1st Rupkatha International Open Conference on Recent Advances in Interdisciplinary Humanities (Virtual)
In collaboration with
Indian Institute of Technology Patna
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
&
Siksha O Anusandhan (Deemed to be University), Bhubaneswar
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
ABSTRACTS
DAY 1
CHANNEL 1
Session 1
Time: 10 AM—11 Am (Indian Time)
Moderator/s: Claudia Chibici-Revneanu, the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in León, Mexico
Presentation 1
Title: The Way of the Firang: Illustrating European Social Life and Customs in Mughal Miniatures (1580 CE -1628 CE)
Author 1: Dr. Soujit Das 1
Designation and affiliation: Assistant Professor of History of Art, Government College of Art and Craft Calcutta. Email: soujitdas85@gmail.com
Author 2: Prof. Ila Gupta 2
Designation and affiliation: Professor (Retired), Department of Architecture and Planning, IIT Roorkee: Email: ilafap@gmail.com
Abstract
During the sixteenth century, along with the rise of the Mughal Empire, the social landscape of India changed drastically with the advent of the European colonial powers. In 1580 CE, following the First Jesuit Mission to the Court of Emperor Akbar, a new cross-cultural dialogue was initiated that not only impacted the socio-economic and political fabric but also the artistic productions of the time. The growing presence of the European traders, ambassadors, soldiers, and missionaries in the Mughal world also lead to several curious narratives that were widely circulated. These tales also gave birth to cultural misconceptions, as the Europeans on several occasions were seen as social evils. They were often collectively addressed as Firang/Farang or ‘Franks’ and were perceived as ‘strange and wonderful people’ or ‘ajaib-o-ghara’ib’. It was during the Mughal reign when for the first time in Indian visual culture, a conscious attempt was made to document the life and customs of the European people. This paper attempts to understand how the processes of cultural alienation and Occidentalism had influenced the representation of Europeans in Mughal miniatures. It also argues how Mughal artists innovated a new iconographic scheme to represent and perpetuate a sense of the ‘other’. The paper also deals with how artists used these identity markers to establish notions of morality as well as of Islamic cultural superiority. The select illustrations also attempt to elucidate, how these representations of Europeans were culturally appropriated and also contributed to the Mughal ‘fantasy excursions’.
Keywords: Firang, Mughal, miniatures, Occidentalism, cross-cultural encounters
Bionote: Soujit Das 1 is an Assistant Professor at History of Art at Government College of Art and Craft Calcutta. He has completed his doctoral degree from Dept. of HSS, IIT Roorkee. He received his post-graduate and under-graduate degrees in History of Art from Kala Bhavan, Visva Bharati, Santiniketan. He has formerly taught at ASFA, AUUP, Noida. His area of interest is cross-cultural artistic encounters in early modern India. He regularly contributes to reputed art magazines and journals, and has a book to his credit.
Dr. Ila Gupta 2 has recently retired as a Senior Professor from Department of Architecture and Planning, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee. She has widely published in reputed journals and has undertaken several important research projects. She has guided several Ph.Ds on issues related to Art and Architecture.
Presentation 2
Title: Art in the Digital during and after COVID-19: Aura and Apparatus of Online Exhibitions
Author 1: João Pedro Amorim
Designation and affiliation: Universidade Católica Portuguesa, School of Arts, CCD/CITAR. Email: jpamorim@porto.ucp.pt
Author 2: Luís Teixeira
Designation and affiliation: Universidade Católica Portuguesa, School of Arts, CCD/CITAR. Email: lteixeira@porto.ucp.pt
Abstract
The public health measures that were put in place to contain COVID-19 created a temporary but significant transformation of the lives of people and institutions alike. For its global impact and transformation, the pandemic can be classified as a Mega Event. Such radical events have become great opportunities to the testing of new technologies and forms of organization, (Masi, 2017) that might in the future become prevalent.
The impact of the pandemic was particularly felt in the contemporary art world, as the entire cultural activity was suspended. During this period, art institutions and collectives around the world reacted by providing alternative materials online. This paper aims at reflecting upon the challenges facing the exhibition of contemporary art online. Following Boris Groys’ (2016) actualization of Walter Benjamin, we problematize how the digital reproduction of art affects the aura of an artwork. Proposing a critique of the apparatus of digital platforms, we analyse how the digital reproduces and enhances ideological structures that perpass the whole of society. We also discuss how the mediation and interaction with artworks is affected by digital presentation.
For that purpose we analyse how four different organizations (an artist-run space, an art gallery, a museum and an art biennale) have migrated their activity to digital platforms. This limited but diverse set of case-studies will allow us to have a broad impression of the different approaches available – with some radically taking advantage of the digital environment, and others merely digitising the role taken henceforth by printed catalogues.
Keywords: Mega-events, Art in the Digital, Aura, Contemporary Art, apparatus
Bionote: João Pedro Amorim is a visual artist and a research fellow at the Digital Creativity Centre of the School of Arts at Universidade Católica Portuguesa. He holds a Master in Contemporary Artistic Practices (Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto) and a Bachelor in Communication Sciences (University of Porto). Between 2014 and 2015 he collaborated with the collective Caucaso Factory (Bologna/ Berlin) in several film projects as assistant director ( “Lepanto – The Last Cangaceiro”; “History of the Future”) and editor ( “Ode a Milano”, “Travelogue”, “Reiseland”). He’s currently a PhD candidate.
Presentation 3
Title: Online Yaoi Fanfiction and Explorations of Female Desire Through Sexually Exploited Male Bodies
Author 1: Shweta Basu
Designation and affiliation: PhD Scholar (JRF) at the Department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata
ORCID ID [If registered]: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7789-7192
Email: bluezy08@gmail.com
Abstract
This essay will try to trace the phenomena of rape, dub-con (dubious consent), and non-con (non consent) as literary expressions of sexual violence which find their graphic and image-laden expression in anglophone yaoi (fiction centred upon male homoerotic relationship (s) in the Japanese anime/manga context) fanfictions (fiction written by fans based on an extant work). Through my work, I try to delve into the question of consent and the rationale of such literary acts through fan ethnography. Also there is the fiction-based otherization of the authorial self as fanfiction is written purely for the pleasure (often masturbatory) of the author and the intended and implied audience (the yaoi fanbase) who, while harboring and finding pleasure in such fantasies, do not subscribe to such notions in real life nor would they enjoy to be in such situations.
The essay also deals with the question of how gay men are represented in such texts and their discomfort in such representations, where their bodies and sexuality are produced and consumed as tools of entertainment for women. These erotic texts exclusively cater to the female psychosexuality, as they are produced by and for women. Since in yaoi texts no involvement of the female body per se hence the pleasure is derived from a mental correlation. The fanbase of such work is also huge, centered around the rotten girls/fujoshi culture.
Keywords: rape, dub-con, non-con, yaoi, fanfiction, fan ethnography, pornography, aesthetic beauty, male homoerotic, derivative artworks.
Bionote: Shweta Basu is currently pursuing Ph.D in the Department of English, at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Her area of specialisation is Anime and Manga Studies and related Fan-works. She has also worked on adaptation theory, reception theory and media convergence theory.
Presentation 4
Title: The Confluence in the Contemporary Art World of Literature and Postmodern Visual Arts in Jeff Vande Zande’s Landscape with Fragmented Figures
Author 1: Smriti Thakur
Designation and affiliation: Ph.D. Research Scholar, Department of English, Central University of Punjab, Bathinda. Email: smriti.thakur7@gmail.com
Author 2: Dr. Dinesh Babu P.
Designation and affiliation: Assistant Professor, Department of English, Central University of Punjab, Bathinda: Email: dinesh.babu@cup.edu.in
Abstract
The American poet, novelist and editor, Jeff Vande Zande’s Landscape with Fragmented Figures (2009) is a novel that deals with the contemporary world of art, which brings forth the intricacies of the art forms such as collage, action paintings, and drop cloths that have established a crucial distance between the present and the past world of pre-modern art. As the novel revolves around the world of postmodern visual arts and brings this subject into the literary world, it necessitates an interdisciplinary approach, which not only brings the two different academic disciplines of arts together for a critical appreciation, but also creates a new aesthetic experience in the reader, wherein visual arts is seen through the lens of literature, which helps foreground the hidden patterns and motives behind the art work, and the literary work is appreciated with a greater knowledge and understanding of the practices in and theories of the modern and postmodern art. By looking at the symbiotic relationship between visual art and literature through the novel, this study makes an attempt to contribute to the aesthetic appreciation of the engaging confluence of postmodern visual arts and literature in the contemporary world of art. By analysing the text, the study explores the phenomena that have reduced the difference between the original and copy in the contemporary art-world wherein the artist’s aesthetic sensibility seems to derive from other sources, and thus brings into critical discourse those factors that have determined the use of parody, pastiche, irony, and collage in contemporary art forms.
Keywords: Modern-art, Postmodern-art, Visual-arts, art-novel, Aesthetic sensibility, Symbiotic relationship, Parody, Pastiche, Irony, Art Culture.
Bionote: Smriti Thakur is a PhD Research Scholar in the Department of English at the Central University of Punjab, Bathinda, and doing research on the American visual artists. Her publications include articles on the Volition of Religion in the Devadasi Tradition, History of Violence and Sexual Exploitation of Devadasis, A Study of Materialisation of Devadasi Tradition and Cultural Objects, The Alienation and Manipulation of Geisha in Cultural Structures of Japan, Commercialisation of Visual Arts in Twentieth Century America. Besides this, she used to pen down her thoughts through poetry and has an account on blogger under the id (thakuramsm.blogspot.com). Two of her poems have been published in the Anthology Silver Mist and one poem in Muse India. And another two of her poems are under the process of publication in an International Anthology of English Poetry, which is part of the Tunisian Asian Poetry Group.
Bionote: Dr. Dinesh Babu is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the Central University of Punjab, Bathinda, where he teaches American Literature, African American Literature, Victorian Literature, and Literary Criticism and Theory. His publications include articles on Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet A. Jacobs, Harriet E. Wilson, Zora Neal Hurston, Nella Larsen, Alice Walker and Jane Urquhart. He has centered his doctoral work on “Miscegenation, Alienation and Lynching in the select works of James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Lillian Smith and William Faulkner.” He has research interest in American and African American literature.
Presentation 5
Title: Seeking theory-practice relation between humanities and fine-art through practice of painting
Author 1: Asmita Sarkar
Designation and affiliation: PhD Candidate, Manipal Academy of Higher Education. Email: asmita.sarkar@srishti.ac.in
Abstract
In recent years different art and design institutions around the world are increasingly looking at developing programs that are research intensive. Along with this trend doctoral programs that are art-and design practice based is becoming progressively common. There are several debates around the nature and significance of art and design practice as research (Sullivan 2005 Borgdorff, 2010, Eriksson 2010) . Many have doubts about the exact nature of knowledge that these PhD’s contributes. One thing is distinct among all these PhD’s is that these include creation of art or design artefacts as part of the research. This paper will not attempt to cover all debate, but will discuss some theoretical view-points and philosophical speculations such as discourse on material of art, performance embodiment, cultural-scientific knowledge behind creation of artefact. The aim is to show that the process oriented and performative aspects of art-practice can come into a meaningful dialogue with traditional humanities. In the present article the author/artist has drawn from the writings of art-historian James Elkins (2000) and philosopher Merleau-Ponty (1993, 2002, 2008) to analyze her own work and to provide some insight into what methodology of artistic research can consist of. The theoretical lens used to contextualize artist’s work is phenomenology and elements of auto-ethnography (Alvesson 2003). Narrative analysis has been incorporated into the reflective case-study of author’s own process of creating a of a series of paintings that incorporates different media and technological interventions. Thus, this paper takes a step towards devising a methodology that can contextualize artist’s intensely personal process of creation.
Keywords: phenomenological research, process and performance in humanities research, methodologies of practice-based research.
Bionote: Asmita Sarkar is Faculty member at the Srishti Institute of Art. She is a practicing artist and her research interests include contemporary drawing & painting, art-science collaboration in art & design, and phenomenological aesthetics. She has published peered reviewed articles in Tracey and Drawing Research Theory and Practice amongst other, and currently working on her practice based PhD (registered in Manipal Academy of Higher Education,) thesis on phenomenology of contemporary painting.
Presentation 6
Title: Comics/Art
Abstract:
Comics have been excluded from the definition of “art.” Key to this exclusion is an attempt to define art as high culture, a construction fostered and perpetuated by the institutions that support it: galleries, museums, and university art-history courses. Comic strips, with their roots in mass culture could never be admitted into this rarefied world. In an increasingly postmodern world where the distinction between high and low culture is often assumed to have been eroded, the situation has changed but outmoded biases continue to persist. My short paper tries to concentrate on the high/low art debate in the 1930s specifically discussing Clement Greenberg’s famous 1939 essay ‘The Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ which dismissed comics as among the lowest forms of debased and industrialized pseudo-culture. During this time, it is interesting to look at Pablo Picasso’s tryst with sequential graphic panels which contain the seed of comics. It offers a counterpoint to the prevailing idea of what constitutes art, as practice and as material iteration—and how the form of comics has always presented a challenge to this notion.
Pinaki De is a multiple award-winning graphic illustrator-designer who regularly works for renowned publishers like Penguin Random House, Harper Collins, Hachette, Routledge, Primus, Oxford University Press, Singapore University Press (NUS), Bloomsbury, Orient Blackswan, Worldview, Pan Picador, Simon and Schuster, Permanent Black, Alchemy, Sage, Roli, Sahitya Academy, Rupa and many others. He has designed almost 500 book covers till date. He is the winner of PublishingNext prize for the best book cover design in India twice in 2017 and 2019. His book cover for “Kalkatta” by Kunal Basu won the prestigious Oxford Bookstore prize for the best cover design in India at Jaipur Literary Fest 2017. His layout design on Satyajit Ray’s archival manuscripts has drawn accolades from all across the globe. A Charles Wallace Trust Fellow, his Ph.D. is in comics theory. Pinaki is one of the editors of the prestigious annual magazine “Longform” (Published from HarperCollins, 2018) which is generally regarded as the first global comics magazine from India. He is the Indian comics advisor of Mangasia, the biggest ever exhibition on Asian Comics curated by Paul Gravett for the Barbican, London. Pinaki juggles his creative work with academics as he has a day job as an Associate Professor of Raja Peary Mohan College, Uttarpara.
Session 2
Time: 11:05 AM—12:05 PM (Indian Time)
Moderator/s: Dr Avishek Parui, IIT Madras
Presentation 1
Title: Technification of Knowledge and Knowledge as Technology: The University as the Verse to Come
Samrat Sengupta
Assistant Professor and Head, Dept. of English, Sammilani Mahavidyalaya. Email: samrat19802003@yahoo.co.in
Description In the very act of pronouncing the word Uni-Versity the uni- in university motivates the versity – the becoming of the verse as memory – as the act of foregrounding knowledge and its continuity in time – the ontology as well as epistemology of culture and society. But at the same time the uni- is in conflict with the verse making – the versity. This double gesture produces the space of the university as an impossible, contingent and precarious space of learning. So the outside of the university is connected – hyperlinked to its inside space. If the university is made into a decided space of providing information and skill then it ceases to be a university. The erosion of liberal humanist university gradually being overcome by technological skill based universities announces the end of university. This paper shall talk about the transformative potentialities of the verse – the possibilities of unexpected turn that cannot be overcome by any technification and enframing. I would discuss university as a dialectics of desire for unification on one hand and the dynamic creative potentiality on the other that ceaselessly challenges and overcomes that unitary impulse. The idea of the University here would be discussed as a form of ‘writing’ – of inscription, through the critical theoretical interventions in Jacques Derrida’s essay “The University without conditions” and Bernard Stiegler’s engagement with it in his book States of Shock: Stupidity and Knowledge in the 21st Century.
Presentation 2
Title: Aesthetics of Posthuman Interactivity
Author 1: Jaya Sarkar
Designation and affiliation: Ph.D. Scholar, BITS Pilani (Hyderabad Campus)
Email: jaya1sarkar@gmail.com
Abstract
This paper examines Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson and the interactive film Bandersnatch from the Netflix series Black Mirror to reveal how hypertexts function ontologically and epistemologically like the posthuman concept of the cyborg defined by Haraway as “a condensed image of both imagination and material reality.” For the theoretical framework, Katherine Hayles and Rosi Braidotti’s theories of Posthumanism and cyborg subjectivity is referred to, among other Postmodernist Feminist ideas of the body and visual culture. Using these theories, the essay will answer the central question that underlies how this new revisionist and interactive medium of storytelling parodies the traditional roles of the author and the reader. Interpreting a ‘cyborg’ hypertext requires a “cyborg reader,” not only because the reader shares a posthuman connection with the narrative in terms of involving their gestures through touch and click, but also because the hypertext forces the reader to adopt a gaze that is equally modular and fragmentary. The paper argues that just like the medium of hypertext itself, the author and the reader become a part of the cyborg subjectivity.
Keywords: Posthumanism, Aesthetics, Bandersnatch, Haraway, Patchwork Girl, Interactors
Bionote: I am pursuing my Ph.D. in Cultural Studies at BITS Pilani- Hyderabad Campus, India. My proposed thesis is “Posthuman Text, Context and Hypertext”. The dissertation examines the aesthetics of the posthuman body, literature, and interactive applications. My research areas include Posthumanism, Postmodernism, Feminist Studies, Digital Humanities, Social Media Studies and Disability Studies. I have edited a book titled Industrial Melanism: An Evolutionary Reverse Swing which was published in April, 2019 by Satyam International Publications, Delhi. Last December, I participated in the Winter Institute in Digital Humanities, organized by University of Saskatchewan and IIT Gandhinagar and attended various other workshops and lectures.
Presentation 3
Title: Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte and the Post-truth Condition
Author 1: Atri Majumder
Designation and affiliation: Research Scholar, Department of Management, Humanities & Social Sciences, NIT Agartala. Email: atri.cal@gmail.com
Author 2: Dr. Gyanabati Khuraijam
Designation and affiliation: Assistant Professor, Grade I, Department of Management, Humanities & Social Sciences, NIT Agartala. Email: khgyan79@yahoo.com
Abstract
The emergence of ‘post-truth’ has dramatically affected the contemporary socio-political discourses. The blurring of the distinctions between fact and fiction has become ostensible owing to the proliferation of social media and the pivotal role played by cyberspaces in creating volatile identities. The erosion of objectivity and the creation of a Baudrillardian ‘hyperreality’ have destabilized the position of truth irrevocably. The meteoric rise of far-right populist governments across the world with their jingoistic, xenophobic and parochial brand of politics, the erasure of subjective autonomy and invasion of privacy have pushed the world to the brink of moral anarchy, devoid of ethical values and veracity. Salman Rushdie’s latest work Quichotte (2019) is a postmodern rendering of Miguel De Cervantes’ picaresque novel Don Quixote. This paper attempts to critically analyse the novel vis-à-vis the ‘post-truth condition’. The evolution of the concept of truth is traced through the ideas of various philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Alain Badiou, Jean Baudrillard and other philosophers in order to ascertain the origin and theoretical implications of ‘post-truth’. Rushdie has foregrounded the contemporary socio-political issues like the impending catastrophic consequences of climate change, the prevalent opioid crisis and the precarious position of immigrants who are often victims of racist violence. He has characteristically employed magic realism and narrative pyrotechnics in the novel. The various intertextual references, allusions to popular culture, and autobiographical traces in Quichotte are also to be explored.
Keywords: post-truth, hyperreality, socio-political issues, magic realism, popular culture, intertextuality
Bionote:
Atri Majumder is currently pursuing his doctoral studies at the Department of Management, Humanities and Social Sciences, NIT Agartala. His poetry collection Visible Infinity was published by Writers Workshop in 2014. His areas of interest are contemporary politics, psychoanalytic criticism, and the works of Salman Rushdie.
Dr. Gyanabati Khuraijam is working as Assistant Professor (English) in the Department of Management, Humanities & Social Sciences at National Institute of Technology, Agartala. She obtained her Ph.D from Manipur University. Her areas of interests are Commonwealth Literature, Indian Writing in English, Gender Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Communication, etc. Her research articles have been published in many international journals of repute. She has also authored two books.
Presentation 4
Title: Re-Presenting Protestors as Thugs: The Politics of Labelling
Dissenting Voices
Author: Lalitha Joseph
Designation and affiliation: Assistant Professor of English, St. John’s College Anchal, affiliated to the University of Kerala. Email: lalithajoseph@stjohns.ac.in
Abstract
The word, “thug” carries diverse meanings in different spaces, histories, communities, and countries. When used as a stigmatizing label, it can define, classify, restrict and fix boundaries within a society. Through an assessment of political rhetoric, tweets, and media reports, this article evaluates the hegemonic power embedded in the strategic use of the word and how it is used for nefarious purposes by the world leaders in the post-truth era. It also explores the racial underpinnings of the word and the covert intentions behind its usage. This paper critically interrogates the social circumstances in which the word is used to suppress dissent. Labelling theory is used to demonstrate how policy makers, mark out a group in order to rationalize the discourse of state violence. The methods and the outcomes of labelling will be discussed in detail, paying special attention to the role it plays in triggering social unrest. The essay argues that the polemics around the word “thug” enables the administrators to shift focus from the real issues, and thereby deny racial minorities their right to challenge the government policies and actions.
Keywords: Labelling theory, thug, dissenting voices, racial discrimination, post-truth era, race-coded language.
Bio note: Lalitha Joseph, is an Assistant Professor of English at St. John’s College, Anchal, affiliated to the University of Kerala. Currently, she is pursuing her research as a part-time research scholar. Her research focuses on Colonial and Postcolonial banditry. She has presented papers at International and National conferences and published her articles in journals.
Session 3
Time: 12:10 PM—1:10 PM (Indian Time)
Moderator/s: Joseph Ching Velasco, De La Salle University, Manila
Presentation 1
Title: “…and beyond/ Frighted the reign of Chaos and old Night”: On The Humanities (in Times of) Crisis
Author: Jeremy De Chavez Ph.D.
Designation and affiliation: Assistant Professor, University of Macau. Email: jeremydechavez@um.edu.mo
Abstract
The history of the present is replete with the language of crisis, which has infiltrated various domains including the political, economic, social, environmental, and moral. Those various proclamations of collapse and disaster intersect somewhat in yet another crisis that we have become all too familiar with: the Humanities crisis. We are regularly reminded, and with intensifying pleas of urgency, that the Humanities are in peril. While various commentators have linked the troubling erosion of the Humanities to the present and impending failures of critical thought, democracy, and civic duty, the Humanities are still widely regarded as unable to measure up to the emerging dominant metrics of value. What then is to be done? How might we come to the defense of the Humanities without merely mouthing banal pieties or capitulating to the paralyzing force of cynical reason? Avoiding both prescriptive polemics and resignation to the corporate university’s remorseless logic of markets, I offer some reflections on what might constitute a valid defense of the Humanities. I suggest a plural form of defense that does not exacerbate what C.P. Snow has called “a gulf of mutual comprehension” between “two cultures.”
Keywords: Humanities, Crisis, Democracy, Neoliberalism
Bionote: Jeremy De Chavez is Assistant Professor of Literature in English at the University of Macau. While his research and teaching areas are primarily in Postcolonial Studies, Global Anglophone Literature, and Critical/Cultural Theory, he is committed to being a strategic generalist with wide-ranging interests across literary periods, genres, and cultural forms. His work has found print in various journals, but currently he is working on a scholarly monograph entitled Positive Affects and Postcolonial Critique (under contract with Routledge) and on compiling and annotating a research guide on “Positive Affects” for the series Oxford Bibliographies in Literary and Critical Theory (under contract with Oxford University Press).
Presentation 2
Title: Is the Philippine Kritika in Crisis? Reviewing the K to 12 Curriculum Objectives in a 21st Century Neoliberal Philippine Literature Education
Author 1: Jan Marvin A. Goh
Designation and affiliation: University of Macau, Graduate Student. Email: mc04084@umac.mo / gohjanmarvin@gmail.com
Abstract
This article reflects on literary and humanities education in the current K to 12 senior high school literature curriculum, through tracing the position of Philippine literary theory and criticism, or Kritika, in its objectives. It seeks to problematize whether its presence or absence is symptomatic to the “disastrous neoliberal” architecture of contemporary Philippine humanities education. While this study relates the literature subject to Martha Nussbaum’s claim that “the imaginative, creative aspect, and the aspect of rigorous critical thought” are indeed “losing ground as nations prefer to pursue short-term profit and skills suited to profit-making”, this paper locates her idea that “democracy needs humanities” through Constantino’s (1975) “miseducation of Filipino people” with the aim of decolonizing from the educational ethos that was never intended to promote democracy, freedom, and equality. Toward that objective, locating Philippine Kritika in the literature education is essential since it speaks to the idea of Isagani R. Cruz’s concept of “the other Other of Western literary theory” (1996), which describes the Western literary thought as impoverished because of its “ignorance of half of the world’s literary texts and theories.” The poverty it brought via colonialist hegemony is “unconsciously shared by Philippine literary thought” as evidenced by New Criticism being “the ruling paradigm in Philippine literary circles today” (2010) despite the emergence of newer critics and recent positions in Philippine postcolonial studies.
Keywords: Philippine Kritika, humanities in crisis, Martha Nussbaum, Renato Constantino, 21st century literature,
Bionote:
Jan Marvin Goh is a currently a graduate student at University of Macau where he writes his project on Post-Colonial Gothic Encounters in Philippine Literary Tradition. His master’s thesis at De La Salle University centers on a canonical Filipino writer’s critical auto/biography. He has presented his papers on linguistics, cultural/heritage studies, and deconstruction in both local and international conferences. He is also a Critical Writing fellow at Popular Culture and City Sense at Ateneo De Manila University and a Translations fellow at Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino.
Presentation 3
Of Fairy Tales: The Reparative Fantasy in Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”
Cassie, Lin Jun
Designation and affiliation: M. A. Student of the University of Macau. Email: mb84026@um.edu.mo
Abstract
With the heated debate on the utility of the humanities as a context, this paper reads Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” as an attempt to reconcile the emerging functional attitude towards the humanities and the susceptibility of the humanities to the neo-liberal condition. This paper traces connections between the “reparative” or the “post-critical” turn and fairy tales or fantasies in order to argue that Christina Rossetti’s much debated poem, “Goblin Market,” could be framed in a fantastic framework that substantiates a reparative orientation that is “additive and accretive” (Sedgwick, Touching Feeling 149). A stubborn insistence on the hermeneutics of suspicion has informed much of the readings of the “Goblin Market,” especially the haunted market, as “kinda subversive, kinda hegemonic” (Sedgwick, Queer Performativity 15). I aim to provide a different approach given that recent scholarship on “Goblin Market” ignores the possibility of reparation. In this paper, I attempt to withhold suspicion in order to hone caring eyes to uncritical materials that are often deemed untenable to politicized life. I reparatively read the female participation in the market that resuscitates a full female identity and the “muted” ending that is often subjected to paranoid readings. Locating “Goblin Market” in a fantastic framework, I argue, helps us to see the actual world and it helps us visualize a fantastic world that brings out an ethical efflorescence that entertains human experience in its plenitude. This essay also argues that “Goblin Market,” partakes in “a new wave of innovative fairy tales” (Zipes 98) that gained ascendancy in the latter half of the nineteenth century and this serves as an affective archive to document long marginalized figures and feelings. I also argue that Rosetti’s poem invites thoughts on how aesthetic devices sustain and reproduce selves that ripple off from real-life experiences in a fantastic interruption of spatiality and temporality.
Keywords: reparative and paranoid readings, and fairy tales
Bionote: Cassie, Lin Jun is currently taking up her M.A. in English Studies at the University of Macau. Her research interests are Asian American Literature, Cultural Studies and Affect Theory, and she is currently writing her thesis on Ocean Vuong and his poetics through lens of affect theory.
Session 4
Time: 1:15 PM—2:15 PM (Indian Time)
Moderator/s: Jeremy De Chavez
Presentation 1
“In the mountains, we are like prisoners”: Kalinggawasan as Indigenous Freedom of the Mamanwa of Basey, Samar
Apple Jane Molabola1, Allan Abiera2, & Jan Gresil Kahambing3
1 Professional Education Unit, Leyte Normal University, ORCID: 0000-0002-4568-9038
2 Social Science Unit, Leyte Normal University, ORCID: 0000-0002-8043-8832
3 Social Science Unit, Leyte Normal University, vince_jb7@hotmail.com, ORCID: 0000-0002-4258-0563
Abstract
The Lumad struggle in the Philippines, embodied in its various indigenous peoples (IPs), is still situated and differentiated from modern understandings of their plight. Agamben notes that the notion of ‘people’ is always political and is inherent in its underlying poverty, disinheritance, and exclusion. As such, the struggle is a struggle that concerns a progression of freedom from these conditions. Going over such conditions means that one shifts the focus from the socio-political and eventually reveals the ontological facet of such knowledge to reveal the epistemic formation of the truth of their experience. It is then the concern of this paper to expose the concept of freedom as a vital indigenous knowledge from the Mamanwa of Basey, Samar. Using philosophical sagacity as a valid indigenous method, we interview Conching Cabadungga, one of the elders of the tribe, to help us understand how the Mamanwa conceive freedom in the various ways it may be specifically and geographically positioned apart from other indigenous studies. The paper contextualizes the diasporic element and the futuristic component of such freedom within the trajectory of liberation. The Mamanwa subverts the conception of freedom as a form of return to old ways and radically informs of a new way of seeing them as a ‘people.’ It supports recent studies on their literature that recommend the development of their livelihood rather than a formulaic solution of sending them back to where they were. The settlement in Basey changes their identification as a ‘forest people’ into a more radical identity.
Keywords: Mamanwa, Indigenous, Freedom, Basey, Sagacity
Session 5
Time: 2:30 PM—3:30 PM (Indian Time)
Moderator/s: Moderator/s: Dr Prabha S Dwivedi, IIT Tirupati
Presentation 1
Negotiating Scottish ‘distinctiveness’ (?): Unmasking the British Conquest and the Construction of Empire in the 19th Century Indian Subcontinent
Subhashis Pan
Ph.D Research Scholar. Sidho-Kanho-Birsha University, Purulia, WB. Email: subhashis.pan6@gmail.com
Abstract:
India in the 19th century encapsulates a very different and contesting Scottish dimension to the expansion of British Empire. Ronald Inden, Professor of Indology at the University of Chicago, argues in his “Orientalist Construction of India” (Modern Asian Studies, 1986) that in the past Western Indologists have produced an Indological construction of India based on caste as India’s essential institution, both the cause of its low level of political and economic development and a factor contributing to its repeated conquest by outsiders. Inden’s take on the Orientalists’ Indological construction of India is based on the philosophical basis of Western Indology and argues how such a ‘hegemonic’ account of Indian history came to be existed that has displaced human agency in India by Indological discourse onto a substantialised caste.
This paper focuses to unmask the role of some of the Scottish scholar-administrators for a distinctively Scottish contribution to the expansion of the British imperial activities that helps to explore the nature of the intellectual and religious engagement. The study offers a contestation of Inden’s argument as the distinctive Scottish Orientalist school in Scottish participation of empire remains open ended and it argues for a complex assessment of Scottish individuals who though shared some philological and philosophical interests and assumptions, nevertheless diverged in many other respects.
Keywords: Empire, Indology, hegemony, distinctiveness, Scottish Orientalist school
Presenter 2
Delhi is Not Far: Reading Khushwant Singh’s Delhi As a Critique of the Reductionist Cultural History
Author- Priyanka Bhardwaj
Department of English, M.K.P. P.G. College, Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India. Email: pinkybhardwaj67@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
The syncretism of Indian culture is widely acknowledged, though it has not been sufficiently historicized. The apparent heterogeneity of a seemingly unified culture has developed over long periods of interaction between elements of the society in an uneven manner whose contours have given unique identities to major centres of Indian culture, defined in all its plurality. Academic scholarship, in particular works of historians, has studied this process in straitjacketed terms, and thus reduced the dynamics to mutually exclusive narratives.
This paper will make a case for an alternative perspective on these processes by examining Khushwant Singh’s Delhi: A Novel (1990) that presents the city of Delhi as a character fraught with and negotiating the multiple threads that have historically contributed to this heterogeneity. It will argue that by exploiting the inherently polyphonic nature of a novel, Singh manages to do what the linear narratives of historiography fail to do. As Singh’s novel shows, numerous dynasties and regimes that ruled Delhi, laid the foundation of a coeval culture that produced dialogic art forms and diverse socio-linguistic registers. The exquisite architecture and intricate panorama of cultural forms are not in discreet relations in Delhi as it emerges in Singh’s novel.
This paper reviews the heterogeneity of culture and languages in ancient and contemporary India through Khushwant Singh’s Delhi: A Novel (1990). It’s a magnum opus of the city of Delhi which widely narrates the diversified culture among many empires. It brings out the vibrant life of the characters from pragmatic to robust, amidst vivid landscapes of the majestic aurora of Delhi. By reading the novel as a cultural biography of the city– herself a participant in these historical processes, this paper will argue that examining cultural memory as a site for the interaction between religion, art, myths, monuments, ritual, conversations, and performance may rectify the reductive prejudices of Indian historiography.
Keywords: Culture, Society, Language, Literature, Architecture
Presenter 3
Title: Perpetrator Plays the Victim: The Politics of Representation in the Captivity Narratives of the Whites
Virender Pal, Assistant Professor, Institute of Integrated & Honors Studies, Kurukshetra University Kurukshetra Haryana. Email: p2vicky@gmail.com, v_pal@kuk.ac.in
Abstract
This paper draws upon and brings into focus an interesting part of the colonial corpus- the captivity narratives. The discoverers of the New World who then shortly turned invaders had to face resistance from the Natives as they embarked upon their conquest, usurpation and assumption of Property in the virgin lands of the continent lying unexploited till the White man set foot on it. To rightfully and legally take that did not belong to the White intruders they had to be morally, culturally and even ethically superior. This question of ‘Might is Right’ is resolved easy through legal systems and machinery on one hand and narratives and discourse and institutions on the other. The Captive Narratives were put to work operating to dub and dismiss the Native. The captive narratives though taken together as a body worked as a device to denigrate the Natives and typecast them so that their extermination would be found as relieving rather than horrendous; as a step towards safety rather than a brutal incursion; they also offered rare insights when not written as part of a strategy but as biographical accounts of Whites held captive by the Natives. Especially, accounts that do not fall neatly onto the timeline set by the White diverge from popular, touted, dominant accounts that underscore barbaric customs of the Reds. These rare narratives by White people brought up by Natives cast a different light on the Red culture and offer substantial clues that the Red way of life was preferable.
Keywords: New World, Red Indians, Natives, Captivity Narratives, Land, Federal Laws, representations, colonization
Presenter 4
Title: Psychological Landscapes and Mines of the Mind: Narrative and Discourse of Red Displacement, White Settlements and Black Laws in the works of Leslie Marmon Silko
Designation and affiliation: Babita Devi, Research Scholar, J. C. Bose University of Science & Technology, YMCA, Faridabad Haryana
Abstract
This study explores the possibility of foregrounding narratives and discourses from marginalized communities such as that of Native Indians. It attempts to assess the efficacy of articulating subaltern subjectivities as in Leslie Marmon Silko’s works. The article investigates the narrative and informing discourse that propels writing of Native Indian authors who engage with issues like displacement, deviance and behavioural changes in context of the colonial experience. The impact that severed relationships can have on people, the psychological trauma resulting from cultural losses and the intangible changes happening in the recesses of the mind are difficult to quantify, therefore these are conveniently dismissed in mainstream discourses. Yet, the important insights that the subjective perceptions of unquantifiable and intangible losses give is unparalleled and cannot be matched by any scientific claims that may be based on surveys and statistics interpreted within the paradigm of White Man’s discourse. Silko’s narrative offers a bridge to the other side, the possibility to transcend knowledge and information validated by the Whites and glimpse the world so far relegated and marginalized. At the same time, the present study while valuing the quasi- real or semi-fictional qualities of the narrative, the subjective experiences shared and admitting the significance of deep experiences in which the reader is invited to partake of or witness, also undertakes a lexical analysis of Silko’s Ceremony using Voyant Tool to intercept psychological and cultural concerns evoked in the text by studying the frequency of words as they appear in the narrative. The author has often referred to words that have association with land and terrain inhabited by the Natives. This triangulation in research is supposed to be enriching and supportive to the concerns of the authors who many a times use the tools, approach and instruments of West to register their protests emphatically- they use the language of the colonizer, the critical approach of the colonizer and the whole jargon of the colonizer to dismantle the edifice of colonialism. Similarly, this study operates in a way analogous to the text under study by both questioning as well using quantitative research tools to unravel dimensions that may be dear in the given context.
Key words: Natives, whites, land, culture Silko
Presenter 5
Title: Re-Orientalism in The Selector of Souls by Shauna Singh Baldwin
Author 1: Urvashi Kaushal
Designation and affiliation: Assistant Professor SVNIT, Surat. Email: urvashikaushal6@gmail.com
Abstract
In almost all diaspora writings home is an important concept which is the locus around which the story revolves. Humanist geographers stress upon the importance of having a place that can give meaning experience and identity to a person. Similarly, postcolonial thinkers also considered home integral to diaspora consciousness. But in last two decades many South Asian diaspora writings depict homeland to cater to the demands of the Western audience. They claim to have an objective and double perspective of presenting the society and culture of their homeland, but it is often the re- oriental picture of the East that emerges through their writing.
Shauna Singh Baldwin an Indo- Canadian writer has consistently written about India and its diaspora community in Canada. This paper argues that her recent novel The Selector of Souls Baldwin’s vision is myopic and her narrative reflects her ambition to present a picture of India that validates the Oriental image created by the Western colonial critics. Unlike her previous works, this novel is written especially for the international readers and endorses the western viewpoint of East with social problems like illiteracy, archaic beliefs, and savage traditions. Hence, Baldwin through her latest endeavour narrates tales of ‘imaginary homeland’ which is an example of ‘re-orientalism’ i.e., complying with the perceived expectations of the western readers.
Keywords: re-orientalism, diaspora writers, conflict, homeland
Bionote: Dr. Urvashi Kaushal is an Assistant Professor of English in the Applied Mathematics and Humanities Department of Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology, Surat, Gujarat. She teaches English and Communication Skills to Engineering and Science students at the Undergraduate and Post Graduate level. Her area of research is Postcolonial Fiction Communication Skills and Employability Skills. She has published around 40 research papers in several national and international journals. She has also presented papers in 10 international as well as national conferences. Currently, she is supervising 4 doctoral theses and has successfully guided 3 research scholars who have been awarded their degrees. She has also delivered expert lectures in many academic platforms.
Presenter 6
Policing Immigration: A Study of Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander
Aratrika Mandal
Research Scholar, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT- Kharagpur. Email: mandalaratrika@iitkgp.ac.in
Abstract
The present paper looks at the representation of inter-national mobility and immigrants in select works from Swedish author Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander series. Conventionally, detective fiction as a genre focuses on an untowardly act of defiance which is resolved in the end, but Mankell’s works are set in Sweden, a country where despite exceptionally inclusive foreign policies, the fault lines that exist within that very social exceptionalism are exposed. Its geographical proximity with the Baltic countries makes its national boundaries porous, which enables the covert extremist factions to surface and function globally. Illegal human trafficking, followed by the absence of any restriction in compliance with the social welfare state allows one to blend in better, despite the rising anti-immigrant sentiments across the nation in the more recent years. While this paper studies the underpinnings of geographical features in the constant run and chase, it will also examine how they are prevailed by cyber space because both the geographic and virtual boundaries are breached by the severity, rigidity, and interdependency of these morally fractured underground networks. Mankell’s Faceless Killers (1991) reveals nascent xenophobia stifled by the neo-Nazi remnants, which is supplemented by local projection of immigrants. These boundaries are further abused in The White Lioness (1993) by Russian and African fugitives operating deeper networks of extremist groups that manifest in dissolved national security. The paper will also reflect on the idea of an immigrant figure as potentially a victim, as a criminal. Finally, an engagement with the physical aspects of the represented urban spaces will facilitate a discussion on the (il)legality of immigration which punctures the welfare state now close to collapse.
Keywords: crime fiction, immigration, refugee, world literature, Swedish fiction
Bionote: Arartika Mandal is a PhD scholar, pursuing World literature, at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences in IIT Kharagpur. She has a keen interest in crime fiction, space studies, and visual studies.
Session 6
Time: 3:35 PM—5:05 PM (Indian Time)
Presentation 1
A Discourse on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as a Post Peak Oil Narrative Foreshadowing a New World Order
S.Jeyasiba Ponmani,
Research Scholar, Department of English, PSGR Krishnammal College for Women, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India, sibasmiles@gmail.com
Narasingaram Jayashree*
Assistant Professor, Department of English, PSGR Krishnammal College for Women, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India, jayashree@psgrkcw.ac.in
*Corresponding author: email id: jayashree@psgrkcw.ac.in; Phone number: +91 9952384783
Abstract
The reconceptualising of the literary history after the discovery of oil has opened a new form of interpretation of the ways of the world. Since its discovery, oil as an energy resource has altered the cultural, social, economic and environmental outlook of the carbon- based world. As the meaning of oil usage shifts from consumption to exploitation, the foreshadowing shows an irrevocable catastrophe. The paper aims to read The Road by Cormac McCarthy as a post peak oil narrative and addresses how the peak oil situation, if not immediately attended, would lead to a perilous future. Thus, by addressing the pressing problem of the present and foreshadowing a possible outcome, the paper asserts the importance of immediate energy descent to avoid the societal collapse.
Keywords: Oil; Exploitation; Catastrophe; Peak oil; Energy descent; Societal collapse
Bionote:
S.Jeyasiba Ponmani is pursuing full time research in the Department of English, PSGR Krishnammal College for Women, Coimbatore. She has published three papers in reputed journals and her area of research interest includes Petrofiction, Ecocriticism and Refugee Literature.
Dr. Narasingaram Jayashree is working as Assistant Professor, Department of English, PSGR Krishnammal College for Women, Coimbatore. Her major research work includes Diasporic Literature, Feminism, Magical Realism and Style in the Select Novels of Divakaruni. She has to her credit 13 research papers in journals of high reputation, 6 papers presented in international conferences and 1 book chapter publication. She is an active research guide since 2011 and has produced 4 PhD, 13 M.Phil, and 21 Master Thesis projects.
Presentation 2
Title: Privileging Oddity and Otherness: A Study of Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore
Author 1: Rasleena Thakur
Designation and affiliation: Ph.D. Research Scholar, School of Social Sciences and Languages, Lovely Professional University, Punjab, India.
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-3032-2831
Email: rasleena1103@gmail.com
Author 2: Vani Khurana
Designation and affiliation: Assistant Professor, Centre of Professional Enhancement, School of Social Sciences and Languages, Lovely Professional University, Punjab, India. Email: vani.khurana@lpu.co.in
Abstract
The concept of otherness in literature usually comes under the broad purview of postcolonial studies, relating to the subaltern and the displaced. This paper, however, focuses on the concept of the ‘other’ and the ‘odd’ in the light of magical realism and how the characters which are generally side-lined by society on the basis of their sexual preference, mental capability, physical deformity, gender fluidity and age find a clear and distinct voice in these fictions. Haruki Murakami’s novel Kafka on the Shore is taken up for this study. The unique blend of surrealism (the progenitor genre) with magical realism (the offspring mode) in the novel create an oneiric landscape which is still very much rooted in reality, in present day Japan. The paper concentrates on the trauma of certain characters and how their exclusion from society leads to their subsequent recovery. The paper through a detailed and critical study of the novel’s unusual characters and their non-deterministic status of being typified in traditional categories posits magical realism as an apt literary mode for those who lack a voice and are underrepresented in conventional texts. Here ostracism is not portrayed as pessimistic but as a locus for growth and self-discovery.
Keywords: Magical Realism, Murakami, Gender fluidity, Disability, Otherness, Trauma
Bionote: Rasleena Thakur is a Research Scholar in the Department of English, School of Social Sciences and Languages at Lovely Professional University, Punjab. Her research concentrates on Magical Realism and Postmodernism.
Dr. Vani Khurana is Assistant Professor and Coordinator of the Department of Verbal Ability in Centre of Professional Enhancement, School of Social Sciences and Languages, at Lovely Professional University. Her research interests include Literature and Psychology and Depersonalization Theory.
Presenter 3
Title Rhizomatous Identity in “The Yellow Wall-Paper” : A Deleuzo-Guattarian Perspective
Name Dr.Preeti Puri
Email purip@nitj.ac.in
Affiliation Assistant Professor, Dr B R Ambedkar National Institute of Technology Jalandhar
Name Shefali
Email shefalibassi1997@gmail.com
Affiliation Assistant Professor, DAV University
Description This article is an attempt to move beyond the conventional binary heuristic of identity to its progressive representation based on multiplicity, difference, and dispersion popularized by the ‘rhizomatic’ theory of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Gilman’s story, “The Yellow Wall-Paper”. It is a cliché belief that multiplicity comprises numerous units and these units can be eventually united under one category, such as the ages of population. Deleuze and Guattari interrogated such logocentric assumptions, and ‘arborescent root- tree’ model of objectified structures, language, and identity. This article seeks to trace the voyage of Jane’s identity, whose dairy constitutes the story “The Yellow Wall-Paper”. Her identity has evoked ramified and conflicting networks of references. Feminists broach that she is caged to be a conventional caring mother; for a Freudian she is a ‘hysteric’ struggling with nervous depression, Lacanian posit that she is a ‘psychotic’ who persistently tries to satisfy the ‘gaze’ of her physician husband John, and for a Deleuzo-Guattarian the moment she fails to bear the burden of capitalism driven ‘bio-power’ and ‘nuclear family’ she becomes a ‘schizo’. The object of study of this article is not Jane’s mind which romanticizes asylums rather the interrelation between ‘bio-power’ and her ‘desire’. The article will portray that the identity of Jane is not a threat to rationality, rather it is in a state of constant ‘flux’, in a ceaseless motion of ‘becoming’, it is a ‘rhizome’, facilitating a non- hierarchical network.
Presenter 4
Revisiting an Unsung Musician and His Time in Michael Ondaatje’s Coming through Slaughter: A Socio-political Study
Dr. Md. Rakibul Islam
Assistant Professor of English, AMU Centre at JangipurMurshidabad, WB. Email: mdrakibulislam1989@gmail.com
Abstract
The paper seeks to illustrate how black people were treated and tortured by white in the United States, especially in New Orleans City in the 19th Century and early part of the 20th century. The murder of George Floyd inrecent past is one such of many cases have come to light. Due to socio-political deprivation, they were left with limited menial earning-options, mostly pottery and plantation, trying hard to manage their bread and butter in the City. With such limited options in hand they further engaged themselves in different illegal activities like robbery while black women had to sell their body to run their family. Amidst such socio-cultural condition, many of them chose ‘music’ as the most exhilarating profession of the time, though they were permitted to play it only in some particular vicinity in New Orleans City. The black musician like Buddy Bolden had to earn his livelihood from music, especially from jazz and blues. Bolden, a black-jazz-king, divulges his innermost agony and antagonism, especially of black people with his cornet. He was a poor genius and gem of purest ray serene went unsung and unseen. He struggled, resisted and fought back with cornet but early loss of his father and sister and repression of white ushered him in addiction to wine. He was bloom of the dirt, a harmonious tune in cacophony; a fragrance amidst filth. Finally, an attempt has been made to ensconce the true socio-political condition of his time and reasons behind his insanity.
Keywords: black people, insanity menial earning-options, music, white, unsung,
Presenter 5
De-Marginalizing the ‘Other’?: Exploring Katherine’s Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers and Sonia Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing
Tanmoy Putatunda
Contemporary authors writing on urban spaces in India have often moved beyond the commonplace or the mainstream images of the city and moved towards the margin and the marginalized. Rather than the iconic landmarks or the ‘places of interest’ in a city, writers today are more intrigued by the alleys and by lanes of the metropolitan maze. This often posits the narratives of the margin at the centre of the ideological ambit of the text thereby calling into question the dominant discourses that sustain the urban myth in the popular imagination. Although a mainstream author acting as the mouthpiece for the underprivileged and the disempowered ‘subject’ often draws skeptical slur, it also nonetheless challenges the popular and ‘promoted’ image of the city. Sonia Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars (2011) is a literary reportage of the dark and intriguing world of the dance bars in Mumbai experienced by the author herself. Katherine Boo on the other hand sets the narrative of her book titled Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (2012) in a present day slum called Annawadi. This article scrutinizes how de-marginalization of the ‘other’ acts as a narrative strategy in these texts and also examines the ways in which these marginalized and peripheral spaces entangle themselves in a curious relationship with the city at large, thereby bringing into focus the complicated rhythm of the city that has indeed been borne out of the contradiction between several forms of significations, as Barthes would have noted.
Bio Note: Tanmoy Putatunda is an Assistant Professor of English in Adamas University. He is pursuing his Ph.D. in the Department of English and Other Modern European Languages, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. His research interests include Urban Studies, representation of city in literature, Indian Literature in English, Popular Literature, Culture Studies, Postmodern and Postcolonial Literature.
Presenter 6
INTRACONNECTIONS AND INTERCONNECTIONS: OIKO POETICS READING OF RICHARD FLANAGAN’S THE SOUND OF ONE HAND CLAPPING
Dr.C. Amutha charu sheela
Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Sri Venkateswara College of Engineering. Email: acsheela@svce.ac.in
ABSTRACT
This paper attempts to read the Australian novelist Richard Flanagan’s The Sound of One Hand Clapping in the light of Oiko poetic theory – an Indian version of eco –critical strand propounded by Dr. Nirmal Selvamony. This econativistic approach attempts to interpret literature from Oikic angle which looks at house hold or habitat as an amalgamation and assimilation of human beings, their action, nature- cultural elements, particular place, time and the spirit. It is also preferred as it warrants one’s right to live a dignified life.
Richard Flanagan’s The Sound of One Hand Clapping deserves a close analysis from an Oiko poetic perspective as it establishes the symbiotic relationship among the humans, the non humans and the sacred. In this novel besides testifying nature’s healing and its regenerative power the author voices his concern over human being’s insatiable greed to conquer and control nature by displacing the indigenous way of life and redefining the native land scape by transplanting people, animals and plants that promotes global capitalism and environmental globalisation. This novel show cases how the global capitalist forces –the Europe threatens the local – the Tasmanian with its nation building projects like dam structures to meet its commercial interests which have become a norm across the world.
Broadly this paper is an attempt to locate Richard Flanagan’s the aforementioned novel in the interstices of power and identity in order to explicate how his narrative instructs the human societies in settler colonies like Australia to accord the land, the humans and the non humans a decisive place in order to institute rapprochement with the original culture.
KEY WORDS: Oikos, Tasmania, integration, dislocation
BIO – NOTE : Dr.C.Amutha charu sheela, Assistant Professor, English at Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Sri Venkateswara College of Engineering, Sriperumpudur, and has been teaching English Language and Management papers for Engineering students. Her research focuses on the impact of communalism and religious fundamentalism in contemporary English fictions. She has to her credit many research papers published in reputed books and journals with good professional front. Her research interest lies in Violence in Literature, Theatre studies, Diaspora Literature and Eco Literature. She is also actively engaged in creating awareness about Social Entrepreneurship among the student community.
Presenter 7
The Contemporary Dystopian Reality of Slavery and Modern Capitalism in Octavia Butler’s Parable Novels.
Cr Patricia Mary Hodge
Research Scholar, Department of English, NEHU. Email: patclhodge93@gmail.com
Abstract
An often unacknowledged truth about slavery is that the forced, unpaid labour of slaves built and maintained capitalist economies. Octavia Butler interweaves the slave past and the contemporary market economy in her dystopian Parable series in order to imagine the possible outcomes in late capitalism. She examines the intermingling and co-existence of two kinds of slavery: resurged antebellum period slavery and industrial capitalist slavery of wage labour and human trafficking. In doing so she also interrogates how the abolished system has metamorphosed as a racial as well as economic class structure in profit-oriented capitalism. In this sense, the genre of her narratives is as much historical and contemporary as it is dystopian as she exposes capitalist utopia as dystopia. This paper will highlight the existent systems of selective in-grouping, class stratification, racial exploitation, unregulated labour supply etc., and thereby establish the evolution of modern slavery as a product of racial and economic parameters to sustain profit-oriented capitalism.
Keywords: Slavery, capitalism, dystopia, race, class
Bionote: The author is a Research Scholar in the Department of English at the North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong, Meghalaya. Her area of research and interest include eco-feminism, eco-spirituality, ecotopia, dystopia, post and transhumanism and feminist speculative fiction.
Session 7
Time: 5:10 PM—5:50 PM (Indian Time)
Moderator/s: Dr Rahul K Gairola, University of Perth
Presenter 1
Projecting Agonies and Scars of Partition through Visual Narratives: An Observation
Sayantina Dutta
Assistant Professor & Head, Department of English, Naba Ballygunge Mahavidyalaya
Email: sayantina@gmail.com
Partition of the Indian subcontinent indisputably generated an intensive, unresolved, trans-generational cultural trauma. This trauma continues to dominate the collective consciousness, largely because perpetrators and victims have for long existed in a state of “psychic amnesia” thus, disallowing for mourning and possibility of healing. Although, literary discourses on Partition abound, describing either the trauma of victims, their loss of home or horrific tales of violence, yet in all these accounts a lot has remained unsaid.
Indeed, partition experiences remain censored. The state agency not only failed at archiving the memory and material for expression and recovery by cathartic means but this lack was further accentuated by official history’s efforts to manipulate, influence, deform and transform it. Such a hegemonic conduct on part of the State and patriarchy ensured that memories of Partition could only survive within the scarred psyches of individuals. These repressed memories, as the texts reveal, re-emerged to influence the post partition generation. Beyond the corpus of literary testimonies, the idea of violence, violations, trauma, dislocation, loss of home in the context of partition have also been addressed through the medium of visual culture of cinema, documentaries, photography, painting, sculpture, cyclorama, graphic narratives, photo stories. Social media has also created a massive archive of people’s memory without any bureaucratic interventions.
This paper aims to look into the partition pathos in the documentaries from the twenty-first century – Supriyo Sen’s Way Back Home (2003 <https://www.idfa.nl/en/film/07c8ed1b-7199-43eb-bf47-2744850a25e7/way-back-home>) and Debalina Majumder’s The Broken Land (2012 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n61xVB6MJCw>). Way Back Home is Sen’s attempt at retracing the roots with his aged parents on their trip to Barisal after having spent half a century as ‘refugees’ in India. These facets are captured through visual images of people, objects, landscape, through photos or sketches in Sen’s narratives. Debalina’s parents consider their homeland as the foreign now. They do not want to go back. They try to shut off the memory of the past. The documentary traces Debalina visiting Jessore to touch the memory, to relive her parents’ past. These visuals excavate the past through the interviews of the people who had witnessed the catastrophic events and had been victims to them.
Keywords: Dislocation, partition, refugees, trauma, visual culture.
Presenter 2
Title: Partition of Bengal: A posthumanist study of select literary works
Author 1: Indra Sankar Ghatak
Designation and affiliation: PhD Research Scholar, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.
Email: indrasghatak16@gmail.com; INDRASGHATAK16@iitkgp.ac.in;
Abstract
The Indian Partition ushered in one of the most historical migrations in human history where millions had to change their native affiliations. This event led to the formation of two nation-states (India and East Pakistan) out of a single cultural geography and the drawing of boundaries (Radcliffe line) disrupted the emotional, cultural and spatial link of the people with the native countries. Selected short stories from Bashabi Fraser’s Bengal Partition Stories and Debjani Sengupta’s Mapmaking and the memoirs in Adhir Biswas’ Border: Bangla Bhager Dewal encapsulate the variegated experiences of the dislocated during 1946-1955, who were sabotaged by fellow Bengalis in the name of gender, community (bangal-ghoti), and religion. The phenomenon of border crossing had led to fluid identities (refugees/migrants/infiltrators) as individuals had been deterritorialized and reterritorialized, whereby migrant bodies had been exploited severely, which resulted in the experience of trauma. This paper looks at select samples from the collections mentioned above and raises the question “of which ‘human’ is the posthuman a ‘post’?” (Ferrando, 2019, p. 9) The narratives from the Bengal partition capture the distortions of bodily boundaries and cognizance of the ‘human’ from the non/sub-human. The paper uses the frame of posthumanism, where ‘man’ is seen as the ‘humanimal’ where human development is less about ‘being’ than a ‘becoming-with’ (Haraway, 2007). The body here becomes an anthropogeographic entity and the refugees present themselves as the cultural metaphor in order to capture the ambivalent condition of post-national human beings.
Keywords: partition, posthuman, identities, trauma, cultural.
Bionote: I completed my Graduation from ST. XAVIER’S COLLEGE, KOLKATA (AUTONOMOUS). I have done my Dissertation entitled “ORIENTALISM IN SHERLOCK HOLMES” under Assistant Professor Christina Mirza. I held the position of Treasurer at The English Academy, ST. XAVIER’S COLLEGE, KOLKATA (AUTONOMOUS).
I have completed by M.A. in English from BANARAS HINDU UNIVERSITY.
I have presented a paper titled “CULTURAL PLURALISM IN INDIA: A BOAT RIDE” at the IASA International Conference 2020. I am also a temporary member of Indian Association for the Study of Australia (IASA).
I am currently a PhD Research Scholar at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, KHARAGPUR under the supervision of Assistant Professor Dr. Somdatta Bhattacharya. My research area is Partition of Bengal and Urban Studies.
Presenter 3
Title: Where Memory Unveils the Pangs of Rootlessness: A Critical Reading of Sunanda Sikdar’s Doyamoyeer Kotha
Author: MADHUMITA ROY
Designation and affiliation: ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, ADAMAS UNIVERSITY, BARASAT
Email: diya6r@gmail.com
Abstract
The saga of Bengal Partition and its aftermath has been documented in histories. The empirical records of deaths, refugees, violated women, abducted lands have acted as major resources for us to comprehend the vicious game that the Partition involved. But somehow the grand narratives of Partition have failed to account personal reflections on lost homes, broken ties and obscure identities. It is at this point that the significance of the Partition memoirs are realised. While the conventional historiography of Partition hovers to express the generality of experience, memoirs have provided an alternative way of documenting the reality(s) of Partition. My paper would focus on one such memoir, Doyamoyeer Kotha, by Sunanda Sikdar, first published in 2008. The writer memorialises her childhood in a small, unknown village of Bangladesh where she spent ten years in the post-Partition era. The memoir assumes the perspective of a little girl, who interprets and negotiates with the consequences of Partition in her own way. While the writer recounts the existence of an ideal society in Bangladesh where the Hindus co-existed with the Muslims, she also states how the migration of the Muslim refugees in the vacated Hindu houses of their locality created problems for her orthodox aunt or how for her aunt the term “refugee” had acquired a demeaned status. The purpose of this paper is to critically sift through the pages of this memoir to find out how it serves as a micro history and by bringing in the elements of personal loss, it makes its contribution to the existing narratives of Bengal Partition.
Keywords: Partition, Memoir, Personal.
Bionote: Madhumita Roy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, Adamas University, Barasat. She is also a research scholar in the Department of English, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. At present, she is working on “Rabindranath Tagore’s Engagements with Science”.
Presenter 4
The Fear of Camp Life: Understand the Spatial Reality and Formation of Discourse
Joydip Dutta
Email Joydipdaju@gmail.com
Affiliation PhD Scholar
Description The existence of camp was very purposive and it was the immediate assistance given to the people whose life was disrupted by the sudden event of partition. On the other hand, the appearance of camp is a situational condition. The objective of the paper is to elucidate the fear of Camp life, especially in the context of refugee Camps in West Bengal during post-Partition time which largely direct as active agent of rehabilitation, continuation of historical chronology and supplier of informal labour. Cooper’s camp in Ranaghat, West Bengal will be taken as a case study here. On the experiential ground Camp unfolds another kind of reality through experiences of everyday where fear, anxiety, suddenness, and temporality constituted the basic state. The concept of fear borrows from Martine Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) which does not indicate any specific character or definite future. Rather fear lies in the character of ‘affect’. The principal enquiry would be if the camp is home of the refugees or it has separate kind of existential reality through the face of fear. In West Bengal construction of the Camp was presupposed by the intention of rehabilitation. Therefore, in-itself the Camp functioned to control the population with norms, rules and regulations. On the other side, its temporal character signifies how state of mind of the refugees was constructed. Here we will try to see how the concept of fear may unfold the possibility to explicate silence, listening, speaking and formation of the discourse inside the Camp boundary.
Bio-note: Joydip Datta is a PhD scholar under School of Development Studies at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. He did his M. Phil in the same school on Refugee Camps in Bengal and is continuing that work in his PhD. His research interests are refugee studies, camp refugees, caste studies. Methodologically he works on Phenomenology and Hermeneutics. The Title of his thesis is ‘Understanding the ‘Being’ of Refugee Camp: Concept and its Form’.
Session 8
Time: 6:05 PM—7:35PM (Indian Time)
Moderator/s: A David Lewis, Ph.D. School of Healthcare Business, MCPHS University
Presenter 1
Performance Medicine in Healthcare: A Study on the Therapeutic Effects of Playback Theatre
- Dorothy Catherine Dr V. Anitha Devi
Ph D Research Scholar Associate Professor
Department of English Department of English
School of Social Science and Languages School of Social Science and Languages
VIT University VIT University
Vellore Vellore
dorothy.catherine2013@vit.ac.in vanithadevi@vit.ac.in
Abstract
This discussion paper reviews and critically assesses literature related to health humanities and theatre arts in academics and its commitment to healthcare prerequisite. The researcher has argued that regardless of extensive advances in the field of clinical humanities needs have been recognized for a progressively comprehensive outward-confronting and applied discipline. The needs can be addressed in what we call the health humanities, which is an interdisciplinary approach. The new approach is designed with the contributions from performance arts and health professionals. It contends on the need for drama therapy and narrative therapy as a tool to improve the emotional wellness of individuals. This paper emphasizes the benefits of therapeutic theatre with specific reference to Playback Theatre (PBT) integrated with emotional healing in performance medicine. The healing indicators of individuals’ suffering imply the therapeutic effect. The paper also places interest in distinguishing the difference between Health humanities and Medical humanities. It defines the treatment tool, performance medicine utilized for natural healing. The results discuss about the remedial effects of PBT and the therapeutic process in PBT. This form of contemporary theatre is gradually emerging in India. PBT, a theatrical form is random, unsystematic, non – structured, unintended and indeterminate. The unpredicted evolution which takes place in the performer’s thought-process initiates the therapeutic effect in the hurt individual.
Keywords: Health Humanities, Performance Arts, Performance Medicine, Playback Theatre, Therapy and Psychosomatic Health
Presenter 2
Title: Delaying the onset of Alzheimer’s through second language Intervention: A case study
First Author:
Annuncy Vinoliya. D
Research Scholar, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology
Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, India. Email Id: vinoalosius@gmail.com
Second Author:
Dr. R. Joseph Ponniah
Professor and Head, Office # 307, Lyceum, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
National Institute of Technology, Trichirappalli, Tamil Nadu. Email.Id: joseph@nitt.edu
Abstract
Epidemiological studies have identified Alzheimer’s disease as the most prominent and widely distributed neurodegenerative disease among older population. Pharmacological intervention, is wildly accepted as a treatment protocol for Alzheimer. But in addition to pharmacological intervention, cognitive intervention at the early stages of Alzheimer’s could delay the progress of the disease. Therefore, second language learning can be used as a cognitive therapy to delay Alzheimer’s disease. Second language training as a therapy for the cognitive decline of Alzheimer patients is debated in the contemporary interdisciplinary medical-humanities field. This prompts us to analyse the functional and structural changes in the AD brain while getting exposure to second language. This article is a case study of seventy-five years old woman who has been diagnosed with cerebral atrophy and currently she is in the early stages of Alzheimer. This study uses English language teaching methods and different activities to strengthen the cognitive areas like memory, retention and response. Finally, the article provides the report of the intervention and emphasize the importance of engaging the senior citizens in cognitive activities at the pre-early stage of Alzheimer’s.
Keywords: Second Language Learning, verbal memory, sensory and motor skill
Bio note: Dr. R. Joseph Ponniah is a Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli. His current research and teaching interest include Biolinguistics, Reading, English Language Teaching and Second Language Acquisition. He is widely published in peer-reviewed international journals, such as The International Journal of Foreign Language Teaching, The Reading Matrix, Journal of Asia TEFL, Journal on Educational Psychology and Journal of Genetics. He has edited a book titled The Idea and Practice of Reading with Sathyaraj Venkatesan. He has delivered keynote addresses and invited talks in conferences and workshops. He has also mentored ESL Teachers in Orientation and Training Programmes.
Presenter 3
Bureaucracy of Medical Profession— A “Kafkaesque Nightmare” for Physicians
Author 1: Livine Ancy A
Designation and affiliation: Ph.D Research Scholar, National Institute of Technology Trichy.
Email: livine2212@gmail.com
Abstract
The figure and authority of doctors are susceptible to persistent changes throughout the history. Family doctors of nineteenth century to holding the role of gatekeepers of non- medical benefits in contemporary times, the role of doctors have expanded making them all the more authoritative and influential. However the increasing consumerism as a result of bureaucratization in medical profession limits physicians autonomy through “deskilling” doctors and coercing them to “derive their authority from other sources other than the body of (medical) knowledge” (Haug 95,96). Ian William’s graphic narratives The Bad Doctor: The Troubled life and times of Dr. Iwan James (2014) and The Lady Doctor (2019), serve as a critical lens to reflect on the hassles that physicians face due bureaucratization of medical profession. Drawing instances from the aforementioned graphic narratives, the essay aims to provide a revisionary understanding of physicians as victims of larger than life forces such as technology, bureaucracy and hierarchy within the practitioners. The essay also scrutinizes how the verbo-visual medium of comics facilitates in visibilizing the of bureaucratic strain on doctors.
Keywords: Graphic Medicine, Medical Profession, Bureaucracy, Health Humanities
Bionote:
I am a doctoral research fellow in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Institute of Technology, Trichy (India).
Presenter 4
Sequential Sadness: Representation of Depression in Clay Jonathan’s Depression Comix
Arya S
Research Scholar, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, NIT Trichy, Tamil Nadu
livearyalive@gmail.com
Dr. Sathyaraj V
Associate Professor, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, NIT Trichy, Tamil Nadu
Abstract
The medium of comics is instrumental in the iconic representation of an idea, otherwise regarded untranslatable into language. Mental illness narratives in graphic medicine accommodate myriad possibilities of articulating the voice of the mind through autobiographical as well as personal narratives. These graphic narratives discover resounding voices or an altered subjective response to the illness from the reading community around the world. Depression narratives in graphic medicine, a conspicuous subset of mental illness narratives, work in tandem with the existing oeuvre of verbal narratives on the illness and have effectively exerted itself as an extension to deliver the complexities of the diseased mind. These narratives inculcate a set of ethos unlooked-for in the rationale offered by biomedicine and validate the patient experience either for its universality or particularity. Reflective of the widespread attitudes towards the illness, Clay Jonathan’s Depression Comix (2011a), a webcomic on depression, deals with the intricate inner lives of the subjects belonging to the heterogenous society. Spread across 450 episodes of four-panel comics, Depression Comix is a continuing saga of telltale clues of depression covering in close quarters the intrapersonal and interpersonal lives of the sufferer expansively. The author, though from an impersonal point of view, affectively employs conventional as well as innovative metaphors of representing the disease in his attempt to undermine the traditional ways of representing depression and emphasizes on how diversified the experience can be across the suffering population. The use of metaphor accentuates the visual narration of illness and solidifies the abstract, resulting in a more concrete picture of an idea. Also, webcomics engages with the burgeoning literature and thought surrounding depression by availing the merits of this promising platform. This research article delineates the representational aspects of depression, with special emphasis on the use of metaphorical devices by closely reading the tropes in Depression Comix and outlines the interface of webcomics and graphic medicine. Theoretical postulates of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have been applied in the context to conceptualize the use of verbo-visual metaphors in comics.
Key words- Depression, comics, graphic medicine, representation, metaphors, web comics
Bionote:
Arya S is a research scholar in the Department of Humanities & Social Sciences in National Institute of Technology, Thiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu. She received a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Government Women’s College, Thiruvananthapuram and a master’s degree in the same from University College, Thiruvananthapuram. Her current area of research is Health Humanities with focus on graphic medicine.
Dr. Sathyaraj V is Associate Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli. He is a Senior International Bibliographer with the Publications of Modern Language Association of America (PMLA). He is the author of The Idea and Practice of Reading (2018, Singapore; Springer) with R. Joseph Ponniah, Edgar Allan Poe: Tales and Other Writings (2017, Orient BlackSwan), AIDS in Cultural Bodies: Scripting the Absent Subject (1980-2010) (2016, Cambridge Scholars Publishing) with Gokulnath Ammanathil and Mapping the Margins: A Study of Ethnic Feminist Consciousness in Toni Morrison’s Novels (2011). His articles have appeared in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, Journal of Medical Humanities, American Medical Association Journal of Ethics (AMA), Health, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, The Explicator, among others.
Presenter 5
The Sociolinguistics of Health Communication: COVID-19 Pandemic and the Cases of India and Bharat
Ajit Kumar Mishra
Associate Professor, Department of Humanistic Studies, Indian Institute of Technology (Banaras Hindu University) Varanasi
Abstract:
Language plays an important role in the processes of information dissemination and information exchange across human societies. An even important element of these processes is the concept of “thought transfer” which renders the dissemination and the exchange processes as moments of meaning creation, which become particularly significant when these transfers are sudden. The thought transfer and meaning creation experiences are vital instances of our understanding of the ecology of language in diverse linguistic groups and societies at a particular moment. Taking a cue from these sociolinguistic nuances, this study probes into the thought transfer practices undertaken in the first few months of the COVID-19 outbreak and their implications for the field of health communication in the Indian context. By delving into the different ecologies of language prevalent in India and Bharat, this study contends that in order for this sociolinguistic dichotomy to be resolved it is important that all concerned must be in control of the same code. The study raises questions ranging from limitations in the health communication to linguistically diverse populations in the country, the ease of access of public health information to the deprived, to the problem of infodemic as a barrier to the availability of proper health communication. Through the critical discourse analysis of health communication chunks taken from various sources, the study analyses the causes of the sociolinguistic chasm that has been existing in the dichotomous relationship between India and Bharat, and suggests some sociolinguistic strategies that can tacitly turn the structural pluralism into an organic pluralism making heath communication smooth and discernible in the face of pandemics.
Keywords: COVID-19, thought transfer, India and Bharat, health communication, organic pluralism
Bio-note: Ajit Kumar Mishra is an Associate Professor of English in the Department of Humanistic Studies, Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi. He has earned his PhD in African-American fiction from Banaras Hindu University. His research interests span narrative studies, visual culture, and communication for life and work. He is particularly interested in finding ways to navigate the communication challenges posed to young researchers in India. He is currently researching the prospects and challenges of research communication in Indian academies. Apart from designing courses on literature and coping skills and communication for engineers, he has also conducted scores of interactive sessions on research communication in reputed institutions.
Presenter 6
Title: The Absence of the Female in Medical Discourses of 19th century Bengal
Author 1: Tapti Roy
Designation and affiliation: Assistant Professor, Department of English, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Sharda University. Email: subterraneanhominin@gmail.com / tapti.roy@sharda.ac.in
Abstract
The 19th century also witnessed a plethora of innovations in medicine that led to the rejection of the theory of miasma giving rise to a new perspective on human body and the diseases thereof which facilitated substantial study on tropical medicine and diseases by the imperial administration. Few contemporary novels bear testimony to this advancement of medicine and the advent of natives in the military and civil medical services. The paper, in question, will utilise one such novel that is, Banaphool’s Agniswar as an entrepot to question the absence of women in the evolving 19th century colonial medical discourse as active beneficiaries. It would seek to establish that women suffered worse than their male counterparts as their diseases were considered to be private affairs to be dealt exclusively within the confines of the household.
The paper will commence by classifying contemporary females under three heads that is Memsahibs, Bhadramahilas, and the rest followed by studying them on the basis of Edward John Tilt’s Health in India for British Women, the case of Queen Empress vs Hurree Mohun Mythee, 26th July, 1890, and finally Ranajit Guha’s Chandra’s Death.
To sum up, the female bodies will be studied as homogenous, dehumanized, and malleable, spaces appropriated by the males both native and colonial, to serve as sites of performative resistance against polluting mutual influences. Additionally, as female bodies they were intended to be ideologically consumable objects embodying the discourses of purity of the respective civilizations. Protecting the female body, claiming ownership, and control followed by the apathy of the colonial administration will be demonstrated as a reflection of medicine and public health in colonial India as a selective enterprise seeking to maximize economic and political gains.
Keywords: Colonial medicine, 19th century Bengal, Female bodies, Public health, Colonial woman, Chandra Chashani, Phulmoni Dasi
Bionote: Tapti Roy teaches at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Sharda University, Greater Noida.. She has completed B.A(Hons) English from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi and M.A (English) from Presidency College, Kolkata. She joined M.Phil (English) at Jamia Millia Islamia in 2011 and completed the same in 2014. Her areas of interest include Literary Theory, Myth studies, Modernism and Postmodernism studies, and Colonial medicine. Additionally, she is a high altitude trekker with several mountain passes to her credit. Presently she lives in New Delhi.
Presenter 7
Title: Giving Dementia a Face? Dementia and Graphic Medicine
Author 1: Laboni Das
Designation and affiliation: PhD Research Scholar, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirapalli, Tamil Nadu, India, 620015. Email: laboni.das73@gmail.com
Abstract
“Second childishness and mere oblivion” as opinionated by Shakespeare, has become one of the greatest fears of ageing. When a family member is diagnosed with ‘dementia’, the effect on the entire family can be overwhelming. The diagnosis triggers a range of emotions creating family conflicts regarding the treatment, care, living arrangement, finances and end-of-life care. Several biomedical, cultural discourses and media reinforce this stigmatization of dementia by shoving the patient towards ‘social death’. Not only the person with dementia, rather those around them and even the medical faculties become imbued with the idea that the graph of the person’s life will drop as soon as the diagnosis is pronounced. Dementia narratives in graphic medicine works in tandem with the existing corpus of verbal narratives on the illness and have effectively exerted itself as an offshoot to deliver the complexities of the diseased person through the space of comics. These narratives inculcate a set of ethos unlooked-for in the rationale offered by discourses and validate the patient’s experience. Following the loss of autonomy that heralds with the onset of ageing and the condition of dementia, the society tends to shun the person, dehumanise and their ‘selfhood’ is invalidated. Against this backdrop, in a close reading of the part memoirs and part autobiographies, this paper aims to instigate an inquiry into the existing discourses of dementia and negotiate how dementia is observed to represent the breakdown of all that is uniquely ‘human’. The paper further aims to patronize the medium of comics that allows (the authors) to represent the non-degeneration of the ‘person’ with dementia and the atrophy of the ‘brain’ with the condition of dementia.
Keywords: Graphic Medicine, Dementia, Personhood, Comics, Graphic Memoirs, Graphic Autobiography.
Bionote: Laboni Das is a Research Scholar in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli, India. Her ongoing PhD dissertation concentrates on neurodegenerative diseases and graphic medicine. She has presented paper in a national conference, 2nd Students’ Colloquium, organized by Department of English, Vasanta College for Women, Varanasi, India. Besides her interest in photography and music, she has participated in several Poetry Fest and Poetry Slam. She can be contacted at laboni.das73@gmail.com.
Presenter 8
Title: Understanding Colonial Masculinity and Native Bodies: Reading Homeopathy as a Feminist form of Medicine
Author 1: Anjana Menon
Designation and affiliation: PhD Research Scholar, Department of History, Maharaja’s College, Ernakulam, Kerala, India. Email: anjanaabhinavmenon@gmail.com
Abstract
The body has been identified, by many commentators, as a site for the production and maintenance of social power. In the context of colonial India, western biomedicine often acted to reinforce the reason/nature split and made manifestations in dualistic divisions between mind/body, and men/women. Perhaps the most intimate and encompassing of all these dualisms is the individual’s appropriation of his or her own body.
According to Mrinalini Sinha, the colonial discourses on India from very early on were gendered as the colonised society was feminised and its effeminate character, as opposed to ‘colonial masculinity’, was held as a justification for its loss of independence. With the advent of the ‘masculine’ western biomedicine, the indigenous population chiefly women lost the authority and autonomy over their self-knowledge and social power of their bodies. Indian nationalist struggle however effectively depicted an alternative medicine which can offer a ‘political’ challenge to ontological dualism and ‘rationality ‘argument’ of allopathy. Thus, Homoeopathy found a space in the spiritual discourse of Indian nationalism as a ‘feminist’ form of medicine. This paper is an attempt to analyses how the rhetoric on homoeopathy were effectively employed to redress the grievances of masculinity in health care unleashed by the British state. The study lays stress on power imbalance within the practitioner/patient relationship, the exclusion of social concerns from the biomedical model, and the trivialisation of women’s interests and knowledge within the clinical encounters.
Keywords: Body, colonialism, power, masculinity, medical encounter.
Bionote: Anjana Menon is a PhD research scholar in history and is engaged in exploring aspects of culture, gender and scientific pursuits in Indian History.
Session 9
Time: 7:40 PM—9:00PM (Indian Time)
Moderator/s: Dr. Priyanka Tripathi
Presenter 1
Title: Psychosocial Impacts of War and Trauma in Temsula Ao’s Laburnum for my Head
Author 1: Raam Kumar. T
PhD Research Scholar, Department of English and Foreign Languages, Bharathiar University.
Author 2: Dr.B.Padmanabhan
Assistant Professor, Department of English and Foreign Languages, Bharathiar University.
Abstract
Violence constantly carries trauma and suffering to combatants as well as non- combatants identically. It also brings enmity and negativity to everyone both emotionally and physically. The cause for any conflict does not emerge from single motive but depends on multiple factors like socioeconomic conditions, marginalisation, discrimination, political power and sometimes even environmental elements. In recent times, the conflicts often emerge among various regional groups rather than states. North Eastern part of India is one of the hotspots for such ethnic conflicts and violence. The major motives for bloody conflict between Indian Army and the underground armed rebels are perceived political imbalance and desire for a separate nation. Even the common civilians are forced to join the rebel groups without knowing consequences. Temsula Ao is one of the prominent English writers from Nagaland who through her moving narratives brings out the existent misery of conflict in her native land. The aim of this paper is to study the psychological impact of domestic violence over the combatants as well as non-combatants whose lives are inseparably intertwined with violence and bloodshed. Though violence is considered as typical condition of human nature most of the time it leads to unbearable trauma and misery. This paper also attempts to interpret the representation of women from the marginalised Ao community who finds difficult to preserve the customs and moral values in spite of regional revolt.
Keywords: Psychological imbalance, Domestic violence, Aggression, North East India
Bionote: Raam Kumar. T is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Foreign Languages, Bharathiar University, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu. He is working as a Project Assistant for RUSA 2.0 – BEICH sponsored by MHRD. He has published three articles in UGC listed journals. He is currently working on Indigenous Literature in Indian Historiography focusing on the Eastern and North eastern Parts of India.
Dr. B. Padmanabhan is currently serving as Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Foreign Languages, Bharathiar University from 2011, teaching postgraduate students and doing research in cognitive literary studies. His other research interests are ethnic and area studies, memory studies, post-colonial literature and Digital Humanities.
Presenter 2
Title: A Study of Trauma and Transgression of the ‘Adult-child’ in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy-Man.
Author: Jharna Choudhury
Designation and affiliation: Ph.D. Research Scholar. Tezpur University, Assam, India. Email: jharnachoudhury123@gmail.com
Abstract
With the sectarian divide against the backdrop of Bapsi Sidhwa’s 1991 historical fiction Ice-Candy-Man, comes the traumatic history of the “adult-child”, a child struggling with forced adulthood. Sidhwa’s novel invites us to explore the “uncanny” (Freudian) resonated by the evidentiary child character Lenny Sethi. The nomenclature, the “adult-child”, is a noun, specific to this paper, referring to the context of psychological and sexual conflicts imbibed at an early stage as abreactions caused by the partition trauma. Through textual analysis, this paper attempts to trace a child with dissociations, disjunctions, unspeakabilities, which are eased out in Deepa Mehta film adaptation (1998), Earth 1947. The minor transgresses her innocence, disclosing a dark side of her fractured identity. She is a character prolepsis of the intergenerational trauma (Catherine Caruth), unsettling an entire generation of children. The chaos of communal massacre, migration, dysfunctional parenting and the marginality of ethnic minority (Parsi) forcefully redefines her childhood. A psychoanalytical reading of the apocalyptic atmosphere of Punjab-centric partition investigates how Lenny plays the architect of the situation with her coping mechanisms. As a child-victim, her somatic manifestations add dimensions to the scale of trauma theory. This paper reflects how Sidhwa’s text can be revisited as a retelling of partition violence through the fluidity in the concepts of “childhood” and “adulthood” and how a work of fiction validates the contemporaenity of the dialectic of trauma and the less-documented parts of history.
Keywords: Trauma, Transgression, Partition, Adult-child, Ice-Candy-Man
Bionote: Jharna Choudhury is a Ph.D. Research Scholar, from the Department of English, Tezpur University, Assam, India. She is currently working on her thesis: ‘Spectres of the Corporeal: The Grotesque Body in Contemporary Fiction’.
Presenter 3
Title: Gendered History of War as a Feminist Alternative to Trauma Narrative in Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War
Author : Tooba Masood
Designation and affiliation: Research Scholar, Department of English and Modern European Languages, University of Allahabad, India. Email: tooba.masood01@gmail.com
Abstract
Based on The Unwomanly Face of War by Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich, the core assertion of this paper is that Alexievich’s collection of testimonies of women who fought and participated in the Second World War provides an essentially feminist way of dealing with trauma narratives.
The paper firstly seeks to place Alexievich’s alternative “feeling” based account of women’s war (hitherto silenced) woven by inviting women war veterans to share their experiences against the “fact” based masculinity-centered official history. The paper also shows how Alexievich’s methods are rooted in the Russian heritage of polyphonic literature and ‘narodnost’, ‘obyektivnost’ in journalism on one hand and Alexievich’s own experience of growing around women and their quotidian oral stories (most of the testimonies are recorded while sitting at kitchen tables over a cup of coffee).
The paper further underlines how Svetlana’s gendered history of war instead of upending gender brings out it’s performative aspect: women repeat readjusted actions and languages of a pre-war period.
The paper finally concludes that by emphasizing the uniqueness of the effect of war on women and of women on war: “Women’s war has its own color, its own smells, and its own range of feelings”, the sisterhood formed and by weaving these testimonies together without claiming sole authorship, Alexievich creates a shared space for commemoration and lamentation through her artfulness. This space or text manages to escape the pitfalls of usual trauma texts that fail to “negotiate effectively the social, public and political consequences of an uncannily present violent past in places, social networks and commemorative practices.” (Tiina Kirss)
Keywords: Russian literature, war, gender, trauma narrative, polyphony, testimonies, feminine.
Bionote: Tooba Masood is a Research Scholar at the Department of English and Modern European Languages in the University of Allahabad, Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh, India. She is currently working on her doctoral thesis titled “Journalism in Fiction with reference to the writings of Svetlana Alexievich”.
She has also served as a Guest Lecturer in the same Department.
Presenter 4
Title: “The New Face of Abuse?: Questioning the Fall of the Father and Assessing the Incest Trauma in Deborah Moggach’s Porky”
Author 1: POULOMI MODAK
Designation and affiliation: Ph.D Scholar (JRF), Department of English, Cooch Behar Panchanan Barma University, Cooch Behar, West Bengal. Email: poulomimodak1992@gmail.com
Abstract
Incest, the ‘taboo’, has always been prohibited in most of the modern societies with few exceptional cases, since the time immemorial on various normative grounds. The restrictions on incestuous sexual activities find its analogy within sociological, religious, political, psychological, and anthropological parameters, but what seems more rational as a cause of this prohibition is the scientific reasoning of inbreeding as a consequence of incestuous sexual relationships and consanguinity. This is not a denial of the fact that the manifestation of incest is ever present in myriad forms in almost every literary genre. However, the struggle of the participants is always recurrent; therefore, it becomes all the more important now to reinterpret the profound impact of incestuous practices upon the ‘self’ and the ‘body’. The occurrence of incest can be both consensual and non-consensual in heterosexual as well as homosexual relationships. In this proposed study, the enquiry would be within the periphery of non-consensual exploitation drawing from literary exemplification. Deborah Moggach’s novel Porky (1983) provides a sensitive rendition of a traumatised self that bears an eternal conflict within the abused body, largely because of the ‘unnatural’ association between the ‘fallen’ father and ‘deceived’ daughter. Since the actual occurrence of non-consensual incest is often a painful experience, therefore, a pragmatic study of such abusive encounter would be effective in catering a sensible outlook on the literature of trauma alluding to the painful confessional narratives. The proposed research paper intends to express these experiences of shocks and trauma.
Keywords: Incest trauma, abusive father, dysfunctional family, body shaming
Bionote: The writer is Poulomi Modak. She has completed her MA in English with a specialisation in Indian English Literature in 2015 from Cooch Behar Panchanan Barma University (CBPBU), West Bengal. She has qualified SET in 2015, UGC NET in 2015, and CBSE NET with JRF in 2016. She was a full-time Contractual Assistant Professor in the Department of English, CBPBU for two consecutive years. Presently she is a Doctoral Fellow (JRF) in the Department of English, CBPBU. She can be reached at poulomimodak1992@gmail.com
Presenter 5
Representation of Afghanistan’s Culturally Legitimised Paedophilia, Bacha Bazi, in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner: Beyond the Scrutinizing Lens of Orientalism and Occidentalism
Dr. Pallavi Thakur
Email pallavi.thakur@sharda.ac.in
Affiliation Sharda University
Description
Abstract: Using children for entertainment and sexual pleasure, also known as Bacha Bazi, is a culturally sanctioned norm in Afghanistan. The country has been embracing this barbaric custom, as it is fostered by affluent and influential Afghans. The custom serves as a grotesque violation of Afghan children’s human rights that is neither questioned by the ‘Orients’ nor the ‘Occidents’ who have been voicing their perceptions against the discriminatory ideologies for East and West respectively. The novelist, Khaled Hosseini has laid bare the atrocious belief systems and customs of Afghans which is often perceived as an ‘Orientalist’ interpretation by the critics. The paper attempts to examine (i) the custom of Bacha Bazi prevalent in Afghanistan (ii) the representation of ‘Bacha Bazi’ in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (iii) The Kite Runner beyond the binaries of Orientalism and Occidentalism.
Key words: Bacha Bazi, custom, Afghanistan, human rights, children, orientalism, occidentalism
Presenter 6
Title: Bacha Posh. A Study of The Micro-Narratives of Gender in Afghanistan
Author 1: Pauline Lalthlamuanpuii
Designation and affiliation: Ph.D. Scholar at National Institute of Technology, Aizawl, Mizoram.
ORCID ID (not registered)
Email: poehmar@gmail.com
Author 2: Dr. Shuchi
Designation and affiliation: Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology, Aizawl, Mizoram.
Abstract
The blitzkrieg destabilization of Afghanistan by major world powers and factional groups in contemporary times has triggered major academic works about the country. One witnessed a surge in interest and curiosity about the socio-cultural, religious, political, and economic dynamics of the country. Often regarded as one of the most unsafe country for women in the world, this paper will focus on the concept of a bacha posh in Afghanistan. A bacha posh is a Dari word for a girl disguised as a boy. It is a common practice in Afghanistan. This paper attempts to examine the power structures that ‘created’ a bacha posh in Afghanistan. It will study how the identity formation process of a bacha posh is shaped by different factors. It will also study how a bacha posh fulfils a lack in the androcentric Afghan society. A bacha posh fulfils a materialistic role in Afghan society by enabling her to work and earn for her family, in a society where women are restricted mobility and economic independence. It will also focus on the process of resistance and the informal structures through which women actively resist the restrictions imposed on them. What happens if the realization of their subalternity results, not in striving for acceptance in the dominant framework of knowledge from which one is excluded, but in the establishment of an alternative center? The micro-narratives are the stories that should be told, equally significant, and beautiful.
Keywords: bacha posh, identity formation, resistance, subaltern, identity, woman, Afghanistan, empowerment, micro-narratives.
- Pauline Lalthlamuanpuii
Assistant Professor (ad-hoc) at RamLal Anand College, Delhi University (2010-2013)
Assistant Professor at ICFAI University, Durtlang, Mizoram (2017- present)
Currently pursuing Ph.D. at NIT, Mizoram
Email: poehmar@gmail.com
Mobile: 8794051585/7085480837
Address: B-28/B Pema Colony, Ramhlun North, Aizawl , Mizoram-796012
Areas of Interest: Post-colonial Studies, Gender Studies and North-East Literature.
- Dr. Shuchi
Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology, Aizawl, Mizoram.
CHANNEL 1
Session 10
Time: 9:05 PM—10:00 PM (Indian Time)
Moderator/s:
Presentation 1
Debating Rasabhasa or Rasa in the Plays of Mahesh Dattani
(In the Special Context of On a Muggy Night in Mumbai and Seven Steps around the Fire)
Abstract
Rasabhasa, a concept from the Rasa theory of Indian Aesthetics means something that may appear to be a Rasa but actually is not therefore also alternatively nomenclated as a pseudo Rasa. According to Indian Aesthetics, the protagonist is one who leads (Nayati Iti Neta) and only certain kind of protagonist evokes as well as relishes Rasa i.e. Bheem’s character evokes as well as relishes Veera Rasa. The question now arises whether Mahesh Dattani, an exponent of modern realistic themes like gender issues, precarity, questions of marginalized, identity crisis and his plays (here, On a Muggy Night in Mumbai and Seven Steps around the Fire) in their thematic construct and characterization dealing with issues of LGBT community reveal the relishing of Rasa. I have also critically problematized the translational affinities between Rasa and Emotions. The paper also attempts to explore the two plays drawing on the concept of Rasabhasa. (Re) interpreting Rasa and Rasabhasa in the context of modern LGBT plays is the central premise of this research paper.
Keywords: LGBT, Rasa, Rasabhasa, Gender Studies, Indian English Drama
Bionote
- Dr. Anshu Surve, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Faculty of Arts, The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Vadodara, Gujarat
email id: anshubrd@gmail.com
- Ms. Garima Hariniwas Tiwari, Research Scholar, Department of English, Faculty of Arts, The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Vadodara, Gujarat
email id: jtiwari117@gmail.com
Presentation 2
Pink Floyd’s Time: an aural metanarrative that explores time through form, lyric and musical arrangement
- Shobana P Mathews,PhD
Associate Professor,
Shobhana.p.mathews@christuniversity.in
- Vishal Varier, II MA-English
vishal.varier@eng.christuniversity.in
Abstract
The inability of language to capture the essence of time is a crisis that has been expressed by philosophers starting from St. Augustine to Paul Ricoeur.
Appearing on their seminal album, Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd’s Time is a profound artistic attempt which transcends this language barrier by using music to bring the listeners to a more direct confrontation with time; doing so by juxtaposing time as calibrated and as experienced through the music and the lyrics, and by making the reader experience time-based affects such as impatience, expectation, monotony, and such. As a direct function of song, time is experienced as musical time in the song, thereby ensuring that the listener’s confrontation with time is immersive, with lyrics that describe the nature of experienced and calibrated time working synchronously with the music to complete the image. In the context of its release in 1974, the 6:52 minute song was in engagement with the concept of time as well, in that it was among the pioneering ones which redefined radio broadcast time beyond the standard 3 minutes afforded to popular music tracks, with the commercially preferred listener span in mind. The matter of time thus becomes a multi-layered formal engagement in the song, at the level of lyric, recording, music and listening, thereby making possible an image of time that is polished and rounded.
These aural, lyrical and production-based concepts will be addressed and expanded upon to show how Pink Floyd’s Time functions as a metanarrative in how it uses and invokes the elements of time to talk about time, while being intimately tied up to time even outside itself, in the realm of radio broadcast history.
Presentation 3
Nature and Self Reflection in Tagore’s The Crescent Moon
Ayanita Banerjee (Ph.D)
Professor-English
University of Engineering and Management, New-Town- Kolkata
Email: abayanita8@gmail.com
Abstract: To perceive the human world in co-existence with nature and thereby to nurture freedom and constructive processes we need to rethink the transformative literature of Rabindranath Tagore, who once again explored an environment conscious, almost ecocritical vision of human existence that inspired a “deep ecological” sense of identification with the immediate environment. Tagore’s philosophy of nature with its wide range and variety reifies the real possibility of ‘living, learning and uniting oneself’ with the “organic wholeness of nature”. My paper dealing with Tagore’s simplest collection of poetry The Crescent Moon in particular lays emphasis on the relationship of the mother and the child developing out of his traumatic experiences of childhood-namely that of losing his mother quite at an early age and his subsequent identification with nature as an ‘alternative mother-principle’ which relives him from the pressures of mundane existence. It confers a psychological closure by connecting him with Mother Nature (my italics) “mother nature (who) have taken me (him) in your affectionate embrace and have begun to sing your (her)imposing music to me (him) rich in harmony and melody”. Nature, thus removed from the crudity of its daily entanglements provided for him an “alternative world” to relocate his emotional detachment from his mother by cathecting the energy to a series of self-identifying images in the world of nature, Nature activated within him a spirit of companionship and receptivity revealing to him “the deepest harmony that existed between him and his surroundings”.
Keywords: Deep ecological, organic wholeness, Mother-Nature, alternative-mother principle, deepest harmony
Bio-note: Dr. Ayanita Banerjee has completed her Ph.D in the year 2012 from Calcutta University, with specialization in the field of Ecocriticism and Envioronmental Sustainability. With enriching nineteen years of academic experience, she holds multifarious positions in Universities, Institutes, organizations of repute accomplishing the posts of Academic Administrators, Board of Studies Member, Paper- Setter/ Moderator to name a few. Currently she is holding the position of Professor in the Department of Basic Science and Humanities in the University of Engineering and Management, New-Town-Kolkata. She has contributed quite a few number of selected/ peer reviewed papers in both national and internal journals. Her keen interest in the field of academic excellence and attaining high quality research activities keeps her spirit motivated to achieve and explore more.