{"title":"Academia, Activism, and Popular Consciousness: A Response to Freedom Inc.","authors":"Pranav Jani","doi":"10.1017/pli.2024.16","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2024.16","url":null,"abstract":"Mukti Mangharam’s <jats:italic>Freedom Inc.: Gendered Capitalism in New Indian Literature and Culture</jats:italic>, conducts a though investigation into the culture and ideology of neoliberal capitalism being produced in India today. But Mangharam’s approach is not to dismiss but to take seriously the appeal of individualism and entrepreneurism among its target audience: ordinary people looking for a way out of the material crises that neoliberalism has produced. In this response to <jats:italic>Freedom Inc</jats:italic>., Pranav Jani recognizes the empathetic and democratic impulse in Mangharam’s method and narrative style and finds a parallel in his own work as a scholar and organizer. How can scholars and activists concerned with the voice of the people recognize the fundamental heterogeneity of popular consciousness, neither romanticizing struggle nor foreclosing the possibility of reform, or even revolutionary change?","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"17 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141517332","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Freedom Inc.: Gendered Capitalism in New Indian Literature and Culture: A Response","authors":"Nalini Iyer","doi":"10.1017/pli.2024.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2024.13","url":null,"abstract":"This essay is a response to Mukti Mangharam’s book <jats:italic>Freedom Inc: Gendered Capitalism in New Indian Literature and Culture</jats:italic>. The essay commends Mangharam’s intervention in reading the gender, caste, and class implications of neoliberalism embraced by the Indian government and people. Drawing upon Mangharam’s main arguments, this essay extends her analysis to examining the role of the Indian diaspora in promoting Freedom Inc’s narrative, the increased marginalization and precarity faced by Muslims within this new India, and the insidious ways in which Freedom Inc coopts narratives that critique it.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"29 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140832281","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Modes of Cosmopolitanism in Waguih Ghali’s Egypt in Beer in the Snooker Club","authors":"Doaa Mohamed Abd El-Salam Ibrahim","doi":"10.1017/pli.2024.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2024.11","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines the different expressions of nationalism and cosmopolitanism in Waguih Ghali’s semi-autobiographical Beer in the Snooker Club (1964). It defines two different forms of cosmopolitanism in the novel (colonial versus imperial) and their influence on the identity of the main characters. The paper also examines the obsession with defining ‘Egyptianess’ in the novel in the wake of Egyptian nationalism during Nasser’s regime. The paper argues that cosmopolitanism and nationalism are two opposite ideologies that hold each other in balance but when the balance tips off in favour of one pole, an immoderate ideology raises its ugly head: racial or class-based nationalism, on the one hand, or colonial hegemony, on the other. Finally, the paper concludes that Ghali favours imperial cosmopolitanism which boasts of multiple communities that interact together and still preserve their uniqueness and specificities.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"108 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140832271","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"In Other Theories: Colonial Reason, Language, And Literature in Ankhi Mukherjee’s Unseen City","authors":"Mrinalini Greedharry","doi":"10.1017/pli.2023.38","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2023.38","url":null,"abstract":"The colonial reason at the heart of psychoanalysis is increasingly acknowledged, but literature scholars still work with it as an instrument for decolonizing. This essay examines thepossibilities of postcolonial literature itself as a source of epistemological intervention into psychoanalysis.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"39 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-02-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139767268","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Matsotsi: The Migrant Detective and the Postcolonial State","authors":"Stephanie Bosch Santana","doi":"10.1017/pli.2023.40","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2023.40","url":null,"abstract":"Recent work on crime fiction has highlighted the genre’s increasingly transnational focus and the growing number of migrant detectives. <jats:italic>Matsotsi</jats:italic>, a little-known Nyanja text published in Zambia in the early 1960s, provides a much earlier example of this figure in Sergeant Balala, an Angolan detective fighting to contain the tsotsi menace in Johannesburg, South Africa. <jats:italic>Matsotsi</jats:italic>, however, does more than point to cross-border detection as a means of elucidating transnational relationships. Shonga and Zulu’s text manipulates the genres of the detective novel and the bildungsroman to tell a story about the relationships among the individual, the state, and the wider region at a key moment in southern African history, when Zambia and Malawi were on the cusp of independence. Although African language writing has often been considered too localized to be used for nationalist purposes, here it is mobilized for the purpose of state-making in a transnational context.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"33 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138688292","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Places of Body: On Authors, Lives, and Agency","authors":"Hosam Aboul-Ela","doi":"10.1017/pli.2023.34","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2023.34","url":null,"abstract":"Edward Said’s life’s work illustrated the very argument for individual agency that became a theoretical focus for him beginning with his classic 1978 study, Orientalism.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"238 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138688498","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Dream of Psychosocial Thinking","authors":"Ankhi Mukherjee","doi":"10.1017/pli.2023.32","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2023.32","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This essay is a response to four peer reviews of Unseen City, touching on the key ideas showcased in each: the move in community psychoanalysis from an authoritative scripting of the cure to elaborations of care; the role of the public clinic in the global city; the post colonial uncanny; the contribution of literature to the psy-disciplines.</p>","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138629029","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"An Ineffable Haunting: Language, Embodiment, and Ghosts in Toni Morrison’s Beloved","authors":"Connor Lifson","doi":"10.1017/pli.2023.39","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2023.39","url":null,"abstract":"Rereading Toni Morrison’s novel <jats:italic>Beloved</jats:italic>, this article explores how Morrison’s work at the limits of language performs the haunting ties between the Reconstruction era and the present day by offering readers a way to experience a rememory of their own. By repeatedly emphasizing the inadequacy of language in expressing traumatic experience, <jats:italic>Beloved</jats:italic> encourages its readers to, like its characters, look beyond language and seek out a kind of ineffable, embodied knowledge to better understand the lingering traumas of slavery. Through Morrison’s concept of “invisible ink,” which points to the inevitability that lived experience cannot be captured in language by the author alone but must be filled in by an active reader, this article makes a larger argument: that <jats:italic>Beloved</jats:italic> acts as both an invitation and a guide to read the ghostly, invisible ink of history that exists outside the novel, haunting our world itself.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"68 9","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-11-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138512865","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Minding the Metropolis: Precarity, Urbanity, and Mental Conditions: A Response to Ankhi Mukherjee’s Unseen City: The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor","authors":"Avishek Parui","doi":"10.1017/pli.2023.31","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2023.31","url":null,"abstract":"This article situates psychoanalysis, urbanity, and precarity apropos of the material, affective, and memory economy of the mutable metropolis marked by visuality, velocity, and violence. Responding to Ankhi Mukherjee’s Unseen City: The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor, the article examines the interplay of visibility and invisibility in a metropolis and how that is in close and complex correspondence to the politics of precarity and privilege. Drawing on historical as well as recent research in psychology, psychoanalysis, cognitive theory, and cultural studies across various geopolitical settings, this article, through a response to and reading of Mukherjee’s book, aims to articulate and illustrate the unique relevance of literature and aesthetic education in a study of mental health conditions in the (un)seen city. It argues that such psychic and social situations may be uniquely encoded and addressed with ethics and empathy through the cognitive interiority and symbolic instrumentality afforded by the affective and liminal framework of aesthetic activity and fiction.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"17 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138512817","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fiction Beyond Words: Music in J. M. Coetzee’s Jesus Novels","authors":"Diana Mudura","doi":"10.1017/pli.2023.30","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2023.30","url":null,"abstract":"J. M. Coetzee’s late work exhibits a productive dialogue between fiction and other arts as part of his interest in the possibilities of thinking in mediums other than ordinary language. Focusing particularly on the <jats:italic>Jesus</jats:italic> novels, this article examines the critical role of music and how Coetzee uses musical forms as literary strategies that open up alternative possibilities of communication and thinking. Revisiting the famous “What is a Classic?” essay and the biographical moment that leads Coetzee to the music of J. S. Bach, I look at how Coetzee writes musically by considering questions of content, form, and technique, and then turn to the representation of music in relation to mathematics. I propose that the interest in music in the <jats:italic>Jesus</jats:italic> novels is part of his conscious engagement with ordinary language and his inherent desire to transcend it that characterizes the late work.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"20 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138512816","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}