Shortly after India conducted five nuclear tests in May 1998, the outspoken Hindu nationalist lea... more Shortly after India conducted five nuclear tests in May 1998, the outspoken Hindu nationalist leader Balasaheb Thackeray declared, “[w]e had to prove that we are not eunuchs.” Euphoric celebrations that were sparked across the country heralded a moment when India had finally found “apparent” access—through the thermonuclear bomb—to the global currency of geo-political domination. While Balasaheb Thackeray’s rhetoric supposedly assured Indian atomic publics that the postcolonial bomb had culminated the crisis of masculinity—plaguing the subcontinent since the onset of colonization—it also emphasized the systemic gendered narrative underlying the nuclear public sphere. I argue that such performances of “radioactive masculinity” trace their lineage back to the Cold War: of nuclear weapons finding resonance in images of white hegemonic masculinity. This idealized masculinity is fluid and cannot be tangibly or materially realized, much like the constantly decaying radioactive nuclear bomb on which it is modeled. The desire of trying to achieve this idealized and hardened male body is itself responsible for creating an anxiety; an anxiety that “since 1945, the people of India and Pakistan have been subject[ed] to, [through] the institutionalized terror represented by the…Cold War” (Itty Abraham).
In illustrating the unrecognized linkages between the nuclear bomb and the anxious masculine performances of atomic publics, I show the continued legacy of the Cold War on postcolonial subjectivities, as well as its effects on the South Asian public sphere.
Affordances offered by new media platforms are perceived as revolutionary instruments for removin... more Affordances offered by new media platforms are perceived as revolutionary instruments for removing the inequities of access to health promotion and communication. However, the production and dissemination of health promotional material on digital platforms does not necessarily translate into uniform access across diverse demographics. This article addresses the lacuna when it comes to analyzing Health Promotion initiatives in India, with a specific focus on the governmental publicity carried out on social media during the four phases of COVID-19 national lockdown between 24 March and 31 May 2020. Our intervention examines how governmental social media health promotion in India played a key role in shaping the 'outbreak narrative' during the lockdown across different levels of social and economic privilege. Through a combination of quantitative data analysis and qualitative interview methods, this article analyzes the circulation and impact of official publicity in online and offline spaces, during the COVID-19 lockdown in India. Resultant findings allow for a comprehensive assessment of whether such publicity contributed to democratized citizen science discourses: enabling social protection measures for vulnerable majorities or potentially reified the existing privileges of the economically and socially affluent minority. We find that health promotion campaigns during a pandemic must focus on reaching the widest possible audience in the most efficient manner. Specifically, in the Indian context, health promotion through mass-media like Television and Radio, and participatory media platforms needed to be implemented in tandem with new media platforms, to achieve required engagement with vulnerable communities on key health issues.
Shortly after India conducted five nuclear tests in May 1998, the outspoken Hindu nationalist lea... more Shortly after India conducted five nuclear tests in May 1998, the outspoken Hindu nationalist leader Balasaheb Thackeray declared, “[w]e had to prove that we are not eunuchs.” Euphoric celebrations that were sparked across the country heralded a moment when India had finally found “apparent” access—through the thermonuclear bomb—to the global currency of geo-political domination. While Balasaheb Thackeray’s rhetoric supposedly assured Indian atomic publics that the postcolonial bomb had culminated the crisis of masculinity—plaguing the subcontinent since the onset of colonization—it also emphasized the systemic gendered narrative underlying the nuclear public sphere. I argue that such performances of “radioactive masculinity” trace their lineage back to the Cold War: of nuclear weapons finding resonance in images of white hegemonic masculinity. This idealized masculinity is fluid and cannot be tangibly or materially realized, much like the constantly decaying radioactive nuclear bomb on which it is modeled. The desire of trying to achieve this idealized and hardened male body is itself responsible for creating an anxiety; an anxiety that “since 1945, the people of India and Pakistan have been subject[ed] to, [through] the institutionalized terror represented by the…Cold War” (Itty Abraham).
In illustrating the unrecognized linkages between the nuclear bomb and the anxious masculine performances of atomic publics, I show the continued legacy of the Cold War on postcolonial subjectivities, as well as its effects on the South Asian public sphere.
Affordances offered by new media platforms are perceived as revolutionary instruments for removin... more Affordances offered by new media platforms are perceived as revolutionary instruments for removing the inequities of access to health promotion and communication. However, the production and dissemination of health promotional material on digital platforms does not necessarily translate into uniform access across diverse demographics. This article addresses the lacuna when it comes to analyzing Health Promotion initiatives in India, with a specific focus on the governmental publicity carried out on social media during the four phases of COVID-19 national lockdown between 24 March and 31 May 2020. Our intervention examines how governmental social media health promotion in India played a key role in shaping the 'outbreak narrative' during the lockdown across different levels of social and economic privilege. Through a combination of quantitative data analysis and qualitative interview methods, this article analyzes the circulation and impact of official publicity in online and offline spaces, during the COVID-19 lockdown in India. Resultant findings allow for a comprehensive assessment of whether such publicity contributed to democratized citizen science discourses: enabling social protection measures for vulnerable majorities or potentially reified the existing privileges of the economically and socially affluent minority. We find that health promotion campaigns during a pandemic must focus on reaching the widest possible audience in the most efficient manner. Specifically, in the Indian context, health promotion through mass-media like Television and Radio, and participatory media platforms needed to be implemented in tandem with new media platforms, to achieve required engagement with vulnerable communities on key health issues.
This paper is set within the context of a rapidly urbanizing India
with shrinking avenues of phys... more This paper is set within the context of a rapidly urbanizing India with shrinking avenues of physical play and social engagement. The loss of traditional play spaces has redefined leisure activities for youth beyond offline sites into online spaces. These newer leisure engagements including gaming, binge-watching and social media interactions are predominantly virtual and sedentary. This shift, and the restrictions in their physical movements, reduce youth interactions with their social and material environments. Operationalizing Soja’s “Thirdspace,” this paper argues that Pok emon Go generates hybrid habitats at the confluence of leisure, youth, and digital gaming. Through qualitative interviews and co-playing sessions, this study draws from an engagement experience pool spanning 400 h of gameplay with five respondents in the Indian context. It examines how the everyday leisure activities of youth in augmented environments can lead to new spatio-cultural meanings, redefine immediate social environments, and create dynamic possibilities for youth development.
This article examines representative games from Zapak.com:
India’s most-popular gaming website (h... more This article examines representative games from Zapak.com: India’s most-popular gaming website (highest number of daily visitors) to conceptualize the relationship between masculinity and colonialism within digital geographies, in postcolonial spaces. Three of the four games chosen here, Sleeping at the Meeting, Zombie Pirate and Yoga Teacher, are representative of games categorized as ‘Girl’s Games’ on Zapak.com: where the ludic engagement is limited to dressing and undressing of white women in a variety of professional or social contexts. The fourth game Bipasha’s Beach Blaze is a continuation of such reductive stereotyping, albeit in the different but culturally significant site of Bollywood. The four games were selected using a case-study methodology and represent discrete but related artifacts. Following a survey of key literature, the authors address the limitations of traditional game studies approaches and propose a replicable methodology located at the intersection of two epistemic frames: one of critical masculinity studies and the other of ludology. Through analyzing the strategic ideologies behind the production, circulation and the game-play of these digital artifacts we argue that Zapak.com not only enables online sexism but also becomes a representative digital space where anxious performances of postcolonial masculinity – that has its historical basis in India’s colonial legacy – can be materialized. Further in highlighting the status of these ‘Girl’s Games’ as artifacts that do not allow for any substantial ludic or narrative involvement – we emphasize the need to constantly interrogate digital spaces as sites where hegemonic ideologies about race, gender and colonialism are reproduced and reified.
Rivista di Studi Americani Journal of AISNA / Italian Association of North American Studies, 2020
Eschatological expressions underwent an epistemic shift with the Trinity tests on July 16, 1945 f... more Eschatological expressions underwent an epistemic shift with the Trinity tests on July 16, 1945 from an imaginative practice of predicting futurity to a cataclysmic vision of complete annihilation. Motifs of literacy while seldom discussed, share a self-reflexive relation with nuclearization and cultural productions of the apocalypse, since the specialized nature of nuclear technology transforms nuclear discourses into signifiers of power: a form of cultural capital that emerges from and simultaneously legitimizes nuclear weapons. This intervention emphasizes how the epistemic violence of strategic nuclear imaginaries—employed through the constant anxiety of an anticipated nuclear catastrophe—can be countered through a critical literacy opposed to both martial ideologies as well as the instrumentalization of weaponized nuclear technology. Considering the current turbulence of an always already global nuclear landscape, this article examines two contemporary cinematic renderings of post-nuclear apocalyptic spaces, The Book of Eli (2010) and The Matrix (1999), to argue that any act of culturally representing/articulating the nuclear disaster is always an act of tangible recovery. In conclusion, I note that by uncovering the terrible realities of nuclear conflict and the dehumanization implicit in sophisticated techno-strategic paradigms, these artifacts from American nuclear culture which are also coextensive with nuclear countercultures everywhere, show the emancipatory possibilities of humane community-oriented critical literacies.
This article examines representative games from Zapak.com:
India’s most-popular gaming website (h... more This article examines representative games from Zapak.com: India’s most-popular gaming website (highest number of daily visitors) to conceptualize the relationship between masculinity and colonialism within digital geographies, in postcolonial spaces. Three of the four games chosen here, Sleeping at the Meeting, Zombie Pirate and Yoga Teacher, are representative of games categorized as ‘Girl’s Games’ on Zapak.com: where the ludic engagement is limited to dressing and undressing of white women in a variety of professional or social contexts. The fourth game Bipasha’s Beach Blaze is a continuation of such reductive stereotyping, albeit in the different but culturally significant site of Bollywood. The four games were selected using a case-study methodology and represent discrete but related artifacts. Following a survey of key literature, the authors address the limitations of traditional game studies approaches and propose a replicable methodology located at the intersection of two epistemic frames: one of critical masculinity studies and the other of ludology. Through analyzing the strategic ideologies behind the production, circulation and the game-play of these digital artifacts we argue that Zapak.com not only enables online sexism but also becomes a representative digital space where anxious performances of postcolonial masculinity – that has its historical basis in India’s colonial legacy – can be materialized. Further in highlighting the status of these ‘Girl’s Games’ as artifacts that do not allow for any substantial ludic or narrative involvement – we emphasize the need to constantly interrogate digital spaces as sites where hegemonic ideologies about race, gender and colonialism are reproduced and reified.
Illicit Motherhood: Recrafting Postcolonial Feminist Resistance in Edna O’Brien’s The Love Object and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Hell-Heaven, 2019
Cultural constructions of passive motherhood, especially within domestic spaces, gained currency ... more Cultural constructions of passive motherhood, especially within domestic spaces, gained currency in India and Ireland due to their shared colonial history, as well as the influence of anti-colonial masculinist nationalism on the social imaginary of these two nations. However, beginning from the latter half of the nineteenth century, postcolonial literary voices have not only challenged the traditional gendering of public and private spaces but also interrogated docile constructions of womanhood, particularly essentialized representations of maternity. Domestic spaces have been critical narrative motifs in these postcolonial texts through simultaneously embodying patriarchal domination but also as sites where feminist resistance can be actualized by "transgress(ing) traditional views of. .. the home, as a static immobile place of oppression". This paper, through a comparative analysis of maternal characters in Edna O'Brien's The Love Object and Jhumpa Lahiri's Hell-Heaven, argues that socially disapproved/illicit relationships in these two representative postcolonial Irish and Indian narratives function as matricentric feminist tactics that subvert limiting notions of both domestic spaces and gendered liminal postcolonial subjectivities. I highlight that within the context of male-centered colonial and nationalist literature, the trope of maternity configures the domestic-space as the "rightful place" for the existence of the feminine entity. Thus, when postcolonial feminist fiction reverses this tradition through constructing the "home and the female-body" as sites of possible resistance, it is a counter against dual oppression: both colonialism and patriarchy. My intervention further underscores the need for sustained conversations between the literary output of India and Ireland, within Postcolonial Literary Studies, with a particular acknowledgement for space and gender as pivotal categories in the "cultural analysis of empire".
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2018
On May 11, 1998, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the Indian prime minister and leader of the ruling Hindu n... more On May 11, 1998, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the Indian prime minister and leader of the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP), proudly proclaimed that under the aegis of Operation Shakti (Power) India had gone nuclear – again. Four days later, continuing this narrative of postcolonial progress through aggressive nuclear nationalism, he visited the Pokhran nuclear testing desert range in Rajasthan and commemorated this achievement by spreading flowers on the very crater left by the blasts. However, only six kilometres away at Khetoloi village, the Bishnoi tribe – the oldest eco-conservationists in Asia – were protesting against the devastating health effects of nuclear tests on their community. Significantly,the plight of Bishnois that has been denied by the Indian nuclear complex and elided systematically from state narratives became the major thematic preoccupation for both Amitav Ghosh’s non-fictional treatise Countdown (1998) and Anand Patwardhan’s anti-nuclear documentary War and Peace (2002). This essay traces the seldom discussed yet immensely problematic, epistemic function of military–industrial complexes around the world. I illustrate how knowledge apparatuses emerging from the nuclear bomb are always already gendered and racialized, and sponsor literacies of power in favour of nuclearization. These pro-nuclear literacy primers construct postcolonial nuclear weapon states as atomic subalterns, while simultaneously provoking the troubling counter-discourses of nuclear nationalism, which perceive nuclearization as a strategy of postcolonial resistance. I argue Ghosh and Patwardhan’s texts explicate the subjectivity of the real atomic subalterns: the victims of nuclearization who are successfully elided from state-sponsored hegemonic nuclear historiography. In emphasizing Rey Chow’s assertion of “the atomic bomb as an epistemic event,” I point out that Ghosh and Patwardhan’s texts perform a postmodern critique of dominant nuclear historiography and represent nucliteracy: a literacy of social practice, which acknowledges multiple stakeholders and differing perspectives within the nuclear domain.
The political partition of India in 1947 into a truncated India and the dominion of Pakistan witn... more The political partition of India in 1947 into a truncated India and the dominion of Pakistan witnessed a wave of forced migration, hitherto unseen in human history. The alteration of a singular national space into two separate nation-states based on religious identities forced the movement of almost twelve million people, in search of a new homeland. Although this exodus was experienced differently based on socioeconomic backgrounds—unfortunately in ways akin to any violent transition—women formed the most susceptible ground to the rigours of the Partition. Gross and barbarous acts of violence perpetuated against women were derived from a hypermasculinized nationalist ideology: one that perceived women's bodies as sites where national and religious identities needed to be forcibly inscribed. Partition historiography, however, has frequently privileged only the political circumstances and elided the traumatic human micro-histories, which dominated and continue to impinge on postcolonial subjectivities. This article explores a key facet of Partition history, which has often been relegated to the footnotes of both political and social narratives: transitory rehabilitation camps established primarily for the recovery of female refugees. Through an analysis of non-fictional testimonies and selected Partition fiction, I demonstrate how the transformation of these refugee rehabilitation camps—from transitory non-places into referential spatial locations or places—was facilitated through the quotidian performances of the female Partition Refugee.
In both USA and India, nuclear bomb tests were first carried out and continue to be implemented i... more In both USA and India, nuclear bomb tests were first carried out and continue to be implemented in marginalized sites—Native American reservations and Bishnoi territory—inhabited by non-normative subjectivities. Nuclear proliferation emerging from such soft spaces (Williams) is always concomitant with performances of what I term as radioactive masculinity: a very specific form of militarized masculinity emerging from the contingent association between privileged and gendered bodies, and the nuclear bomb
By juxtaposing Native American perspectives on the bomb, represented by Leslie Silko’s Ceremony, with socio-legal artifacts from the Bishnoi tribal community in Rajasthan (India) I argue that tactical storytelling creates postcolonial ecologies, which recovers minoritarian perspectives about nuclearization and disrupts the strategic ideologies of Anglo-American modernity. I further emphasize that by not trying to represent the Other, both the Bishnoi texts and Ceremony belong to the domain of planetarity (Spivak) and question the globalizing narrative of disciplines like Postcolonialism and Ecocriticism.
Examining the Evolution of Gaming and Its Impact on Social, Cultural, and Political Perspectives, 2016
Join My Mailing List. Angela Coco. Southern Cross University. Senior Lecturer, School of Arts &am... more Join My Mailing List. Angela Coco. Southern Cross University. Senior Lecturer, School of Arts & Social Sciences; Contact Information; Curriculum Vitae [PDF]. ... Games people play. Angela Coco, Southern Cross University. Suggested Citation. ...
This article explores the predominance of mundane everyday tasks within the World of Warcraft (Wo... more This article explores the predominance of mundane everyday tasks within the World of Warcraft (WoW) gamespace to emphasize the importance of the quotidian within this purported heroic environment. The importance of what is understood to be ordinary-everyday-tasks in accomplishing heroic quests, I argue, challenges popular and scholarly perceptions of WoW, as a gendered gaming space based in heroic time and presumably inhabited by skilled male technocrats. I illustrate that the WoW game-environment, in offering players the option of in-game progression not only through slaying dragons but also by picking herbs and sewing clothes makes a definite rupture in the idea of heroic temporality, which is traditionally understood as masculine while the everyday is essentialized as feminine. Without gendering any task as either feminine or masculine I assert that heroic identity in WoW is extensively influenced by everyday ennui, to the extent that maintenance of heroic status quo often means a regular engagement with the quotidian. By allowing for the possibility of gameplay in multiple temporal modes WoW challenges social constructions of heroic time as masculine and everyday time as feminine. In doing so these multiple temporalities open out possibilities for perceiving the WoW landscape as ideal for resisting hegemonies of masculinized heroism and the creation and sustenance of alternative modes of agency.
Exploding bombs embedded with catastrophic potential have remained central to our eschatological ... more Exploding bombs embedded with catastrophic potential have remained central to our eschatological conceptualizations for more than a century. Future war fiction—a key sub-genre of speculative fiction—in building upon this obsession introduces us to unforeseen apocalyptic settings, which are brought forth through a nexus between gendered bodies and destructive military machinery. In underscoring the decidedly masculine nature of future war fiction, this article explores depictions of anxious postcolonial masculinity within the little-explored terrain of Indian speculative fiction. Apocalyptic settings in these texts, I argue, provide a topos for enacting postcolonial masculine anxieties, which are subsequently countered through making male bodies contingent on the volatile performances of destructive military technology. In utilizing R.W Connell’s conceptualization of “hegemonic masculinity,” I explore the reasons behind the emergence of postcolonial masculine insecurities, which, I argue, results from India’s colonial history and its continued legacy within the subcontinent. Finally, my examination of representative Indian speculative texts, namely Mainak Dhar’s Line of Control (2009) and Sami Ahmad Khan’s Red Jihad (2012) emphasizes that making hegemonic postcolonial masculinity contingent on the destructive capabilities of military technology results in unstable and threatening masculine performances; much like the unpredictable nature of war machinery highlighted in these texts.
Summary Affordances offered by new media platforms are perceived as revolutionary instruments for... more Summary Affordances offered by new media platforms are perceived as revolutionary instruments for removing the inequities of access to health promotion and communication. However, the production and dissemination of health promotional material on digital platforms does not necessarily translate into uniform access across diverse demographics. This article addresses the lacuna when it comes to analyzing Health Promotion initiatives in India, with a specific focus on the governmental publicity carried out on social media during the four phases of COVID-19 national lockdown between 24 March and 31 May 2020. Our intervention examines how governmental social media health promotion in India played a key role in shaping the ‘outbreak narrative’ during the lockdown across different levels of social and economic privilege. Through a combination of quantitative data analysis and qualitative interview methods, this article analyzes the circulation and impact of official publicity in online and...
The absence of an entry on digital humanities in the last volume of The Year’s Work in Critical a... more The absence of an entry on digital humanities in the last volume of The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory due to the Covid-19 pandemic as well as the exacerbation of academic precarity (that was acknowledged in the editorial preface of the last volume) predicates that this chapter develop a narrative bibliography of notable scholarship in the digital humanities from both 2021 and 2022. Therefore the unprecedented circumstances that have extended the scope of scholarly review for this chapter beyond a single chronological year also provide the unique opportunity to not only ‘trace and expand upon currents in critical and cultural theory, and to engage in [the] areas’ key debates’ (Quinn and Ghosh, ‘Preface’ to YWCCT 2022) but also (and more importantly, one might argue) understand some of the radical thematic transformations brought about and anticipated by the legacies, presents, and futures of digital humanities within the supposedly ‘new normal’ of a post-Covid world. Th...
This paper is set within the context of a rapidly urbanizing India with shrinking avenues of phys... more This paper is set within the context of a rapidly urbanizing India with shrinking avenues of physical play and social engagement. The loss of traditional play spaces has redefined leisure activities for youth beyond offline sites into online spaces. These newer leisure engagements including gaming, binge-watching and social media interactions are predominantly virtual and sedentary. This shift, and the restrictions in their physical movements, reduce youth interactions with their social and material environments. Operationalizing Soja’s “Thirdspace,” this paper argues that Pokemon Go generates hybrid habitats at the confluence of leisure, youth, and digital gaming. Through qualitative interviews and co-playing sessions, this study draws from an engagement experience pool spanning 400 h of gameplay with five respondents in the Indian context. It examines how the everyday leisure activities of youth in augmented environments can lead to new spatio-cultural meanings, redefine immediate social environments, and create dynamic possibilities for youth development.
Eschatological expressions underwent an epistemic shift with the Trinity tests on July 16, 1945 f... more Eschatological expressions underwent an epistemic shift with the Trinity tests on July 16, 1945 from an imaginative practice of predicting futurity to a cataclysmic vision of complete annihilation. Motifs of literacy while seldom discussed, share a self-reflexive relation with nuclearization and cultural productions of the apocalypse, since the specialized nature of nuclear technology transforms nuclear discourses into signifiers of power: a form of cultural capital that emerges from and simultaneously legitimizes nuclear weapons. This intervention emphasizes how the epistemic violence of strategic nuclear imaginaries—employed through the constant anxiety of an anticipated nuclear catastrophe—can be countered through a critical literacy opposed to both martial ideologies as well as the instrumentalization of weaponized nuclear technology. Considering the current turbulence of an always already global nuclear landscape, this article examines two contemporary cinematic renderings of post-nuclear apocalyptic spaces, The Book of Eli (2010) and The Matrix (1999), to argue that any act of culturally representing/articulating the nuclear disaster is always an act of tangible recovery. In conclusion, I note that by uncovering the terrible realities of nuclear conflict and the dehumanization implicit in sophisticated techno-strategic paradigms, these artifacts from American nuclear culture which are also coextensive with nuclear countercultures everywhere, show the emancipatory possibilities of humane community-oriented critical literacies.
This article examines representative games from Zapak.com: India’s most-popular gaming website (h... more This article examines representative games from Zapak.com: India’s most-popular gaming website (highest number of daily visitors) to conceptualize the relationship between masculinity and coloniali...
On May 11, 1998, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the Indian prime minister and leader of the ruling Hindu n... more On May 11, 1998, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the Indian prime minister and leader of the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP), proudly proclaimed that under the aegis of Operation Shakti (Power) India had gone nuclear – again. Four days later, continuing this narrative of postcolonial progress through aggressive nuclear nationalism, he visited the Pokhran nuclear testing desert range in Rajasthan and commemorated this achievement by spreading flowers on the very crater left by the blasts. However, only six kilometres away at Khetoloi village, the Bishnoi tribe – the oldest eco-conservationists in Asia – were protesting against the devastating health effects of nuclear tests on their community. Significantly, the plight of Bishnois that has been denied by the Indian nuclear complex and elided systematically from state narratives became the major thematic preoccupation for both Amitav Ghosh’s non-fictional treatise Countdown (1998) and Anand Patwardhan’s anti-nuclear documentary War and Peace (2002). This essay traces the seldom discussed yet immensely problematic, epistemic function of military–industrial complexes around the world. I illustrate how knowledge apparatuses emerging from the nuclear bomb are always already gendered and racialized, and sponsor literacies of power in favour of nuclearization. These pro-nuclear literacy primers construct postcolonial nuclear weapon states as atomic subalterns, while simultaneously provoking the troubling counter-discourses of nuclear nationalism, which perceive nuclearization as a strategy of postcolonial resistance. I argue Ghosh and Patwardhan’s texts explicate the subjectivity of the real atomic subalterns: the victims of nuclearization who are successfully elided from state-sponsored hegemonic nuclear historiography. In emphasizing Rey Chow’s assertion of “the atomic bomb as an epistemic event,” I point out that Ghosh and Patwardhan’s texts perform a postmodern critique of dominant nuclear historiography and represent nucliteracy: a literacy of social practice, which acknowledges multiple stakeholders and differing perspectives within the nuclear domain.
Cultural constructions of passive motherhood, especially within domestic spaces, gained currency ... more Cultural constructions of passive motherhood, especially within domestic spaces, gained currency in India and Ireland due to their shared colonial history, as well as the influence of anti-colonial masculinist nationalism on the social imaginary of these two nations. However, beginning from the latter half of the nineteenth century, postcolonial literary voices have not only challenged the traditional gendering of public and private spaces but also interrogated docile constructions of womanhood, particularly essentialized representations of maternity. Domestic spaces have been critical narrative motifs in these postcolonial texts through simultaneously embodying patriarchal domination but also as sites where feminist resistance can be actualized by “transgress(ing) traditional views of … the home, as a static immobile place of oppression”. This paper, through a comparative analysis of maternal characters in Edna O’Brien’s The Love Object and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Hell-Heaven, argues that ...
Cultural constructions of passive motherhood, especially within domestic spaces, gained currency ... more Cultural constructions of passive motherhood, especially within domestic spaces, gained currency in India and Ireland due to their shared colonial history, as well as the influence of anti-colonial masculinist nationalism on the social imaginary of these two nations. However, beginning from the latter half of the nineteenth century, postcolonial literary voices have not only challenged the traditional gendering of public and private spaces but also interrogated docile constructions of womanhood, particularly essentialized representations of maternity. Domestic spaces have been critical narrative motifs in these postcolonial texts through simultaneously embodying patriarchal domination but also as sites where feminist resistance can be actualized by “transgress(ing) traditional views of … the home, as a static immobile place of oppression”. This paper, through a comparative analysis of maternal characters in Edna O’Brien’s The Love Object and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Hell-Heaven, argues that ...
Examining the Evolution of Gaming and Its Impact on Social, Cultural, and Political Perspectives
The study of various choices made while producing and playing games allows little opportunity for... more The study of various choices made while producing and playing games allows little opportunity for interrogating video games as a transcultural convergence of multiple subjectivities and institutions. This chapter speaks to this topic by presenting the Computer Games Across Cultures (CGAC) project. CGAC involved humanities researchers from West Virginia University (USA), Bangor University (Wales), and Jawaharlal Nehru University (India) who over a two-year period sought to understand creative and cultural aspects of gaming. CGAC's researchers employed both qualitative and quantitative methodologies to bridge the gap between the academic explorations of gaming in tandem with industry-specific practices within such spaces. This chapter provides an overview of the resultant work through its analysis of a cross-section of games. Examining both Western mainstream games and lesser known games from places like India and Ghana helped interrogate representational politics in videogames an...
Uploads
Conference Presentations
I argue that such performances of “radioactive masculinity” trace their lineage back to the Cold War: of nuclear weapons finding resonance in images of white hegemonic masculinity. This idealized masculinity is fluid and cannot be tangibly or materially realized, much like the constantly decaying radioactive nuclear bomb on which it is modeled. The desire of trying to achieve this idealized and hardened male body is itself responsible for creating an anxiety; an anxiety that “since 1945, the people of India and Pakistan have been subject[ed] to, [through] the institutionalized terror represented by the…Cold War” (Itty Abraham).
In illustrating the unrecognized linkages between the nuclear bomb and the anxious masculine performances of atomic publics, I show the continued legacy of the Cold War on postcolonial subjectivities, as well as its effects on the South Asian public sphere.
Publications
I argue that such performances of “radioactive masculinity” trace their lineage back to the Cold War: of nuclear weapons finding resonance in images of white hegemonic masculinity. This idealized masculinity is fluid and cannot be tangibly or materially realized, much like the constantly decaying radioactive nuclear bomb on which it is modeled. The desire of trying to achieve this idealized and hardened male body is itself responsible for creating an anxiety; an anxiety that “since 1945, the people of India and Pakistan have been subject[ed] to, [through] the institutionalized terror represented by the…Cold War” (Itty Abraham).
In illustrating the unrecognized linkages between the nuclear bomb and the anxious masculine performances of atomic publics, I show the continued legacy of the Cold War on postcolonial subjectivities, as well as its effects on the South Asian public sphere.
with shrinking avenues of physical play and social engagement. The
loss of traditional play spaces has redefined leisure activities for
youth beyond offline sites into online spaces. These newer leisure
engagements including gaming, binge-watching and social media
interactions are predominantly virtual and sedentary. This shift, and
the restrictions in their physical movements, reduce youth interactions
with their social and material environments. Operationalizing
Soja’s “Thirdspace,” this paper argues that Pok emon Go generates
hybrid habitats at the confluence of leisure, youth, and digital gaming.
Through qualitative interviews and co-playing sessions, this
study draws from an engagement experience pool spanning 400 h
of gameplay with five respondents in the Indian context. It examines
how the everyday leisure activities of youth in augmented environments
can lead to new spatio-cultural meanings, redefine immediate
social environments, and create dynamic possibilities for youth
development.
India’s most-popular gaming website (highest number of
daily visitors) to conceptualize the relationship between
masculinity and colonialism within digital geographies, in
postcolonial spaces. Three of the four games chosen here,
Sleeping at the Meeting, Zombie Pirate and Yoga Teacher, are
representative of games categorized as ‘Girl’s Games’ on
Zapak.com: where the ludic engagement is limited to dressing
and undressing of white women in a variety of professional
or social contexts. The fourth game Bipasha’s Beach
Blaze is a continuation of such reductive stereotyping, albeit
in the different but culturally significant site of Bollywood.
The four games were selected using a case-study methodology
and represent discrete but related artifacts. Following
a survey of key literature, the authors address the limitations
of traditional game studies approaches and propose a replicable
methodology located at the intersection of two epistemic
frames: one of critical masculinity studies and the
other of ludology. Through analyzing the strategic ideologies
behind the production, circulation and the game-play
of these digital artifacts we argue that Zapak.com not only
enables online sexism but also becomes a representative
digital space where anxious performances of postcolonial
masculinity – that has its historical basis in India’s colonial
legacy – can be materialized. Further in highlighting the status
of these ‘Girl’s Games’ as artifacts that do not allow for
any substantial ludic or narrative involvement – we emphasize
the need to constantly interrogate digital spaces as
sites where hegemonic ideologies about race, gender and
colonialism are reproduced and reified.
India’s most-popular gaming website (highest number of
daily visitors) to conceptualize the relationship between
masculinity and colonialism within digital geographies, in
postcolonial spaces. Three of the four games chosen here,
Sleeping at the Meeting, Zombie Pirate and Yoga Teacher, are
representative of games categorized as ‘Girl’s Games’ on
Zapak.com: where the ludic engagement is limited to dressing
and undressing of white women in a variety of professional
or social contexts. The fourth game Bipasha’s Beach
Blaze is a continuation of such reductive stereotyping, albeit
in the different but culturally significant site of Bollywood.
The four games were selected using a case-study methodology
and represent discrete but related artifacts. Following
a survey of key literature, the authors address the limitations
of traditional game studies approaches and propose a replicable
methodology located at the intersection of two epistemic
frames: one of critical masculinity studies and the
other of ludology. Through analyzing the strategic ideologies
behind the production, circulation and the game-play
of these digital artifacts we argue that Zapak.com not only
enables online sexism but also becomes a representative
digital space where anxious performances of postcolonial
masculinity – that has its historical basis in India’s colonial
legacy – can be materialized. Further in highlighting the status
of these ‘Girl’s Games’ as artifacts that do not allow for
any substantial ludic or narrative involvement – we emphasize
the need to constantly interrogate digital spaces as
sites where hegemonic ideologies about race, gender and
colonialism are reproduced and reified.
preoccupation for both Amitav Ghosh’s non-fictional treatise Countdown
(1998) and Anand Patwardhan’s anti-nuclear documentary War and Peace (2002). This essay traces the seldom discussed yet immensely problematic, epistemic function of military–industrial complexes around the world. I illustrate how knowledge apparatuses emerging from the nuclear bomb are always already gendered and racialized, and sponsor literacies of power in favour of nuclearization. These pro-nuclear literacy primers construct postcolonial nuclear weapon states as atomic subalterns, while simultaneously provoking the troubling counter-discourses of nuclear nationalism, which perceive nuclearization as a strategy of postcolonial resistance.
I argue Ghosh and Patwardhan’s texts explicate the subjectivity of the real atomic subalterns: the victims of nuclearization who are successfully elided from state-sponsored hegemonic nuclear historiography. In emphasizing Rey Chow’s assertion of “the atomic bomb as an epistemic event,” I point out that Ghosh and Patwardhan’s texts perform a postmodern critique of dominant nuclear historiography and represent nucliteracy: a literacy of social practice, which acknowledges multiple stakeholders and differing perspectives within the nuclear domain.
By juxtaposing Native American perspectives on the bomb, represented by Leslie Silko’s Ceremony, with socio-legal artifacts from the Bishnoi tribal community in Rajasthan (India) I argue that tactical storytelling creates postcolonial ecologies, which recovers minoritarian perspectives about nuclearization and disrupts the strategic ideologies of Anglo-American modernity. I further emphasize that by not trying to represent the Other, both the Bishnoi texts and Ceremony belong to the domain of planetarity (Spivak) and question the globalizing narrative of disciplines like Postcolonialism and Ecocriticism.
through slaying dragons but also by picking herbs and sewing clothes makes a definite rupture in the idea of heroic temporality, which is traditionally understood as
masculine while the everyday is essentialized as feminine. Without gendering any task as either feminine or masculine I assert that heroic identity in WoW is extensively
influenced by everyday ennui, to the extent that maintenance of heroic status quo often means a regular engagement with the quotidian. By allowing for the possibility of gameplay in multiple temporal modes WoW challenges social constructions
of heroic time as masculine and everyday time as feminine. In doing so these multiple temporalities open out possibilities for perceiving the WoW landscape as ideal for resisting hegemonies of masculinized heroism and the creation and sustenance of alternative modes of agency.