be shared among all of us, but we have never seen you, or your father, or your grandfather, offer a sharp-edged sword. You are nothing but a fungus growing in the muck! But I plunge into battle, shatter swords, and return with plunder; I refrain from fornication; and I give away all I own. As for poetry—just wait! (Dictionary of Literary Biography (DLB 311) p. 78)

Miraculously, very soon, Antarah, who had never before penned a single line of poetry, began composing his famous ode rhyming in ‘m’. These odes of variable length begin with a famous invocation to the speaker’s predecessors. Following in the footsteps of the ancient oral poets, he invokes the sad ruins where Ablah, his beloved, once camped. In romantic and alluring terms, he compares her breath to a perfumed well-watered meadow. Unfortunately, she had moved with her flocks to an enemy territory and he pines away in remembrance of her soft bedclothes, which now are a sharp contrast to his horse’s hard saddle, where he is now destined to take rest, day and night. These odes give away much of the poet’s life when he compares the horse (which struts like an ostrich) to a crop-eared slave, hidden securely in a coat of fur. He further says that sober or drunk, there is in his nature an unparalleled generosity, as he had lavished gifts of immeasurable proportions to the poor and the needy. His vengeance, on the other hand, is fatal; he would not baulk to slash his foe apart with his lance. In fearful terms, the odes depict the war-cry, where spears clash against lances and enemies, foreign or tribal, meet their death in awful combat. Even when Antarah’s horse is ripped open from the chest, he undauntedly plunges headlong to kill, pursue, and devastate. In fact, when Antarah is on the battlefield, no other sight but of blood and mortal ruin claims him till he has routed and massacred all his foes. The authorial authenticity of these odes has been challenged by classical and modern critics; as early as the ninth century, the poet Abu Tammam (died 845)—according to al-Tibrizi in Shash al-Tabrizi ‘ala Hamasat Abi Tammam (1888)—cautioned that many verses in Antar had been falsely attributed to Antarah. According to al-Tabrizi, poems that can be ascribed

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to Antarah are the ones that are simple in style and short in length; rather than the more erudite and intellectually fraught odes that deal with prowess in battle, it is a mourning poem, an acclamation of Antarah’s enemies and romantic musings about Ablah. The rest of the poems are pastiches. The longest poem, which rhymes in ‘m’, makes a reference to Damdam al-Murri—a warrior who Antarah was believed to have slain in the tribal war against the Dahis and al-Ghabra (this war broke out between ‘Abs and Fazarah when one tribe accused the other of cheating during a horse race. Dahis and al-Ghabra are names of horses). This battle is said to have earned Antarah the title of the bravest among the Arabs. Classical critics and Arabic anthologists were so impressed by these odes that they placed Sirat ‘Antar among the ten best odes ever composed in pre-Islamic Arabia. Such interesting comparisons as that of a fly to a one-armed man wielding a fire-stick (the point of comparison being that both move one arm rapidly back and forth) are surprisingly unique and witty. Modern scholarship is a bit sceptical about the poetic fervour that Sirat ‘Antar displays, since Antarah was a first-timer in writing odes and not an acclaimed master for whom such unconventional handling of themes and styles evolved out of pure scholarship and poetic erudition. Whatever his fame, in pre-Islamic Arab warrior society, Antarah has been largely linked to Antar, the hero of the magnificent epic that bears his name. The Sirat ‘Antar thus tells the story of the poet’s ancestors, his birth, his exploits and death, and includes many facts taken from the life of the historical Antarah: his slave origin for example, and his love for a great beauty named Ablah. In its varying versions, the Sirat ‘Antar paints a wider canvas, and as a true epic, moves across the centuries, thus linking major events and happenings of the eastern and western worlds. For example, it sends its hero to the battle of the crusades, and it makes Antar’s story part of the narrative during the rise of Islam and important Muslim conquests thereafter. The main storyline coalesces between the eleventh and twelfth centuries, although no written copies exist before the fifteenth century. In modern times, the epic is known through its published versions, the longest of which runs to 5000 pages. It begins by announcing that Antar was sent by God to make the way clear for Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and then goes back to the beginning of Islamic history at the time of prophet Abraham and his encounter with Nimrod. It narrates Prophet Abraham’s marriages to Sarah and Hagar, and his construction of the Ka’bah (the temple of Mecca). The narrator of Sirat ‘Antar says that Abraham’s son Ishmael was the ancestor of the Arabs, who split into two

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groups, Adnan in Northern Arabia and Qahtan in the South.The ‘Abs tribe to which Antar belonged descended from Adnan. The narrator goes on to describe the history of ‘Abs, beginning with king Judhaymah and continuing with his sons Amr and Zuhayr; the latter was the king of the tribe when Antar was born. The context of Antar’s story starts with Shaddad, a noble of the ‘Abs who captures the beautiful Ethiopian Zabibah, and her sons, Shaybub and Jarir, in a raid. Shaybub later plays an important role in Sirat ‘Antar as Antar’s right-hand man and close confidante. When Shaddad keeps Zabibah as his slave and concubine, she bears him a son named Antar. However, Antar is of servile birth, and so, the noble Shaddad does not acknowledge his paternity. From childhood, however, Antar proves to be undaunted; showing exceptional physical prowess and daring, he kills a wild dog, a wolf, and a lion at the tender age of four. Under the guardianship of Shaybub, Antar, still a shepherd, teaches himself to use a homemade spear, and although older than Antar, Shaybub recognizes the former’s superior skills and takes no offence in being Antar’s subordinate, a role that he plays throughout Sirat ‘Antar. Antar, in his subsequent seeking after fortune, attains the status of a knight; he rides a black horse (al-Abjar), of unparalleled beauty and royal pedigree. This favourite horse is stolen many times by his enemies, but Antar rescues the horse heroically and frustrates their motives. These episodes give scope to the epic in introducing new battle sequences and thereby recreating a lost chivalric courtly custom. Antar’s sword (nicknamed ‘the Thirsty’) is fashioned from a rare black stone; he himself is black in complexion and looks formidably sinister on his black horse, brandishing the sword. Other exploits of the hero narrate Antar’s battle in Iraq, where he is captured while pursuing a herd of rare camels belonging to King alNu’man. He earns his freedom by fighting for the king and then accompanies the latter to Persia and the court of King Kisra to defeat the Emperor of Byzantium. This excursion lends scope to the narrative to describe the court of the Persian king in minute detail with its lavish and extravagant palaces, its awe-inspiring government officials, knightly men and warriors and their exotic hunting trips, sumptuous cuisines, and strange religious practices. Antar also visits Zorastrian temples in Persia in the course of his wanderings. In Constantinople, the Byzantium capital, he meets a beautiful princess who bears him a son, al-Jufran. Antar is later sent by Caesar to lead an army against the kingdom of al-Wahat. This

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kingdom is safely protected by an ancient Greek statue with magical powers, which none can overcome; but Antar manages with his guile and good sense to seek the help of a Christian monk and ultimately succeeds in defeating al-Wahat. This trip exudes the narrator’s fascination for ancient Greek lore and his probable connections with Byzantine Christianity. Perhaps for this reason, the epic includes several miracles of Christian heroes in stories titled ‘Michael’, ‘Gift of Christ’, ‘Light of Christ’, and ‘Son of the Monastery’ among others. Antar also undertakes a journey to Africa and about 350 pages in the epic is devoted to a description of this mystic land, where broad-crested handsome kings display exceptional wisdom and military skill. Antar is engaged in several duels and fatal combats only to discover that the kings, at least some of them, are his distant cousins, He has to ask for pardons and bids farewell to them royally; they, in turn, treat him with great respect and honour. On one particular journey, Antar is accompanied by his wife Ghamrah, and on another excursion inside Africa, Antar discovers his mother Zabibah’s royal origins. Owing to a twist of fate, she had fallen on evil days just before Antar was born. Antar’s wanderings through Africa is also coloured by descriptions of this land of pristine beauty, prolific with flora and fauna, and the strange, mesmerizing, cultural and religious customs. There are hints that a flourishing trade-route once existed between Abyssinia and Arabia. Many important historical figures also surface; thus, we get an account of the Abyssinian General Abrahah, who invaded Arabia in the year Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) was born. Antar’s return journey consists of his ruminations about how he might assume the pride of place that was so long due to him; but here again he finds his long-lost beloved (Ablah) taken away forcefully by her father Malik, who pronounces a reward of his daughter’s hand in marriage to anybody who could bring back Antar’s head, severed from his body. Amidst much heart-rending struggles and machinations by friends and foe alike, Antar at last manages to secure Malik’s confidence and admiration, and finally marries Ablah. More adventures and expeditions to foreign lands follow; Antar also marries several other renowned princesses and warrior women. Moreover, he is tested from time to time by famous rival poets in his knowledge of poetry and Arabic synonyms but eventually emerges the victor by unanimous consent, thus assuming the title of the prestigious Mu ‘allaqat Poets. As is customary in epic conventions, Antar’s death is depicted according to the biography of the historical poet Abu ‘Ubaydah (died 826) whose description of the incident follows the account given in Sirat ‘Antar. One

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night, Antar leaves his tent to obey the call of nature. His long-time enemy al-Asad, who was always at vigil and who he once blinded in mortal combat, seizes the opportunity. Recognizing Antar’s footsteps, he shoots a poisoned arrow in the night and wounds him. Antar, knowing that his end is near, instructs Ablah to remarry after his death. An interesting series of descriptions follow, where Antar’s faithful retainers place his body on horseback; the corpse sitting stiffly on the saddle continues to frighten his enemies, who think that Antar is still alive. His last rites are performed aptly, and he is buried beside Shaddad and his uncle Malik. The Sirat ‘Antar does not end with Antar’s death; it turns a new leaf with the story of Anitrah, Antar’s daughter, a skilled horsewoman and formidable warrior like her father. She embraces the tribe of ‘Abs on realising that Antar was her father, and, in order to do justice to his memory, travels to foreign lands and offers help to the needy and the distressed. While helping the king of Damascus, she accidently meets her half-brother al-Jufran and joins him in his quest to avenge the death of their father. A grotesque description follows, when al-Jufran, in his obsession, disinters Antar’s body from the grave, wraps it up in a piece of cloth, and straps it to the back of a camel to accompany the trio, so that Antar’s soul might be satisfied to see his children avenge his death. Once the mission of revenge is complete, Antar is again laid to rest with full burial rites adequate to such occasions. Anitrah marries and has five sons, and as the story goes, she is still alive when Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) appears on the scene. She also embraces Islam and fights for the glory and spread of Islam. Most of the ‘Abs tribe also convert to Islam and the last volume of Sirat ‘Antar ends with a description of the miracles in the life of the Prophet. Although the Sirat ‘Antar has many fantastic episodes and digressions, it refers to certain important events and facts from Arabic historiography. Some of the significant events are the pre-Islamic tribal war of Dahis and al-Ghabra, the prophet’s campaign against the Jews of the Khaybar Oasis, and the battle of Dhu al-Qar, in which Muslim forces defeat the Persian Empire. According to the historical timeline, Antar the historical poet mentioned would have been surely dead by the time of the tribal war of the Dahis and al-Ghabra, and the war of Dhu al-Qar. Even then, in order to glamorize and valorise the epic hero, he is shown to have been a part of this medieval world. The use of historical names and events lends credibility to the story, which would otherwise come off as a one-man saga, for the extent of an epic should be manifold and it should present a much broader canvas that one can relate with a wide historical stretch of

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time. Nevertheless, it would also be wrong to suggest that merely because Antar is shown to have lived across such a span of time, the interconnections are missing. On the contrary, Sirat ‘Antar faithfully follows a historical semblance of dates and events, and daringly recreates a bold and romanticized historical backdrop for its famed heroic character. The reception of the Sirat ‘Antar in Europe was promising, and the epic was considered a peep into oriental ethnography and medieval worldview. In 1801, Josef von Hammer-Purgstall purchased an incomplete manuscript from a Cairo-based story-teller’s guild, which might have performed it several times. Another Austrian orientalist, in his Fundgruber des Orients (1809-1818), described the Sirat ‘Antar as quintessential in learning about medieval Arab traditions and their way of life (both on a courtly-public level as well as on a private level). The epic was translated into English by Terrick Hamilton: titled Antar: A Bedoueen Romance, 1820. In France, A. Caussin de Perceval, the orientalist, published a version of the epic in French and alluded it to the Illiad and the Odyssey. A more extensive and exhaustive French translation appeared in 1864 and 1923. Many critics bestowed lavish comments on the conception of the hero’s personality; Alphonse de Lamartine placed Antar alongside Roland, the Cid, Rustum and Achillies. This comment was noted by Peter Heath in his The Thirsty Sword: Sirat ‘Antar and the Arabic Popular Epic (1996). So popular was the Sirat ‘Antar that not only translations appeared but a common performance play was also put on show in the cafes of Cairo. Trade guilds confident about the popularity of the play, and hence, the sale of their tickets, performed it with other popular stories, such as The Epic of al-Zahir Baybars (performed without a written text and without musical accompaniment) and The Epic of Banu Hilal (which also did not have a written text but was sung to the accompaniment of a Rubab, a stringed instrument). The Sirat ‘Antar was read aloud from books and nobody bothered about the authenticity of historical evidences because it vastly inflamed popular imagination and the heroic tastes of the audience. In the technological twenty-first century, storytelling or reciting has lost much of its popular appeal and is fast dwindling into the realms of a forgotten art practice. Nevertheless, the epic of Antar, because of its oral nature, lives on with a legacy that is unprecedented and glorious. Antar and his deeds are remembered in many societies and faiths that still recreate the mythical hero through television serials, dramas, comic books for adolescents, and full-length and abridged versions of story-cycles for school children. Many visual art galleries have mythically eulogized

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portraits of Antar on horseback. Traditional crafts also show flamboyant embroidered patterns of Antar and Ablah as the blessed pair of eternal lovers; sometimes traditional puppetry depicts short heroic scenes from the life of the warrior poet. Even when puppetry festivals are not held, dolls for adornment modelled on the mythical Antar and his beloved Ablah appear occasionally on the streets in craft markets in Tunisia. Thus, the epic of Antar is resplendent in its quest for undaunted heroism, selfless sacrifice, and a generosity that flickers as an incandescent candle from out of the depths, half history, half myth, and most importantly, from the penchant in man to value the ancient Arabian medieval Romantic ethos. Antar lives on, and perhaps will enchant generations to come.

Works Cited ‘Antar: A Bedoueen Romance. Translated by Terrick Hamilton, Murray, 1820.4 vols. Dictionary of Literary Biography (DLB 311) Arabic Literary Culture, 500-925, edited by Michael Cooperson and Shawkat M. Toorawa, Thomson Gale, 2005. Sirat ‘Antar (1: 9–15). Translated by Peter Lauchlan Heath, U of Utah P, 1996.

THE MATRIX OF DESIRE: DAVID LURIE AND THE DELEUZIOGUATTARIAN ETHICS IN COETZEE’S DISGRACE MILDA MARY SAVIO AND SHIVSHANKAR RAJMOHAN A K

J. M. Coetzee is a distinguished South-African writer who has been influential in significantly altering the cornerstones of writing by evoking self-conscious fictions. Heavily influenced by the styles of Beckett, Derrida, Hegel, Kafka, and Dostoevsky, he opposes the prescriptive approach of writing novels wherein public and private realms are not congruent enough to envision an independent resistance or to conceive a methodology that writes-against-itself. This perspective would perhaps be the reason behind Attwell’s statement: “Coetzee is often charged with being evasive: in the eyes of his critics the obliquity and rarefaction of the works are evidence of his disavowal of politics in spite of some obvious sorties into the political fray” (26). Attwell’s observation becomes pertinent when one examines Coetzee’s work Disgrace, which has not received much scholarly attention. The apparent sense of political disavowal assumes a glaring presence in Disgrace, for it stays away from any form of overt political commentary or critical remarks on discursive practices. David Lurie, the protagonist, who expresses dismay in subscribing to the regulations mediated by a society operating within specific parameters and boundaries, has not been the subject of much critical discussion. Coetzee’s narrative enframes us into the world of David Lurie, inflicting conceptual tremors as we are stroked by the roving lens of fictional commentary, which seems to momentarily explode the logic of rational principles. The novel resists conformity to normative standards by employing specific verbs of movement and relying on the limitations of representation so as to question their power to capture the impulses that pervade an individual’s life. Disgrace narrates the story of a white, aged, male professor who is socially castrated after the discovery of his ‘illicit’ sexual affair with his

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young female student Melanie. Lurie’s preoccupancy with Romantic poetry, and his indulgence in the life of Byron and his lover Theresa interferes and forms an overbearing influence so as to frame his relationships with women, literature, poetry, and animals shuttling through shifting patterns. The novel tracks his fall from the position of a university “Professor of Modern languages” to “Adjunct Professor of Communications”, and releases a gamut of events that primarily encase his experiences during the stay with his daughter Lucy on what she calls a farm, and participating in euthanizing and neutering dogs at a nearby hospital. The novel positions its readers in a whirlpool of obscurity, starting with Lurie’s degradation from a professor of ‘Literature’ to a professor of ‘Languages’. His philosophy of life revels in relying on the power of literature that creates intensities and situates itself in a domain that is beyond the reach of language and communication. He breaks away from specificities, which produce ‘beings’ to embrace the abstract dimension of life that offers unlimited choices. Lurie demonstrates the characteristics of a ‘desiring machine’ as he breaks boundaries between the self and the other, thereby presenting possibilities that favour the process of ‘becoming’. At the same time, he depicts the importance of connections, which serve to be expressions of life and are mediated by the fact that one body does not in reality desire another; bodies become only facilitators that contribute to the impersonal flow of life. This point of view becomes evident when the narrator makes the observation: In the field of sex his temperament, though intense, has never been passionate. Were he to choose a totem, it would be the snake. Intercourse between Soraya and himself must be, he imagines rather like the copulation of snakes: lengthy, absorbed, but rather abstract, rather dry, even at its hottest. Is Soraya's totem the snake too? No doubt with other men she becomes another woman: la donna e mobile. Yet at the level of temperament her affinity with him can surely not be feigned. (Coetzee 2– 3)

It is possible to argue that Lurie offers a new model to unwrap the structures that have moulded the notion of desire. In the DeleuzioGuattarian scheme of events, he could be seen as entering into a relentless journey of forming “machinic assemblages” that is in perfect harmony with the idea of desire. Lurie suspends moralistic judgments and ceases to identify with anything in particular that allows him to undergo regular transitions as he moves from one to the other, utilizing specific “lines of flight” (Colebrook 129). Lurie serves more than a fictional character and becomes emblematic of the twentieth-century zest to subvert the ‘life-

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sentence’ offered by the world at large and appears instrumental in challenging the normative boundaries of social life, much like Nikos Kazantzakis’s Zorba (1946; 2001). He floats through space and time probing for particulars that reveal the pulse of life dismissing the frameworks of logic and rationality, losing himself in the rhythm of music and dance, comprehending realms that extend beyond the horizon normalcy. For that very reason, Lurie remains a problematic character for traditional modes of psychoanalytic thinking. He does not appear to desire anything in particular; yet, he carries within him an excessive core, an inexhaustible recess of desire. Traditional notions of ‘desire’ fail to contextualize Lurie and his extra-subjective sense of it. His provocative acts of mechanic copulation disturb the triadic structure of subject-desire-object logic. The notion of ‘desire’ performs a significant role in Coetzee’s writing, for Lurie claims: “My case rests on the rights of desire.... On the god who makes even the small birds quiver” (Coetzee 89). One would fail to capture the revolutionary potential inherent in Lurie if the concept of desire is not disengaged from the pathological frame imposed upon it by traditional psychoanalytic discourses. The Deleuzio-Guattarian understanding of desire is pre-personal and is innately against structure and organization, which results in a critique of the discursive understanding of desire facilitated by psychoanalysis. Instead of considering repression or modulation of desire as constitutive of subjecthood, Deleuze and Guattari conceptualize desire in its entirety as essentially productive in nature. Freudian psychoanalysis holds ‘the family’ as the locale accelerating human personality, development, and sexual awareness. An individual’s psyche formation greatly rests on resolving the complexities of sexual attraction directed towards parents of the opposite sex and feelings of rivalry towards parents of the same sex. In other words, in psychoanalysis subjecthood is constituted by and through the categorisation of desire into the dyad of acceptable and unacceptable. Coetzee critiques the overbearing influence of this traditional understanding of desire when he states: “To fix me? To cure me? To cure me of inappropriate desires?” (43). He illustrates how individuals have been anchored and entrapped within the subscriptions of appropriate and inappropriate desires and has misunderstood desire’s real function. Deleuze and Guattari, therefore, emphasize the need of a reversed psychoanalysis to dismiss the family as the agency of subject formation. The emergence of Deleuze and Guattari revealed not merely the deficiencies of the Oedipus paradigm, where the unconscious comprised

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an “atavistic reservoir of dark passion” (Buchanan and Thoburn 28) responsible for framing the human ecosystem and also portrayed the ambiguous role of psychoanalysis in French intellectual circles. Deleuze and Guattari contrive the family to be oedipalizing since it treats subjects as if they were “sick from their childhood” (Buchanan and Thoburn 69), as mentioned in Disgrace itself: “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires?” (Coetzee 69), thus hinting a negative connotation where desire needs to be administered to ensure the integrity and smooth functioning of the primary kinship structure. The result is the formation of a double bind, two undesirable outcomes that mark our struggle; either in the form of resolving the conflict or giving into oedipal desires. In either case, the ‘improper’ and castrating desire gets interpellated as the ‘real’ object of desire formation. For what really takes place is that the Law of the Father prohibits something that is perfectly fictitious in the order-ofdesire so as to persuade its subjects into believing that they had the intention corresponding to the fiction. It is indeed the only way the Law has of getting a grip on intention, of making the unconscious guilty (Deleuze and Guattari 125). Deleuze and Guattari opened avenues that sought to redefine the processes and strategies clarifying that desire was not guilty or the Law innocent. The Law restricts its subjects and convinces them to give into something that does not exist and gets a grasp on intention, thus making their unconscious guilty. Deleuze and Guattari argue that desire is a proliferation brought forth by a flow of time or becoming, interactions and perceptions. “Desire causes the current to flow, itself flows in turn, and breaks the flow” (Deleuze and Guattari 6). In other words: “Desire begins not as the desire for some object by some person; rather, there is a flow of life, an impersonal differentiating ‘sexuality’, which produces bodies and organisms. So, before there are any subjects who desire, there is the production of desire” (Colebrook 100). The world is constructed by individuals who are assemblages defined by their ability to be affected. Affects are “sensible experiences in their singularity, liberated from organizing systems of representation” (Colebrook 22) as in the case of Lurie, who considers eros, desire, or sexuality to be life-saving mechanisms that need to be utilized to fill the void of the heart. In a sense, Lurie escapes the structures of linguistic mediation, which were supposed to express the inner turmoil of an individual. He refuses to reconcile with the fact that subjectivity is essentially linguistic in nature and that one’s whims and fantasies are necessarily mediated by the agency of language. He is not a Lacanian who believes that “desire—the imagination of a presence that lies beyond the differences of language—is an effect of language” (qtd. in Colebrook 17).

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Being compartmentalized into a category where reality and emotions are formulated by discourses, Lurie is not offered the luxury to explore the eventfulness of life. Thus, he celebrates art and literature, and assimilates the power situated in connections that form machinic assemblages. His immense craving for music, which he considers to be the origin of speech and inscription, expresses his disillusionment at the use of language as a tool for communication. According to Lurie, language reduces individuals to mere functional units, thus obliterating any form of resistance to traditional forms of desire. Lurie adheres to the power of literature that creates intensities engaging in a productive life that fails to draw borders between different objects, clearly embarking on a process of ‘becoming’. In his machinic connections with Soraya, she becomes an extension of Lurie. The machine allows for an active ethics, with no need to presuppose something. Lurie’s disposition rethinks ethics. The machine embodies an immanent production—not the production of someone by something, rather production that assumes an ungrounded time and becoming. The nature of Lurie’s machinic connection with his student becomes apparent in the following descriptive passage. “In Soraya’s arms he becomes, fleetingly, their father: foster-father, step- father, shadow-father. Leaving her bed afterwards, he feels their eyes flicker over him covertly, curiously.... His childhood was spent in a family of women. As mother, aunts, sisters fell away, they were replaced in due course by mistresses, wives, a daughter” (Coetzee 7). Deleuze and Guattari’s notions on desire contradict regular standards of constructing an external relation between the desiring subject and desiring object and breaks away from the psychoanalytic explanation that suture desire to negation/lack. Within the paradigm of Freudian psychology, the subject is destined to strive and overcome ‘difference’ where both ‘desire’ and ‘difference' hold negative connotations. Difference is generally considered negative since it makes sense only when it is placed within a system of terms. Desire is negative since it can only be experienced as other than the signifier and lies beyond language. Hence, desire is impaired and endowed with faculties of fantasies, images, and representation which are co-products of a “universal history” (Buchanan and Thoburn 90). Lurie loves to intensify his relationship with individuals by suspending their identities, and by an increase in the number of connections, dimensions, and parts that enable him to assume varying identities. Lurie’s paradoxical relationship with his student, where he is simultaneously endowed with the faculties of being both a lover and a parent to Melanie, could be understood in this regard. One of the most pivotal junctions of the

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novel demonstrates Lurie expressing an almost parental emotion to Melanie: “Tell me what is wrong.” It is as if he says: “Tell Daddy what is wrong” (Coetzee 26). Nevertheless, the same man is capable of making love to her the very next day as he is mediated only by thoughts that are found ‘intoxicating’ at the moment, although it turns against conventional social norms. The nature of relationship that Lurie and Melanie share differs and is sufficiently evident in this interaction: “Do you have pictures?” “I don’t collect pictures. I don’t collect women.” “Aren’t you collecting me?” “No, of course not” (Coetzee 29). These words explain why Melanie finds it difficult to comprehend his philosophy of life as she attempts to cleanse him off her and reconcile her status as a pure being. As Colebrook puts it, “desire is not a relation between terms—the desire of the subject and the absent object, which they lack; desire is production. All life is desire, a flow of positive difference and becoming, a full series of productive connection” (99). One does not desire the personal maternal object but a pre-personal “germinal influx of intensity” invested in flow and difference (Buchanan and Thoburn 90). There is a compelling need to free desire from structures of representation. They are perceptions and sensible encounters, which need to be seen as an act of the body itself and not an entity bound by specificities. This understanding frees desire from the limits of normative constructs, which assert that distinct terms such as the human would only find realization in the organization of desire. Desiring production cannot take place without the occurrence of new desiring machines as Lurie switches between individuals replacing old desiring machines. Lurie creates not a world, but multiple worlds through a process of synthesis located on a dynamic plane of forces, which enables him to move on from one connection to another. In other words, the machinic connections formed by Lurie operate at a plane of pure immanence. His associations with various individuals should be understood as self-contained experiences. In the words of Colebrook, these experiences are unique forms of embodiment, for they exist “without subjects or objects, inside or outside.” This dynamic “plane of immanence”, replete with sheer intensities, facilitate a “perception without any distinct perceivers” (74). Lurie’s modalities of operation, in order for it to make sense, need to be understood within this framework. His capacity to view a prostitute’s sons as his own and live a life in the company of several women who are mere connections enhancing his ability to flow could be explained in this manner. The same is applicable when we consider the ambiguous bond he shares with his own daughter Lucy. We find Lurie commenting on her body: “Her hips and breasts are

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now (he searches for the best word) ample” (Coetzee 59), quite contrary to the oedipal framework placing him against all possible structures of power. He finds it difficult to understand the nature of the relationship he has with his daughter. This oedipal intricacy gets manifested in his disapproval of her probably sharing a sexual relationship with her friend Bev Shaw. Lurie observes that pupils who come to him learn literally nothing, while those engaged in the process of teaching learn the keenest lessons. He substantiates it with his attestations that women and livestock do not owe their bodies and should share them with the world. This argument literally attributes the status of a desiring machine to him and is marked by a series of flows that is not in concurrence with the social, material, or ecological fields. He is extra-subjective in nature and dwells on the power of connections, which are boundless. As discussed earlier, in the Deleuzio-Guattarian logic, desire is not primarily a desire for anything. It is not quantifiable or characterized with the emotions of guilt or remorse. Lurie’s statement that body needs to be “shared more widely” depicts a synthesis of connections, and distinct intensities (Coetzee 16). These distinct intensities are formed by the intersection of flows of desire, which imply territorialization succeeding disjunction. His belief in the moment, therefore, sets a series of intensities against each other. A validation of this observation could be located in Lurie’s succinct response to Bev Shaw when she asked him whether he felt any sense of regret in the erotic relationship with his student. Lurie responds: “Do you mean, in the heat of the act? Of course not. In the heat of the act there are no doubts” (Coetzee 148). The “heat of the act” embodies the spirit of desire in its fullest. It is not choreographed by a transcendent regime of truth. In the multiplicity of that moment nomadic bodies enter into absolute connections. When the ‘heat of the moment’ gets stratified by structures of transcendent power, the oedipal kinship structure gets validated and materialised. This subordination results in the familial man. Families can be created only by coding desires. Colebrook seems to echo it when he observes that we are currently situated not in a “regime of private persons but of collectively invested organs” (112). Lurie exercises no restraint over his life; he is able to assimilate each point and rhythm that comprises life as he remains detached from original territories and subjects himself to sensations or ‘pure affects’ that do not refer to a specific body. It is difficult for Lurie to delineate the kind of emotions that are brought to play. His curt response to Rosalind’s question that he neither loved nor jilted Melanie makes it amply clear that Lurie perceives senses that do not belong to conventional models of desire

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(Coetzee 45). The schizophrenic exhibits potentials of Homo natura and Homo historia enables us to understand that the schizophrenic exists both as an individual and a member of the human species and does not identify himself with any specific aspect of nature as he evolves alongside within nature, thus conceiving it to be a process of production. All the machines that Lurie is pre-occupied with possess the possibility of becoming the centre of his sense of subject-hood. Deleuze’s philosophical exposition, which is primarily rhizomatic in nature, links desiring production with his notions on ‘becoming’, thus emphasizing that it is not concomitant with the aspects of imitation or likeness for something. It is primarily infested with a transformative and affirmative zeal that is molecular and imperceptible underlying the fact: “All ‘beings’ are just relatively stable moments in a flow of becominglife” (qtd. in Colebrook 125). We do not recognize ‘becoming’; we understand the world as one of external things and extensions that give rise to singularities or what Deleuze calls the virtual power of the sensible. Singularities are untimely possibilities from which the difference of time flows, it is our ability to experience sensibilities that stretch beyond organization and the definite interests of the perceiver. Individuals become extended bodies capable of “contracting from the complex flow of life” (Colebrook 127). It is, however, important to realize that one is not essentially freed from the discursive structures and institutional frameworks of society, for they serve as the nodes that enable becomingin-process. Lurie opens to the event of becoming, acknowledging rituals which he considers would “ease the awkward passages” (Coetzee 12). However, this condition also evolves to form the primary juncture of the novel and initiates Lurie’s journey to ‘disgrace’, thereby raising concerns towards the problematic situations circumscribed in portraying the conflicts between individual and society, most importantly freedom and authority. This situation is rightly framed in his thought: “But the girl he has brought home is not just thirty years his junior: she is a student, his student, under his tutelage. No matter what passes between them now, they will have to meet again as teacher and pupil. Is he prepared for that?” (Coetzee 12). Our social relations are limited within the boundaries of conventions, values, and other economic structures, which never facilitate addition or other strategies fixed within our theoretical make-up, especially issues pertaining to sexuality. This state of affairs can also be analysed in terms of the smooth and striated spaces that exist as a mixture, the former being the sphere where Lurie belongs as it relies on an intensive space, nomadic, and formed by affects which hold full potential,

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whereas the latter is characterized by fixed variables and organization adhering to distinct forms producing disciplinary societies. The inescapability from the structural framework of ‘being’ forces him to surge into the identities of teacher and student formed as part of the power mechanism. Becoming endeavours to question hegemonic discourses and shatters it to allow a range of digressions and alternatives leading to an exploration in reconstructing subjectivity, and society, thus formulating liberation. Lurie is equipped to demonstrate his love for Lucifer; he acts not on principles but impulses. A world beyond morality would be an opening to what Deleuze calls ethics teeming with multiplicities and the power to select and expand those powers that create life as a whole. The Deleuzian ethics in Lurie gets encapsulated in his description of what transpired between him and the woman when they met first: “Our paths crossed. Words passed between us, and at that moment something happened which, not being a poet, I will not try to describe. Suffice it to say that Eros entered. After that I was not the same.” “You were not the same as what?” asks the businesswoman cautiously. I was not myself. I was no longer a fifty-yearold divorce at a loose end. I became a servant of Eros” (Coetzee 52). Lurie believes in exploring all dimensions of thought and lets it to unfold itself as the idea of thought is capable of creation and not mere representation. Coetzee frames it as follows: “He has never been afraid to follow a thought down its winding track, and he is not afraid now” (Coetzee 76). Lurie’s machinic existence leads him to exhibit a kind of callousness which opens to him an entire life of ‘disgrace’. Nevertheless, it does not affect him as his machinic nature rejects essentialist structures which are only discursive formulations. Quite contrary to the individual who awaits freedom from the imposed illusions of culture, Lurie demonstrates the ability of bodies to make connections and form assemblages to enhance power which supplements not the repression but the expansion of desire. Becomings do not have their root in knowing who or what we are; they allude to a liberation from finite self-images, destroying borders between the perceiver and perceived, aiming to find zones of indiscernibility where all forms are freed from the curtails of identity and social codes. Becoming arises only when individuals free themselves from the illusion of transcendence as detailed by Colebrook: “A maximised becoming is a commitment to univocity, affirming all those differences and creations which traverse us, including the genetic, historical and affective investments that have constituted us but do not define us once and for all” (96).

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An individual enframed in the structures of normalcy would feel exactly like the dog that tries to hide its instinctual drives. Lurie contemplates the plight of a dog towards the end of the novel: Whenever there was a bitch in the vicinity it would get excited and unmanageable, and with Pavlovian regularity the owners would beat it. This went on until the poor dog didn't know what to do. At the smell of a bitch it would chase around the garden with its ears flat and its tail between its legs, whining, trying to hide....But desire is another story. No animal will accept the justice of being punished for following its instincts.... What was ignoble about the Kenilworth spectacle was that the poor dog had begun to hate its own nature. It no longer needed to be beaten. It was ready to punish itself. At that point it would have been better to shoot it. (Coetzee 90)

Coetzee, quite similar to Deleuze and Guattari, primarily questions the reasons and justifications we invest in restricting and curtailing desire. Lurie feels for the animal, and for the sole reason that his condition appears synonymous to that of the animal, he sees them in his own right. As Heidegger observes, “we can learn thinking only if we can radically unlearn what thinking has been traditionally” understood (qtd. in Bell and Colebrook 178). True thought has ceased appearing because that which facilitates true thought has always been restricted and can only be enhanced by a departure from thought-itself. Coetzee’s Disgrace succeeds in providing us with thought-provoking insights capable of producing cerebral sensations that challenge our engagement with existing frames of thinking. Lurie succeeds in making movements in the minds of people, “producing a shock to thought, ‘vibrations to the cortex, touching the nervous and cerebral system directly” (Deleuze156). Images that shock the readers will, in fact, enable them to formulate new meanings and may push them beyond normal barriers to achieve sublimity. As Deleuze observes: “In fact, what constitutes the sublime is that the imagination suffers a shock which pushes it to the limit and forces thought to think the whole as intellectual totality which goes beyond the imagination” (Deleuze 157). The figure of Lurie assumes the position of a frightful ‘scandal’, an absolute alterity that could potentially dismantle the structural integrity of a traditional society. It is precisely in this event of alterity that the possibility of the sublime manifests itself. The image of a man revelling in intensities, categorically refusing to adhere to the normative representational paradigm, would push the threshold of imagination to its ultimate; in the process, he becomes a true subject with absolute agency.

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Works Cited Attwell, David. “The Life and Times of Elizabeth Costello: J. M. Coetzee and the Public Sphere.” J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual, edited by Jane Poyner, Ohio UP, 2006, pp. 25–41. Bell, Jeffrey A., and Claire Colebrook, editors. Deleuze and History. Edinburgh UP, 2009. Buchanan, Ian, and Nicholas Thoburn, editors. Deleuze and Politics. Edinburgh UP, 2008. Coetzee, J. M. Disgrace. Penguin Books, 1999. Colebrook, Claire. Gills Deleuze. Routledge, 2002. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema Two: The Time Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, U of Minnesota P, 1989. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. U of Minnesota P, 1983. Kazantzakis, Nikos. Zorba the Greek. 1946. Faber and Faber, 2001.

CANCEL CULTURE PAVING THE BLACK MIRROR IN “FORGET ME NOT” PRASADITA L RAVEENDRAN

The year 2020 has witnessed a cultural transformation in its understanding of ‘consequence’. In particular, the need and desire to be woke has taken on a whole new level owing to the development of the trend of Cancel Culture. Though the term ‘cancel’ is usually used to denote ‘to eliminate’ or ‘to do away with’ a product or an agreement, recent years have witnessed a new meaning acquiral that closely resembles ostracization. The digital age we live in has inevitably allowed a more or less unrestricted virtual space for freedom of speech. To add to that freedom, the like-minded ideological groupings that occur on social media platforms easily give rise to a mob mentality. Therefore, when someone, mostly a prominent figure, acts or expresses an idea in a manner that upsets a section’s mob mentality, it leads to outrage from them, and within seconds, the mob decides to alienate the ‘wrongdoer’. This alienation, by definition, has now come to be recognized as cancelling an individual from social platforms. #cancel (name of the wrongdoer), #boycott (name of the wrongdoer) are trends that are part of the thrusting out phenomenon of cancel culture. “As with McCarthyism, even when the accusations are true, or partially true, they are generally about acts done, statements made, or positions taken many years earlier, when different attitudes and values prevailed” (Dershowitz, 15). Even though cancel culture has gained a strong footing on online platforms, especially since 2019, in-person cancel culture has only begun to attain currency. Cancelling a person from the societal, cultural, and virtual circles is similar to dismissing their existence, and thereby, erasing their presence and identity. Ligaya Mishan, one of the leading writers of The New York Times, avers that cancel culture “is shambolically applied to incidents both online and off that range from vigilante justice to hostile debate to stalking, intimidation and harassment... Those who embrace the idea… of cancelling seek more than pat apologies and retractions, although it's not always clear whether the goal is to right a specific wrong and redress a

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larger imbalance of power” (Mishan). Though it can be rightfully said that cancelling someone has been initiated as a trend or a participatory movement by online media, it no longer restricts itself in the virtual. Dismissing a friend or a colleague because they have expressed a controversial and derogatory action/statement/opinion when in the school/work space is now becoming an acceptable norm. The initial dismissal they show soon turns to a complete ostracization, and thus, the act of cancelling is viewed by many as the appropriate step of protest. Tracing cancel culture’s history, Mishan states that this “custom of a radical form of citizen justice” had its social media origin in Chinese netizen tweets whereupon people, who explicitly showcased moral deficiency or animal cruelty were exposed to the public, and then went on to be the targets of the other netizens at large. When this custom began, it was viewed as an “exotic phenomenon” by the West. However, the Western world soon embraced this public shaming and punishment as a representation of wokeism so much so that cancel culture became an indispensable part of everyday life (Mishan). Much like the West, cancel culture has now become a customary practice in Indian society. If a film or a book or a celebrity supposedly has a problematic religious or political expression, boycotting the art or the artist is now the norm. From the scapegoats targeted during the aftermath of Sushant Singh Rajput's death (Chawla) to the latest glorification of the portrayal of the historically cruel Babur in The Empire (Nijhara), art and artists alike have been trolled, boycotted, and cancelled by fans and media alike. Ironically enough, when cancel culture is weaponized against the famous and the powerful, its reeling effect lasts not for long. Nevertheless, as people have become accustomed to the idea of effectively cancelling an individual, it is those without much power that suffers the most, however minor their alleged wrongdoing is. In the case of the latter, ““What can often start out as well-intentioned and necessary criticism far too quickly devolves into brutish displays of virtual tar-and-feathering,” writes the activist and writer Ruby Hamad” (qtd. in Matei). The popular notion of cancelling people has also come under close scrutiny by Indian artists. In August 2021, Vir Das did a stand-up comedy against cancel culture, thus once again reiterating that society has an ambiguous stand towards the idea of calling-out and defaming an individual with the hidden agenda of political correctness and/or other sensitive motives (Das 0:31–19:14). The trend has become so popular through social networking sites and other media sources in India that many work cultures in India have begun to practice it in-person. A case in point could be the ostracization of Kartik Aryan by Bollywood work culture (Jha). When Karan Johar, one of the

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notable directors and producers of the Bollywood industry, decided to publicly defame the budding actor Kartik Aryan by stating that he has been removed from his upcoming production Dostana 2 owing to “unprofessional behaviour”, a few other production houses in the industry also decided to remove Aryan from their films (Thakare). Aryan’s online defamation and ousting from some of the films that he was already rumoured to have signed strongly indicates a section of the Bollywood industry’s desire to cancel him from their work circles.

“Forget Me Not” and the Cancel Culture When in-person examples are prevalent, it is natural that the film industry will also begin to adopt this trend into its narratives. Ray, the June 2021 web series released on Netflix expresses wokeism in an eerie fashion. Its first episode, “Forget Me Not”, touches upon the dark way of dismissing people, thus giving the protagonist a black mirror-ish reflection of his actions of cancelling others (“Forget Me Not” 00:00:00–01:05:00). This in-person representation of cancel culture is based on Satyajit Ray’s short story “Bepin Choudhury’s Lapse of Memory” (Gupta). Ray’s short story portrays a highly intelligent man Bepin Choudhury, whose memory seems almost perfect to be true. The plot of the story evolves when Choudhury thinks that he is sick because of his inability to recollect a particular incident, which all his acquaintances remember. This situation puts him in a dilemma and leads him on a wild goose chase, only to finally realise that the whole incident that Choudhury supposedly forgot was a practical joke/revenge that was well-crafted by one of his closest friends, Chunni Lal. Chunni Lal was hurt by Choudhury’s blatant dismissal of his desperate request to help him out with a job; therefore, he decided to act against the injustice done to him. Srijit Mukherjee’s adaptation of Ray’s “Bepin Choudhury’s Lapse of Memory” to “Forget Me Not” lends the supposedly forgotten incident a dark undertone. Ipsit Rama Nair, a young, highly intelligent, and successful entrepreneur, is the protagonist in “Forget Me Not”. Srijit Mukherjee takes Ray’s Choudhury and re-weaves his job, location, intelligence, and life to suit the contemporary world. The tactful and urbane depiction of Ipsit’s cold and calculative efficiency is placed on a pedestal initially in the narrative. Overtly, Ipsit’s family and business life seem to be thriving. His underlings constantly walk around him literally acting as his entourage on the professional and personal front; Ipsit, a man of sharp intellect and power, considers them as mere commodities of his burgeoning business, with whom he is mostly in touch on Bluetooth. His lack of acknowledgement of the individuality, emotions,

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and opinions of people below his rank is nothing but neglect; he justifies it as his way of cancelling unwanted data/people from his brain. Therefore, to Ipsit, certain people and events are mere unnecessary data that ought to be deleted into his brain’s recycle bin. When his closest friend hints that Ipsit tends to devalue his near and dears, he merely laughs it off as an unavoidable part of the present-day lifestyle. Even though Ipsit does not showcase the wokeism behind cancel culture, he is, in fact, a product of the contemporary world, which validates and valorises the idea of cancelling any person or incident that is dispensable or dissentious. Cancel culture “also seeks to dismantle the entire structure of meritocracy— of judging people on the totality of their accomplishments and virtues— and replacing it with a hierarchy based on “identity”” (Dershowitz 81). In “Forget Me Not”, no question is ever raised about the merit of Ipsit. He is showcased through other individuals’ eyes as a successful man worthy of praise and accolades. Nevertheless, the snide remarks of Rahul, his partner at the firm whom Ipsit always undermines and bullies; his college friend, Patchy and his silence on being asked about his present designation at Ipsit’s company; his secretary Maggie’s non-participation in Ipsit’s child’s naming ceremony; and many other instances prove that it is not Ipsit’s merit that is disagreeable but his patronizing and cancelling attitude towards them. This response, in turn, becomes a crucial factor for others to dismiss Ipsit’s meritocracy, for they had begun to crave for their identity as separate from that of Ipsit. This retort could be because Ipsit assumes the rare position of privilege amongst the rest of the staff in his firm, not only because he is a partner but also due to his inflated ego, authoritarian stand, and dismissive nature. “Opponents of meritocracy argue that intelligence, education, achievement, and even work ethic are themselves functions of “privilege”, and that privilege is rewarded enough without making it the basis for further rewards” (Dershowitz 84). Thus, cancel culture is used to challenge the status quo in society to a polarizing level. In the opinion of Lisa Nakamura, a professor at the University of Michigan, cancel culture implies a “cultural boycott”; it is the “ultimate agency of expression” that stems from an individual’s desire to assert/take back control (Velasco 3–4). It is this agency that people around Ipsit desire. Initially, it is only Maggie who is outrageous at Ipsit’s behaviour. He had an affair with her and had forced her to abort the child, never giving her agency or thought to her emotional state during or after the abortion, and after the end of their affair. So she tries to claim back her power and identity by trying to cancel Ipsit’s most proud faculty—his power of brain, which he adds on to and deletes from as per his view of

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what is advantageous to him. Her trigger to become woke happens when Ipsit asks Maggie to tag along while he does shopping for his newborn daughter, without even giving the slightest care that he had at one point of time asked Maggie to abort his child. Maggie, with the help of her sister, Rhea, crafts a narrative that Ipsit had once travelled to Aurangabad and had spent a great deal of time with Rhea. When he encounters Rhea and she narrates the ‘crafted’ past they had shared, Ipsit’s brain is unable to recollect it. This encounter becomes a psychologically disturbing one for Ipsit. When his friends/underlings, including Rahul, Patchy, Maggie, and Gary, provide fake evidence and statements of Ipsit’s stay in Aurangabad with Rhea, he is pushed down the rabbit hole of self-doubt. It soon makes him lose track of time, his business, and his family affairs, thus forcing him further and further into being ostracized and into self-ostracization. Thus, Ipsit’s once-relied-upon entourage turns against him. Their decision to stop supporting him reaches the level of cancelling Ipsit’s identity from their common economic, social, cultural, and virtual spaces. By taking away Ipsit’s job, power, relations, and support, the mob mentality of his underlings demand his complete submission, as is the usual occurrence in cancel culture. Ipsit’s staff drive him insane until they are satisfied with his pathetic psychological breakdown and his forever loss of identity. The last scene of “Forget Me Not” shows Ipsit in a room in a mental asylum; the room’s walls are covered with fragmented and mundane details of his former identity, which may never ever truly come back to him. The ending shows how the desire to hold a person accountable for their actions, however justifiable, could also victimize the targeted one. The scenario raises a crucial question. Does this sort of vigilante justice that upends hierarchy truly hold a person accountable? The take on cancel culture has always been ambiguous owing to how effective or how moral the trend is (Velasco 4). If the purpose of cancel culture is solely to right a wrong or oust wrongdoing so that the wrongdoer understands the repercussions of his/her words/actions, cancel culture is nothing but being woke. Nevertheless, cancelling someone the way Ipsit gets cancelled allows no scope for the wrongdoer to either have a second chance or think about redemption (Velasco 4). Ipsit’s room in the asylum becomes a dark mirror of a once glorified but vile self of the occupant. If the room can act as a space for self-reflection, the distorted numbers and words on the walls illustrate the dark image of a man who had cancelled the people around him.

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Even though “Forget Me Not” is based on Ray’s short story, the cancel culture and memory loss as portrayed in Ipsit’s cancelled self appears to take its inspiration from Charlie Brooker’s television series Black Mirror (Naahar). One of its episodes, titled “White Bear”, depicts how a criminal and cancel culture target, Victoria Skillane, is punished and held accountable for her actions. She had helped her fiancé, Iain Rannoch, to abduct, torture and murder Jemima Sykes, a young girl (Simpson and Lay 50). She is placed in the White Bear Justice Park where people hunt and torture her—a sort of “macabre recreation” of what she made Jemima Sykes go through (Simpson and Lay 50). In the park, “families can pay to participate as onlookers of Victoria’s punishment. Her memory is torturously extinguished every night so she can play out the same storyline the next day” (Simpson and Lay 51). Besides the physical and psychological torture Victoria goes through throughout the day, the final agonizing electrocution of her by the staff to wipe her memory, which eventually knocks her out, is indicative of Victoria unknowingly cancelling her identity and the staff knowingly cancelling Victoria Skillane’s existence. One of the most striking statements made by the staff of the White Bear Justice Park is that the onlookers are there to “enjoy themselves” (“White Bear” 38:55). The latter’s participation and happiness at seeing Victoria Skillane punished bears a striking resemblance to Ipsit’s underlings' state of mind while they carry out their hatched-up narrative/s. When Maggie visits Ipsit in the asylum, she points out that all those who had participated in the process of cancelling Ipsit took part in it willingly and gladly because they wanted to punish him. A parallel comparison of Victoria and Ipsit’s reasons to get cancelled is of course unthinkable, owing to the difference in the cruelty of their crimes. Yet, shockingly, they are both part of the surrogate justice system framed by the cancel culture. If for Victoria, the process of memory loss is rather quick, terrorising, excruciating and forced, for Ipsit, memory wiping is a gradual process as he painfully recognizes that his most precious faculty is crumbling. It is the group identity that Ipsit’s entourage maintains that leads them to view their act of cancelling Ipsit as a much-needed social justice. In Ipsit’s staff’s eyes, he is guilty of callousness, dismissiveness, cancellation of others and using others, and therefore do they consider that Ipsit deserves to be punished. Nevertheless, such actions do not necessarily classify him as a criminal. Victoria Skillane, on the contrary, aptly deserves the label of criminal. “Punishing criminals has been part of social life of millennia and looking to different traditions of justifying criminal punishments can help us make sense of Victoria’s bleak fate. One system endorsed by philosophers like Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and G. W. F. Hegel (1770–

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1831), views punishment as retribution for a person’s crimes. People are punished because they deserve it” (Simpson and Lay 51). Though Victoria’s memory is wiped, the onlookers’ disgusted reaction towards her indicates that regardless of whether Victoria remembers the graveness of her crime, she deserves to be punished. The same can be said about Ipsit too, especially because his underlings seem to revel in the loss of Ipsit’s memory and identity achieved by their successful cancellation of the cachet that Ipsit once represented. If for Victoria, the White Bear Justice Park symbolically becomes the black mirror through which she sees the dark side of herself and the society, for Ipsit, his room in the mental asylum reflects and reverberates his darkest, deepest fears, that of losing himself and his intellectual prowess. The philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson argues that “having the same body” even if a person’s memories or brain is removed indicates that there is a physiological continuity in the past/future identity of that person (Simpson and Lay 54). Meanwhile, Derek Parfit holds that if mental states, memories, beliefs and desires of a person continue in the past/future self even in trace amounts, there is a psychological continuity as well (Simpson and Lay 54). Perhaps these reasonings enable those who initiated the cancel culture drive of Ipsit and Victoria Skillane to accept that even after their memory is wiped, they both deserve to endure their wretched state of punishment. Ironically, when the narratives “White Bear” and “Forget Me Not” are viewed from a here and now basis, Ipsit’s cancelling met with its OTT viewers in 2020 while Victoria’s incidents in the “White Bear” came out in 2013. The former rightfully speak of a time where the notion of cancel culture is widely prevalent but the latter almost seems to prophesize the present world scenario. After all, in 2013, the now-viral trend of #cancel was absent, and the vibe of such a culture came to prominence only during the last three to four years. Thus, if “White Bear” has, in a way, foreshadowed the present-day virtual cancel culture, the possibility that the in-person cancel culture in “Forget Me Not” would transcend to the actual daily life is indeed startling. The cancel culture endorsed in “Forget Me Not” is a clear reflection of how contemporary society looks at wokeism, constant vigilance, one’s identity, maintaining the balance of power, and above all, using one’s agency to get justice for oneself. This claiming back of power echoes the idea that every deed and utterance has its own consequence, and one must own up to it. If one does not, the justice system of cancel culture will hold up the dreaded black mirror to push the target further and further down the rabbit hole of ostracization and psychological perplexity, eventually

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causing the individual/s to recognise and rectify their follies or cancel themselves.

Works Cited Chawla, Palak. “Calls for Boycott: Cancel Culture in India.” Media India Group, 20 June 2021, mediaindia.eu/culture/cancel-culture-in-india/. Accessed 15 Sept. 2021. Das, Vir. “Tribalism & Cancel Culture vs Comedy.” YouTube, uploaded by Vir Das COMEDY, 10 Aug. 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZW_vjRpXS7w. Dershowitz, Alan. The Latest Attack on Free Speech and Due Process.Hot Books, 2020. “Forget Me Not.” Ray, created by Srijit Mukherji, season 1, episode 1, Viacom 18 Studios, 2021. Netflix, www.netflix.com/in/title/81183492?s=a&trkid=13747225&t=wha&vla ng=en&clip=81244034. Accessed 18 Sept. 2021. Gupta, Ruchika. “Bepin Choudhury’s Lapse of Memory.” SuccessCDs, www.successcds.net/learn-english/class-8/bepin-choudhurys-lapse-ofmemoryclass-8-cbse-english.html. Accessed 12 Sept. 2021. Jha, Subhash K. “Apurva Asrani on Karthik Aryan Being Bullied by Bollywood’s Most Powerful Producers’ Caucus.” National Herald, 07 June 2021, www.nationalheraldindia.com/india/apurva-asrani-on-kartik-aaryanbeing-bullied-by-bollywoods-powerful-producers-caucus. Accessed 19 Aug. 2021. Matei, Adrienne. “Call-out Culture: How to Get it Right (and Wrong).” The Guardian, 01 Nov. 2019, www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/nov/01/call-out-cultureobama-social-media. Accessed 18 Sept. 2021. Mishan, Ligaya. “The Long and Tortured History of Cancel Culture.”The New York Times Style Magazine, 03 Dec. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/12/03/t-magazine/cancel-culture-history.html. Accessed 18 Sept. 2021. Naahar, Rohan. “Ray Review: Manoj Bajpayee, Harsh Varrdhan Kapoor Stand Out in Irreverent but Inconsistent Netflix Anthology.” Hindustan Times, 25 June 2021, www.hindustantimes.com/entertainment/webseries/ray-review-manoj-bajpayee-harsh-varrdhan-kapoor-stand-out-inirreverent-but-inconsistent-netflix-anthology-101624524741118.html. Accessed 26 Aug. 2021.

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Nijhara, Apoorva. “Here’s Why People Want to Boycott Dino Morea and Kunal Kapoor’s ‘The Empire’.” mensxp, 29 Aug. 2021, www.mensxp.com/entertainment/news/92699-people-want-to-boycottdino-morea-kunal-kapoors-the-empire.html. Accessed 11 July 2021. Thakare, Sanyukta. “Kartik Aryan to Be Replaced in Dostana 2 Due to Unprofessional Behaviour.” Filmibeat, 27 April. 2021, www.filmibeat.com/bollywood/news/2021/kartik-aaryan-to-bereplaced-in-dostana-2-due-to-unprofessional-behaviour-report312625.html. Accessed 26 Aug. 2021. Simpson, Sid, and Chris Lay. “White Bear and Criminal Punishment: How Far is too Far?” Black Mirror and Philosophy: Dark Reflections, edited by David Kyle Johnson, Wiley-Blackwell, 2020, pp. 50-58. Velasco, Joseph. “You are Cancelled: Virtual Collective Consciousness and the Emergence of Cancel Culture as Ideological Purging.” Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, vol. 12, no. 5, Oct. 2020, pp. 1–7, doi:10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s21n2. “White Bear.” Black Mirror, created by Charlie Brooker, season 2, episode 2, Endemol Shine UK, 2013. Netflix, www.netflix.com/in/title/70264888?s=a&trkid=13747225&t=wha&vla ng=en&clip=81030804. Accessed 10 July 2021.

CONTRIBUTORS

Jonathan Culler is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director of the Society for the Humanities, Cornell University. His Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature won MLA’s Lowell Prize and established his reputation as analyst and expositor of critical theory. Now known especially for On Deconstruction: Literature and Theory After Structuralism, and Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (which has been translated into some 27 languages), he published Theory of the Lyric (Harvard University Press) in the spring of 2015. Professor Culler has been President of the American Comparative Literature Association, Secretary of the American Council of Learned Societies and Chair of the New York Council for the Humanities. At Cornell he has served as chair of the departments of English, Comparative Literature, and Romance Studies, as well as Senior Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001 and to the American Philosophical Society in 2006. Dr. Kunhammad K K is Associate Professor of English at Kannur University, Kerala. He has 29 years of teaching experience at different universities including University of Calicut, Kannur University and University of Sharjah in the UAE. He has published two books on English Language and several articles in books and journals on various topics in areas such as Literary Theory, Philosophy and Literature and Cultural Studies. Dr. Arunlal K is an author, translator and speaker. He currently works as an Assistant Professor at the Department of English, Govt College Mokeri. He finished his PhD in Cultural Studies from the English and Foreign Languages University Hyderabad, and has worked with the faculty of Humanities at NIT Warangal before shifting to Kerala in 2010. He has worked with the International Shakespearean Desk, Dublin, on Localizing Shakespeare. Dr. Arunlal has written and published widely on issues concerning culture, philosophy and literature. His latest publications include “The Cult of Aliteracy, New Media Contexts and the Challenges to Intellectualism” (in Post-theory and the Discourses of the New, 2019) ‘A Study of Millennial Short-fiction’ (The Literary Criterion, 2018) “Spatial Logics in Poetry,” the cover article of The International Journal of

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European Studies (Sage, London, 2017) and a translation of Akbar Kakkattil’s stories (Luminous Books, 2017). He has currently 4 books to his credit including translations. Progress Books brought out his translation of Bertrand Russell in 2014 and Penguin published his collection of poems in 2015. He has contributed two entries to the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Aesthetics and Poetics from Sahitya Akademi. He has worked as an Assistant Director for two documentary films with Sathyan Odessa (Agnirekha, The Holy Cow). He is a member of the Panel of Resource Persons for UGC-HRDC Kerala University and Kannur University, a member of Board of Studies (Functional English) Calicut University, a member of the Pass Board Kannur University, academic counsellor at IGNOU, director of English Proficiency Program with CDC (under the Ministry of Labour and Employment) and is a Research Guide under Calicut University. Dr Pradeepkumar K teaches in the Department of English, Sri Vyasa NSS College, Wadakkanchery, Thrissur, Kerala. He has obtained his undergraduate and postgraduate degrees and Ph.D from the University of Calicut. He has been teaching English for the last 22 years to higher secondary and college classes. He is a Research Supervisor in the University of Calicut and is presently the Chairperson of the Board of Studies in English (UG) of the University of Calicut. His areas of interest are Cultural Studies, Ecocriticism and Postmodern Fiction while retaining an interest in poetry of all kind and nationality. Dr Pradeepkumar K is also an activist who identifies himself with Kerala Sasthrasahithya Parishath, a Peoples Science Movement. He has published four books with one more in the process of printing. He has many essays and academic articles to his credit. He was a member of the Core Resource Group of the State Council of Educational Research and Training, Kerala for the Conceptualisation and Production of Social Constructivist Textbooks for English at Higher Secondary level. Thulasi Das B, working as Assistant Professor of English, CKGM Government College, Perambra. He completed his M.Phil from Bharathidasan University, Trichy, and holds an MA in Philosophy and is pursuing MA in Sanskrit Language and Literature. He worked as Assistant Professor on contract at Dr. Janaki Ammal Campus, Palayad, Kannur University, and is presently pursuing PhD in English from the same institution. He has engaged plenary sessions in national and international seminars and colloquiums and also published various articles in journals and books.

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Contributors

Dr Prasanth V G is an Associate Professor of English at R Sankar Memorial SNDP Yogam College, Koyilandy and a research guide at St. Joseph's College, Devagiri, Calicut. He has taken his doctoral degree from Kannur University in the works of Shashi Tharoor and has presented papers in national/international seminars/webinars in India and abroad. He has 27 years of teaching experience and his area of interest includes theory, theatre and fiction. He has authored books and published articles in Scopus indexed as well as UGC listed journals. Ms Manchusha Madhusudhanan is a teacher of English for the past 20 years. Currently, she is stationed at Maharaja’s College Ernakulam, Kerala, as Assistant Professor in English. Her PhD thesis was approved from Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit Kalady, Ernakulam. Her MPhil dissertation related to Metis literature, from Institute of English Thiruvananthapuram, was submitted in 2002. She has to her credit five ISSN publications and has presented research papers at national and international seminars. Her areas of interest include cultural studies and postcolonial studies. Her area of specialisation is Cultural Studies and Memory Studies. She has also collaborated in writing English Textbooks for polytechnic colleges under the Department of Technical Education Kerala. Smrithi M. Venugopal is a research scholar in English pursuing her PhD programme in the Post Graduate and Research Department of English, St. Joseph’s College (Autonomous), Devagiri, Calicut. She is a Master of Arts in English (2016) from the University of Hyderabad. Sheron K.P.R. is a research scholar in Educational Psychology at Zakir Hussain Centre for Educational Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He pursued his MPhil in Educational Psychology (2012) from Jawaharlal Nehru University. Dr. Ninitte Rolence is presently working in Malabar Christian College as Assistant Professor in the Department of English. Her research area is Black Feminism. She has presented more than 10 research papers in national and international seminars and has 7 publications to her credit. Saigeetha S is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Malabar Christian College, Calicut. She has more than ten years of experience in the field of teaching. She has contributed to educational resources through Podcasts and YouTube Videos and not less than 10 publications. She teaches Grammar, Phonetics and Linguistics for

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Functional English. She has also served as Resource Person for topics pertaining to Communication Skills in English. Duna Liss Tom completed her Ph. D in English from Kannur University. She has published various articles in national and international journals. Her areas of interest include literary theory, European literature, film studies and culture studies. Anu Kuriakose teaches in the Department of English, Government Arts and Science College Kinanoor, Karinthalam, Kasargode. She was a UGCJRF in English and Womens Studies and completed PhD from the Department of Humanities, Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology Thiruvananthapuram Kerala. Her PhD dissertation critically examined the emerging trans space in the public sphere of Kerala and regional cinema. She is keenly interested in and published extensively on issues of trans identity and politics in contemporary Kerala, cultural practices, and media in reputed international journals. Her recent publication in South Asian Popular Culture (Routledge) is a critique of the construction of trans femininity in popular Malayalam films. Dr. Rafseena M is an Assistant Professor in English at the Department of Studies in English, Kannur University, Thalassery Campus, Palayad, Kannur, Kerala. Her areas of interest include British Literature, African American Literature, American Literature, Canadian Literature, Dalit Literature, Postcolonial Literature, and Women Writings. She has delivered three invited lectures. She has coordinated an International Colloquium, an International Webinar, a National Webinar and a workshop. She has coedited a book and published many research articles in International and National Journals as well as in edited volumes with ISBN. Dr. N Sajan is an academic with more than three decades of experience in college teaching. He retired from the Department of English, Sree Narayana College, Kannur, Kerala, in 2019 and since then he has been associated with the Department of Studies in English, Kannur University as a faculty member. His areas of interest include fiction, cinema, painting, food culture and local history. He has published several articles in accredited National and International journals. As a resource person he has lectured at various National and international seminars and workshops on Art and Literature and has also curated various art and photography exhibitions. He was a research associate in the making of a documentary film on the cave art at Edakkal in Wayanad.

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Contributors

Dr. Pinky Isha teaches English Literature and Communication at Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata. She has been teaching for a decade in colleges and universities across West Bengal, India and has presented at many international and national conferences, and her research publications centre areas such as folkloric studies, middle eastern literatures, and British and New literatures. She has published three books and is also a poet and creative writer. Milda Mary Savio has completed her under graduation from the University of Mysore and was the gold medalist in English and Sociology. She pursued Post-graduation in English from Kannur University and was the university first rank holder. Her MA Project was awarded the Best Dissertation Award at a national level dissertation competition. She has published various articles in national and international journals. Her areas of interest include literary theory, European literature, film studies and culture studies. Shivshankar Rajmohan. A. K is a UGC Senior Research Fellow in Kannur University. His doctoral thesis forms one of the pioneering attempts at capturing the absent dimension of ‘body’ in Kalarippayattu, the ancient martial art form of South India. His areas of interest include literary theory, culture studies, film studies, and performance studies. He has published over fifteen research papers in National/International journals and conducted over a dozen workshops on research methodology at various colleges in Kerala and Karnataka. Prasadita L. Raveendran is a Guest Faculty at the Post-graduate Department of English, Mangalore University, Karnataka, India. She also serves as the Resident Editor of a bilingual, tri-monthly Film Magazine Filmography, recognizing the space visual narrative literature occupies in the contemporary world. Other than academic publications, she also pens poetry, writes criticism on films, and often enjoys translating articles from Malayalam to English. Her film enthusiast attitude has led her to deliver a lecture about the Indian film industry on All India Radio, Kannur, Kerala. Besides being a passionate literature and language lover, she is also a trained student of Bharatanatyam, Folk Dance, and Classical Music.