While Namwali Serpell's novel The Old Drift can be read as a fictional account of colonial and po... more While Namwali Serpell's novel The Old Drift can be read as a fictional account of colonial and postcolonial Zambian history, this article focuses on the text's exploration of Anthropocene timegeobiochemical and planetary temporal scales that predate human histories, while also gesturing towards futures where Homo sapiens may be absent. This article focuses on deep temporality in the novel via the use of mosquito and Moskeetoze (mosquito-like microdrones) narrators. While mosquitoes facilitate encounters with the deep past and of entangled human-nonhuman histories, the Moskeetozes enable representations of the vicissitudes of the "Anthrobscene" (Parrikka) and the creative potentialities of improvised life that emerge in hazardscapes in the Global South. Additionally, The Old Drift gestures towards a speculative planetary future where mosquitoes and Moskeetozes integrate to evolve new modalities of swarm intelligence and forms of life.
Drawing on anthropologist Kathleen Stewart’s description of the ordinary as an “animate circuit t... more Drawing on anthropologist Kathleen Stewart’s description of the ordinary as an “animate circuit that conducts force and maps connections, routes and disjunctures,” this article reads the representations of the fugitive potentials of the quotidian in Shillong-based artist Tarun Bhartiya’s photomontage/postcard collection Niam/Faith/Hynñiewtrep (2021). Focusing on Bhartiya’s utilization of the technique of montage and the poetic juxtaposition of text and images, I consider the pluriversal narratives of pasts, presents and futures in his representations of the ordinary and the quotidian in a frontier/borderland space like Northeast India as a contribution to the nascent field of visual studies and the photographic archive in the region. This essay evaluates the significance of avant-garde visual practices, like those of Bhartiya’s, in probing the minutiae of ordinary life and its fugitive and unpredictable potentialities.
This article is part of a Book Forum review of Sanjib Baruah's book In the Name of the Nation: In... more This article is part of a Book Forum review of Sanjib Baruah's book In the Name of the Nation: India and its Northeast (2020). The Book Forum consists of individual commentaries on this text by five interested scholars, followed by a response by the author. The article may be read individually or alongside the other contributions to the Forum, which together constitute a comprehensive discussion of the themes and arguments in the book.
This interview with science fiction writer Vandana Singh focuses on her rapidly expanding oeuvre ... more This interview with science fiction writer Vandana Singh focuses on her rapidly expanding oeuvre in climate fiction. More specifically, she discusses her cli-fi under the umbrella of three major concerns: their realist settings in a near future, the affirmative
In this essay I argu e that Makam , Rita Chowdhury 's epic historical novel about the expulsion o... more In this essay I argu e that Makam , Rita Chowdhury 's epic historical novel about the expulsion of Indian-Chinese from the town of Makum in 1962, is the first Assamese post-memory fiction. Focusing on Makam 's narrative structure and its associated paratexts, I claim that the novel 's affective reason emanates from its retracing of the process of the gradual unraveling of a family "' phantom. " Deploying Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok's psychoanalytic concept of the phantom , I study the homology established between the narrative figurations of family '·secrets" and the secrets buried in the crypts of the ·'national" community in the novel. Furthermore. through a specific focus on the affect of "ghrina" (disgust) and the figuration of a narrative therapeutics as the motors fueling Chowdhury's text, I analyze how Makam ·s formal features stage the release of long foreclosed secrets from the family/national crypt into the public domain.
While Namwali Serpell's novel The Old Drift can be read as a fictional account of colonial and po... more While Namwali Serpell's novel The Old Drift can be read as a fictional account of colonial and postcolonial Zambian history, this article focuses on the text's exploration of Anthropocene timegeobiochemical and planetary temporal scales that predate human histories, while also gesturing towards futures where Homo sapiens may be absent. This article focuses on deep temporality in the novel via the use of mosquito and Moskeetoze (mosquito-like microdrones) narrators. While mosquitoes facilitate encounters with the deep past and of entangled human-nonhuman histories, the Moskeetozes enable representations of the vicissitudes of the "Anthrobscene" (Parrikka) and the creative potentialities of improvised life that emerge in hazardscapes in the Global South. Additionally, The Old Drift gestures towards a speculative planetary future where mosquitoes and Moskeetozes integrate to evolve new modalities of swarm intelligence and forms of life.
Drawing on anthropologist Kathleen Stewart’s description of the ordinary as an “animate circuit t... more Drawing on anthropologist Kathleen Stewart’s description of the ordinary as an “animate circuit that conducts force and maps connections, routes and disjunctures,” this article reads the representations of the fugitive potentials of the quotidian in Shillong-based artist Tarun Bhartiya’s photomontage/postcard collection Niam/Faith/Hynñiewtrep (2021). Focusing on Bhartiya’s utilization of the technique of montage and the poetic juxtaposition of text and images, I consider the pluriversal narratives of pasts, presents and futures in his representations of the ordinary and the quotidian in a frontier/borderland space like Northeast India as a contribution to the nascent field of visual studies and the photographic archive in the region. This essay evaluates the significance of avant-garde visual practices, like those of Bhartiya’s, in probing the minutiae of ordinary life and its fugitive and unpredictable potentialities.
This article is part of a Book Forum review of Sanjib Baruah's book In the Name of the Nation: In... more This article is part of a Book Forum review of Sanjib Baruah's book In the Name of the Nation: India and its Northeast (2020). The Book Forum consists of individual commentaries on this text by five interested scholars, followed by a response by the author. The article may be read individually or alongside the other contributions to the Forum, which together constitute a comprehensive discussion of the themes and arguments in the book.
This interview with science fiction writer Vandana Singh focuses on her rapidly expanding oeuvre ... more This interview with science fiction writer Vandana Singh focuses on her rapidly expanding oeuvre in climate fiction. More specifically, she discusses her cli-fi under the umbrella of three major concerns: their realist settings in a near future, the affirmative
In this essay I argu e that Makam , Rita Chowdhury 's epic historical novel about the expulsion o... more In this essay I argu e that Makam , Rita Chowdhury 's epic historical novel about the expulsion of Indian-Chinese from the town of Makum in 1962, is the first Assamese post-memory fiction. Focusing on Makam 's narrative structure and its associated paratexts, I claim that the novel 's affective reason emanates from its retracing of the process of the gradual unraveling of a family "' phantom. " Deploying Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok's psychoanalytic concept of the phantom , I study the homology established between the narrative figurations of family '·secrets" and the secrets buried in the crypts of the ·'national" community in the novel. Furthermore. through a specific focus on the affect of "ghrina" (disgust) and the figuration of a narrative therapeutics as the motors fueling Chowdhury's text, I analyze how Makam ·s formal features stage the release of long foreclosed secrets from the family/national crypt into the public domain.
Postcolonial Animalities, co-edited by Suvadip Sinha and Amit R. Baishya, brings together ten ess... more Postcolonial Animalities, co-edited by Suvadip Sinha and Amit R. Baishya, brings together ten essays to consider the interfaces between "human" and "animal" and the concrete presence of animals in postcolonial cultural production. This edited collection critiques monohumanist conceptions of the "human" and considers the co-constitutiveness of imaginaries of the human with grammars of animality. One of the central contributions of this volume is to decolonize existing conceptualizations of the human-animal relationship, and to consider the material representation of animals within the realm of colonial and postcolonial cultural production from the perspective of ethical alterity and alternative narratives of anticolonial and postcolonial politics. The volume also explores entanglements of race and species in colonial and neocolonial frameworks without transforming such inquiries into a zero-sum game that privileges one category over another. The essays in the volume, focusing on multiple geographical locations ranging from South Asia, Southeast Asia, post-Ottoman Turkey, the Caribbean, Australia, South Africa and Palestine/Israel, historicizes and understands multispecies, interspecies and transspecies encounters, affiliations and connections in and through their localized dimensions, and studies human-animal encounters in their varied and complex affective relationalities. Through such inquiries, the volume considers how modes of representing animals, including located forms of anthropomorphism and zoomorphism, help us think-with and be-with different animals.
Classroom: Copeland Hall, 0246. Time: 1.00-2.15 TR Office Appointments: Set up by email; all appo... more Classroom: Copeland Hall, 0246. Time: 1.00-2.15 TR Office Appointments: Set up by email; all appointments online. Email Contact: arbaishya1@ou.edu Mode of Delivery: Hybrid (one class F2F, two subsequent classes synchronously online and so on-synchronous online classes indicated in your course schedule) Course Description: Dogs are considered to be the most "humanized" of animals. However, a survey of world literature and culture shows that dogs play very ambivalent and complex roles in human societies. Focusing on contemporary literature and cinema, this course will explore the ambivalent representations of dogs in human cultures through a focus on five major themes: 1) Living-with Dogs, 2) Dogs Tell their Stories 3) Stray and Free-range Dogs, 4) Dogs and the Political and 5) Canine Documentaries. Ultimately, the aim of this course is not only to de/ familiarize a neighborly animal, but to ask what goes into the making of that complex and slippery term "the human." Required Texts: 1. Sigrid Nunez-The Friend (Virago) 2. Paul Auster-Timbuktu (Henry Holt) 3. Mohammad Hanif-Red Birds (Bloomsbury)
A conversation between Elizabeth Povinelli and Amit Baishya for Borderlines journal. The conversa... more A conversation between Elizabeth Povinelli and Amit Baishya for Borderlines journal. The conversation covers the major issues in Povinelli's work.
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