This paper is a critical reading of the affective and emotional geographies imagined in the "Isla... more This paper is a critical reading of the affective and emotional geographies imagined in the "Islands" plot-line of Shubhangi Swarup's novel Latitudes of Longing (2018). The paper argues that Swarup presents the case of a rethinking environmental aesthetics that conveys a deeper sense of space, time, and place. By creating an ambient poetics to negotiate human and non-human interconnectedness, the paper demonstrates the strength of novelistic traditions and their potential to generate an idea of affect that is transcorporealas one not located only in the site of the human body, instead, emanating from a more nuanced interconnectedness between the human and the non-human world. Informed by 'affective ecocriticism' and Zayin Cabot's 'multiple ontologies approach' that generates 'ecologies of participation,' the paper closely reads the "Islands" section to establish how literary illustrations provide an instance to widen the horizons of environmental engagement and generate a narrative imagination that encompasses a larger ecosystem cutting across geological spacetimes in the Anthropocene. Swarup's use of fiction is critically used to generate an ecoaesthetics that leads to a more informed ethical action towards recognizing the interconnectedness of living and non-living forms that create sustainable ecologies.
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2020
This paper explores Samanth Subramanian's travel writing collection Following Fish: Travels aroun... more This paper explores Samanth Subramanian's travel writing collection Following Fish: Travels around the Indian Coast (2010) for its strength in establishing the significance of the human-non-human connection in the Indian coastline. Although a decade old, the work stands out even today for its strength in framing 'travel' from a non-terracentric point of view, as most travel writings have been often positioned. Subramanian's travel writing is an important departure from territorial historiographies via travel. His work traces the author's movement across India's coastal regions-the frontiers, as it were, of territoriality, literally following fish. Foregrounding a non-human subject as the travel writing's object of investigation, the paper deploys actor-network theory to analyze Subramanian's reconfiguration of the cultural imaginaries of India's coastlines via mobility thus reassembling the social of India's coastlines. His work, therefore, is argued to be an assemblage of the human and non-human actants creating a new water-based examination of socialities. Fish is the central node of his navigation of India's coastline assemblage, where he examines fish as food, as medicine, as commerce and as culture. By positing India's coastal regions as waterscapes to track movement of people, objects, and every day practices vis-à-vis fish, and moving inland with the fish in some instances, Subramanian's work does not merely function as a commentary on the coastlines, but also emphasizes the need to interrogate mobility and travel across waterscapes.
South Asian Review, Taylor and Francis Online, 2020
This paper is a critical reading of Amitav Ghosh’s fictional representation of modes of acquisiti... more This paper is a critical reading of Amitav Ghosh’s fictional representation of modes of acquisition, assimilation and dissemination of colonial knowledge in River of Smoke (2012). The paper highlights the cultural exchange of botanical and horticultural knowledge between Europe and China in the nineteenth century narrativized by Ghosh. The novel illustrates the significance of non-Eurocentric modes of conserving knowledge that would otherwise suffer from the violence of utilitarian models of European epistemology. The paper explicates how Ghosh represents the Chinese as successful in ensuring that the Golden Camellia – a rare flowering variety in China – is preserved from falling prey to the profiteering logic of botanical expeditions and epistemic hegemony by European naturalists. Using Pramod Nayar’s imperial cosmopolitanism and Robert Proctor’s agnotology as critical frames, the paper maps Ghosh’s fictional representation of Chinese horticulturists using botanical illustration to disable Europeans from accessing the Golden Camellia. By circulating the nonexistence of the plant variety as the truth, the Chinese horticulturalists in the novel prevent the Golden Camellia from being usurped and profiteered by European botanists and plant traders. The paper also establishes how Ghosh’s work functions as a significant addition to works foregrounding the South-South connection in the South Asian literary imagination.
The paper examines postcolonial concerns arising in and through the science fiction, "Delhi," by ... more The paper examines postcolonial concerns arising in and through the science fiction, "Delhi," by Vandana Singh as the author consciously deviates from generic conventions of the structures of Western science fiction. We argue that the protagonist in "Delhi" could be viewed as a postcolonial subject experiencing alienation and powerlessness. The character"s postcolonial subjectivity is traced through Singh"s manipulations of western science fiction tropes vis-à-vis time-travel, technology, dystopia, and narrative techniques. Using "abrogation" and "appropriation" (Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin, 1989), and Ricoeur"s Time and Narrative (1988), the paper analyses how postcolonial elements are foregrounded. It also examines the larger implications of engaging in a postcolonial reading of a science fiction text produced from a technologically developing Indian context.
The Department of English in a country like India too often witnesses contestations of varied kin... more The Department of English in a country like India too often witnesses contestations of varied kinds. Debates range from Macaulay's prod to the madness of the method and beyond. Identity crisis-that of the department and that of its members-is one such problematic context. Sidestepping desires to sing notes of self-congratulation, this paper attempts to self-reflexively critique the values, aspirations, practices and its resultant consequences in the Department of English, Christ University, Bangalore. Such a critique will look at specific issues, concerns of, and about English Studies at Christ, based on three experience-enabled narratives. The first narrative aims at exploring 1. complexities of a fresh " pocopomo " (postcolonial-postmodern) English Studies teacher in such a reputed, metropolitan institution, 2. complexities of locating Cultural Studies within an English Studies framework in the institution, and 3. complexities of studentship in such a context.
This paper examines the dialogic encounter between the spectator and the spectacle in the context... more This paper examines the dialogic encounter between the spectator and the spectacle in the context of war crimes and humanitarian disasters (in this context, the Sri Lankan Civil War) in Vanni Eli, a short film by a Sri Lankan tamizh diasporic filmmaker Tamiliam Subhas., The narrative introduces us not to the military disaster that is war but also to the humanitarian disasters effected through war. The paper studies the role of the spectator who 'witnesses' the torture, and thus complicates the ethics of both the act of torture and the viewing of it. By looking closely at the ingenious ways of narrating torture the paper argues that the creative representation of war and disaster implicates within its discourse not merely the participants and the victims of the war alone but also the " peripheral " subjects like the mice (the film's lead 'actors'), and by extension, the spectators participating in the discursive construction of the victimized. Despite the symbolic disembodiment and effacement of the tortured, their suffering is recognized as a humanitarian disaster with the shared grammar of suffering common to all 1 .
This paper is a critical reading of the affective and emotional geographies imagined in the "Isla... more This paper is a critical reading of the affective and emotional geographies imagined in the "Islands" plot-line of Shubhangi Swarup's novel Latitudes of Longing (2018). The paper argues that Swarup presents the case of a rethinking environmental aesthetics that conveys a deeper sense of space, time, and place. By creating an ambient poetics to negotiate human and non-human interconnectedness, the paper demonstrates the strength of novelistic traditions and their potential to generate an idea of affect that is transcorporealas one not located only in the site of the human body, instead, emanating from a more nuanced interconnectedness between the human and the non-human world. Informed by 'affective ecocriticism' and Zayin Cabot's 'multiple ontologies approach' that generates 'ecologies of participation,' the paper closely reads the "Islands" section to establish how literary illustrations provide an instance to widen the horizons of environmental engagement and generate a narrative imagination that encompasses a larger ecosystem cutting across geological spacetimes in the Anthropocene. Swarup's use of fiction is critically used to generate an ecoaesthetics that leads to a more informed ethical action towards recognizing the interconnectedness of living and non-living forms that create sustainable ecologies.
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2020
This paper explores Samanth Subramanian's travel writing collection Following Fish: Travels aroun... more This paper explores Samanth Subramanian's travel writing collection Following Fish: Travels around the Indian Coast (2010) for its strength in establishing the significance of the human-non-human connection in the Indian coastline. Although a decade old, the work stands out even today for its strength in framing 'travel' from a non-terracentric point of view, as most travel writings have been often positioned. Subramanian's travel writing is an important departure from territorial historiographies via travel. His work traces the author's movement across India's coastal regions-the frontiers, as it were, of territoriality, literally following fish. Foregrounding a non-human subject as the travel writing's object of investigation, the paper deploys actor-network theory to analyze Subramanian's reconfiguration of the cultural imaginaries of India's coastlines via mobility thus reassembling the social of India's coastlines. His work, therefore, is argued to be an assemblage of the human and non-human actants creating a new water-based examination of socialities. Fish is the central node of his navigation of India's coastline assemblage, where he examines fish as food, as medicine, as commerce and as culture. By positing India's coastal regions as waterscapes to track movement of people, objects, and every day practices vis-à-vis fish, and moving inland with the fish in some instances, Subramanian's work does not merely function as a commentary on the coastlines, but also emphasizes the need to interrogate mobility and travel across waterscapes.
South Asian Review, Taylor and Francis Online, 2020
This paper is a critical reading of Amitav Ghosh’s fictional representation of modes of acquisiti... more This paper is a critical reading of Amitav Ghosh’s fictional representation of modes of acquisition, assimilation and dissemination of colonial knowledge in River of Smoke (2012). The paper highlights the cultural exchange of botanical and horticultural knowledge between Europe and China in the nineteenth century narrativized by Ghosh. The novel illustrates the significance of non-Eurocentric modes of conserving knowledge that would otherwise suffer from the violence of utilitarian models of European epistemology. The paper explicates how Ghosh represents the Chinese as successful in ensuring that the Golden Camellia – a rare flowering variety in China – is preserved from falling prey to the profiteering logic of botanical expeditions and epistemic hegemony by European naturalists. Using Pramod Nayar’s imperial cosmopolitanism and Robert Proctor’s agnotology as critical frames, the paper maps Ghosh’s fictional representation of Chinese horticulturists using botanical illustration to disable Europeans from accessing the Golden Camellia. By circulating the nonexistence of the plant variety as the truth, the Chinese horticulturalists in the novel prevent the Golden Camellia from being usurped and profiteered by European botanists and plant traders. The paper also establishes how Ghosh’s work functions as a significant addition to works foregrounding the South-South connection in the South Asian literary imagination.
The paper examines postcolonial concerns arising in and through the science fiction, "Delhi," by ... more The paper examines postcolonial concerns arising in and through the science fiction, "Delhi," by Vandana Singh as the author consciously deviates from generic conventions of the structures of Western science fiction. We argue that the protagonist in "Delhi" could be viewed as a postcolonial subject experiencing alienation and powerlessness. The character"s postcolonial subjectivity is traced through Singh"s manipulations of western science fiction tropes vis-à-vis time-travel, technology, dystopia, and narrative techniques. Using "abrogation" and "appropriation" (Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin, 1989), and Ricoeur"s Time and Narrative (1988), the paper analyses how postcolonial elements are foregrounded. It also examines the larger implications of engaging in a postcolonial reading of a science fiction text produced from a technologically developing Indian context.
The Department of English in a country like India too often witnesses contestations of varied kin... more The Department of English in a country like India too often witnesses contestations of varied kinds. Debates range from Macaulay's prod to the madness of the method and beyond. Identity crisis-that of the department and that of its members-is one such problematic context. Sidestepping desires to sing notes of self-congratulation, this paper attempts to self-reflexively critique the values, aspirations, practices and its resultant consequences in the Department of English, Christ University, Bangalore. Such a critique will look at specific issues, concerns of, and about English Studies at Christ, based on three experience-enabled narratives. The first narrative aims at exploring 1. complexities of a fresh " pocopomo " (postcolonial-postmodern) English Studies teacher in such a reputed, metropolitan institution, 2. complexities of locating Cultural Studies within an English Studies framework in the institution, and 3. complexities of studentship in such a context.
This paper examines the dialogic encounter between the spectator and the spectacle in the context... more This paper examines the dialogic encounter between the spectator and the spectacle in the context of war crimes and humanitarian disasters (in this context, the Sri Lankan Civil War) in Vanni Eli, a short film by a Sri Lankan tamizh diasporic filmmaker Tamiliam Subhas., The narrative introduces us not to the military disaster that is war but also to the humanitarian disasters effected through war. The paper studies the role of the spectator who 'witnesses' the torture, and thus complicates the ethics of both the act of torture and the viewing of it. By looking closely at the ingenious ways of narrating torture the paper argues that the creative representation of war and disaster implicates within its discourse not merely the participants and the victims of the war alone but also the " peripheral " subjects like the mice (the film's lead 'actors'), and by extension, the spectators participating in the discursive construction of the victimized. Despite the symbolic disembodiment and effacement of the tortured, their suffering is recognized as a humanitarian disaster with the shared grammar of suffering common to all 1 .
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