South Asian review最新文献

{"title":"“Postcolonial Disaster”: Purdah, Precarity, and Hunger in Abu Ishaque’s Surja Dighal Bari (The Ominous House)","authors":"Sourit Bhattacharya","doi":"10.1080/02759527.2022.2156171","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2022.2156171","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The 1943 Bengal famine had severely changed the social landscape in rural Bengal. Thousands of peasants who mortgaged or sold their lands to the economic elite to migrate to Calcutta for food had to start over landless and precarious. Married women who were forcibly repudiated by their husbands (“talaq”) during the famine had to abide by the religious law of purdah (of keeping women at home) and accepting death by hunger. Abu Ishaque’s 1955 novel, Surja Dighal Bari (The Ominous House) evocatively captures these harrowing moments of hunger and poverty in the majority rural population through the life-events of Jaigun and her family. The novel shows how a resilient single mother’s will to work and provide for her children is crushed by the male elite through religious injunctions and social alienation. In this essay, I will comment on the intersection of land, hunger, purdah, and patriarchy, reading them together as an instance of “postcolonial disaster,” which conspires to produce an endless condition of precarity for the socio-economically vulnerable in post-independence rural East Pakistan, and consequently a raw esthetic of realism in the postcolony.","PeriodicalId":85563,"journal":{"name":"South Asian review","volume":"73 1","pages":"28 - 36"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74118154","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Re-Reading Two Poems by Bishnu Dey in a Time of Exponentially Growing Crises","authors":"Sayan Bhattacharyya","doi":"10.1080/02759527.2022.2157576","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2022.2157576","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract I argue in this essay that in some circumstances lyric poems written from the colony or the postcolony move in the direction of expressive totality by engaging with multiple worlds of reference at once. György Lukács suggested that the totality that we find in epic poetry and, to a lesser extent, in the novel, is absent from lyric poetry. In a re-reading, inflected by the Covid-19 pandemic, of two mid-twentieth-century Bengali poems written by Bishnu Dey (1909–1982), of which I provide the English translations, I illustrate how lyric poems about disaster, enacting a disorientation of the senses and a dissolution of the fixity of reference, creates transpositions across multiple worlds. In the case of these particular poems, the worlds are those of Greek myth and Indian myth, parallels among which weave intertextually together in an expressive totality. It follows that, alongside other genres, poetry too continues to be a resource with which to think our contemporary moment.","PeriodicalId":85563,"journal":{"name":"South Asian review","volume":"3 1","pages":"50 - 59"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90134923","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ethnographic Surrealism in Gun Island: Reorienting Climate Change Narrative","authors":"Lava Asaad","doi":"10.1080/02759527.2022.2159688","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2022.2159688","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island brings to the forefront the inadequacy of realist fiction in presenting climate crisis. Assiduously, the novel teems with alternative modes of narration that dispenses with the authority of accurate representations of crisis. In this essay, I am applying James Clifford’s term “ethnographic Surrealism” in analyzing Ghosh’s representation of catastrophe in Gun Island. The inception of Surrealism in 1920s and 1930s in Europe was a recourse for its proponents to find new ways to process the aftermath of WWI. Similarly, I argue that Ghosh is dismissing strict realist fiction in writing about catastrophe. The novel has been lauded for its improbable realities, implausible connections, and folkloric Bengali legends. Ghosh is juxtaposing otherwise clashing cultural discourses to creatively characterize climate change. In this way, Ghosh is requestioning the prevalent mode of responding, mainly categorized by concealing or denying, to climate crisis through offering non-western and unscientific solutions that work on blurring the boundaries of “real” and “surreal” in countering climate catastrophes. Ghosh, as Clifford would argue, is emphasizing that cultural norms and production of knowledge about crisis is part of “artificial arrangements.” I argue that in writing about catastrophe, Ghosh does not start from the presupposition that reality is absolute; instead, Ghosh finds a utopia in reconstructing reality.","PeriodicalId":85563,"journal":{"name":"South Asian review","volume":"17 1","pages":"7 - 17"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77244018","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Naga Writings in English – Coming into One’s Own","authors":"Theyiesinuo Keditsu","doi":"10.1080/02759527.2022.2152966","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2022.2152966","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In the past decade, Nagaland has witnessed a marked rise in publications of writings in English. The establishment of homegrown publishing houses have contributed significantly to this increase. This paper will attempt to historicize publishing in Nagaland and undertake a critical survey of published writings in English from Nagaland. Through these trajectories, I argue that a gendered tradition of orality has been transposed into writing and the notion that only Naga women are writing literature fails to account for the whole range of writings in English from Nagaland. Women writers insert themselves into this realm of public discourse through their literary works by negotiating both traditional patriarchal structures in which they are embedded as well as the demands of the world literary market. Creative writing is therefore, a space patriarchy “allows” them to engage the violence and trauma that characterized our neo-colonial encounter with the Indian state. The younger generation of writers, many of whom grew up after the ceasefire came into place, demonstrate either a desire to forget or display a new set of memories that seemingly circumvent the conflict and violence that characterized life before the 1990s. I examine self-publishing as a mode of mediating state censorship and the aesthetic demands of the world literary system. I argue that there is apathy on the part of national and international publishers toward representations of contemporary Naga experiences that deviate from or contravene cherished and commercially viable stereotypes of Nagas as exotic, festive natives; dangerous violent headhunters and/or insurgents. Naga writers who have successfully crossed over to the world literary market are ones who cater to these two aesthetic paradigms. In terms of subject matter and language, the current crop of emerging writers are questioning the canonical indoctrination of our colonial past as well as mainstream taste for conflict and magic realism cultivated as representative of Naga literature in English. New Naga writers are producing works that reject English (British) figures of speech and even sacrosanct rules of grammar, representing instead a colloquial Naga English that both disrupts and creates new narrative expectations. Finally, I contend that new Naga writers in English and Naga publishers are part of a emergent literary culture negotiating between insularity and a desire to demonstrate global cultural currency.","PeriodicalId":85563,"journal":{"name":"South Asian review","volume":"15 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83630609","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ecological Rifts as Disaster in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People","authors":"Muhammad Manzur Alam","doi":"10.1080/02759527.2022.2158279","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2022.2158279","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Literary texts can deconstruct the popular notion that environmental disasters are isolated accidents without global implications. Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People portrays the Bhopal disaster of 1984 as symptomatic of “systemic” disasters that global capitalism perpetrates over time and distributes unevenly. The disaster has converted the setting of the novel, Khaufpur, into a toxic wasteland and metamorphosed Animal, the protagonist, whose uncompromising narrative perspective resists the violence against his body. The toxification of land and human body exemplify postcolonial developments of what Marx conceptualized as “metabolic rift”—the loss of soil nutrients due to capitalist exportation of crops. The postcolonial rifts in Sinha’s novel reflect the discriminatory subtraction of ecological materials by global capitalists who select “disposable” sites of subaltern people for risk-ridden projects that often unleash toxicity and further subtract soil fertility. The ecological rifts additionally expose the historical and global continuities of disasters in South Asia, especially how the colonial extraction of materials is now replicated by neocolonial projects like the pesticide plant in Animal’s People. The reading of disaster via ecological rifts demonstrates Sinha’s subaltern angle in responding to the South Asian varieties of disaster, especially how an abrupt industrial disaster means an endless environmental hazard and denial of justice for the poor.","PeriodicalId":85563,"journal":{"name":"South Asian review","volume":"2 1","pages":"18 - 27"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79018559","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Writing South Asia in Disastrous Time","authors":"Meghan Gorman DaRif, Liam O’Loughlin, P. Rastogi","doi":"10.1080/02759527.2022.2156658","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2022.2156658","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":85563,"journal":{"name":"South Asian review","volume":"1 1","pages":"2 - 6"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83153550","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“Listening to the Multiple and Multispecies Voices of the Crisis”: Climate Change in Two Cetacean Fictions by Vandana Singh","authors":"A. Baishya","doi":"10.1080/02759527.2022.2156166","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2022.2156166","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article reads two cetacean tales—“Entanglement” and “Requiem”—by the prominent South Asian writer of science fiction, Vandana Singh, to evaluate her portrayal of ordinary dimensions of living and existing in situations impacted by climate change. While cetaceans often function as an exotic alien other in science fiction and in cultural fantasies, Singh places her cetacean tales among Indigenous communities in the North Arctic region. Communities like the Inuits and the Iñupiat share relationships of collaborative reciprocity with cetaceans like belugas and bowhead whales. Deploying the geographer’s Chie Sakakibara’s concept of “cetaceousness”—complex, co-constitutive and quotidian relationships among humans and cetaceans in the North Arctic—this article studies Singh’s merger of realism and speculation in her representation of the impact of global warming on populations for whom climate change is not a catastrophe waiting in the future, but whose effects have seeped into the minutiae of the everyday and the ordinary.","PeriodicalId":85563,"journal":{"name":"South Asian review","volume":"17 2 1","pages":"37 - 49"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76989008","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Routes, Roots, and Rihla: Cartography of Feminine Islam in Contemporary Anglophone Travel Narratives by Muslim Women from India","authors":"Haris Qadeer","doi":"10.1080/02759527.2022.2146940","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2022.2146940","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":85563,"journal":{"name":"South Asian review","volume":"43 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78623191","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Toward a Vernacular Globalectics: “Minor” Illustrations from South India","authors":"A. Muneer","doi":"10.1080/02759527.2022.2151771","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2022.2151771","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":85563,"journal":{"name":"South Asian review","volume":"2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73004914","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Of Beginnings and Convergences: Contemporary Women’s Poetry in Manipur","authors":"Loiya Leima Oinam","doi":"10.1080/02759527.2022.2127473","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2022.2127473","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Anglophone women’s poetry in Manipur in the last decade critiques the norms prevalent in patriarchal societies. This article focuses on six contemporary women poets whose works highlight the woman, her subjectivity, and her truths. Collectively, their works constitute an emerging feminist poetic tradition in Manipur. Despite the multiplicities of location and creative idiom of each poet, their poetry converges upon seminal issues and amplify one another’s voices, giving us an intimate glimpse of women’s trysts with everyday structures of patriarchy. The respective poets attempt to rewrite previously inscribed taboos and cultural practices—some by reimagining tropes that have weighed against fair representation of women such as the body, female desire, and myths; and others by breaking the cycle of abuse and shame through testimonial poetry.","PeriodicalId":85563,"journal":{"name":"South Asian review","volume":"15 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75199278","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}