identity

Memory, Trauma and Affect: The Implicated Subject in Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Passage North

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Atri Majumder1 & Gyanabati Khuraijam2
1Research Scholar, Dept. of Management, Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology Agartala, India, E-mail: atri.cal@gmail.com, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2624-5703
2Assistant Professor, Dept. of Management, Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology Agartala, India, E-mail: khgyan79@yahoo.com, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2312-6787

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 4, December, 2022. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n4.14 
Abstract Full-Text PDF Issue Access

Abstract

In A Passage North, Anuk Arudpragasam invades the consciousness of the protagonist to reveal the subliminal enmeshed spaces of the personal and the political. The distance between the traumatic events of the Sri Lankan civil war and the alienated individual who has apparently remained aloof, is obliterated through the refracted memories that have embedded the subject in the matrix of his country’s political history. The individual memory thus coalesces into the fabric of collective memory as the narrative unfolds. The concatenation of the traumatic realities and the sequestered psyche, untethers the individual from its ensconced private sphere and situates it within the macrocosmic and pervasive sociopolitical structure. The transmutation of subjectivity is attuned to the affective sites of collective trauma. The dichotomy of proximity and distance elucidated by the apprehensive reflections of the survivor is symptomatic of the subterranean intensities that elude corporeal presence and agency. The memories of the individual become resonant with the affective (un)lived experiences of traumatic violence, that deconstruct the tension of presence/absence, and consequently reconfigure the preconceived notions of subjectivity. The theoretical framework of this paper would foreground Michael Rothberg’s conceptualization of the implicated subject, to limn the trajectory of identities who are indirectly implicated in traumatic legacies. This paper argues that the trauma of the genocidal war and its aftermath is transcribed into affective memories, that bear the potential to reconstitute identity by recognizing and transcending the state of implication.

Keywords: memory, affect, trauma, implicated subject, identity, Sri Lankan civil war

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Imagining India / Hinduism from Chile

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Felipe Luarte Correa
Professor, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Chile. Email id: fluarte@uc.cl

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 3, September-October 2022, Pages 1–7. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n3.18

First published: October 17, 2022 | Area: Latin America | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under the themed issue “Across Cultures: Ibero-America and India”)
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Imagining India / Hinduism from Chile

Abstract

Indian culture expresses itself in Chile’s daily life that, until recently, would have been unthinkable both for its real and mental remoteness. Undoubtedly, this is a consequence of globalization and the rapid flow of ideas and practices of the last decades, but it is also due to the sustained increase in the presence of the Indian community in Chile from the mid-’80s onwards, with the economic opening during that time creating favorable conditions for the increased number of Indian immigration in Chilean society. India’s cultural identity is marked by its religious way of life and in general, Hindu immigrants – as a result of the characteristics of Hinduism – have tended to reproduce their culture and religion while having to adjust to local circumstances. Consequently, both are renegotiated. This process implies an enormous effort of adaptability, which is necessary to be able to develop themselves in the new country without having to abandon the cultural baggage they bring with them, creating new strategies of action that at the same time imply and generate new ways of relating and redefining their identity referents.

Keywords: Chile, identity, Immigrant, India, Partial Scope Agreement

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Problematising Tribality: A Critical Engagement with Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s The Adivasi Will Not Dance: Stories

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Francis Ekka1 & Dr. Rosy Chamling2

1Research Scholar, Department of English, Sikkim University.

Email id: fekka.20mpen01@sikkimuniversity.ac.in, ekkafran@gmail.com. ORCID id: 0000-0002-2777-3121.

2Associate Professor, Department of English, Sikkim University.

Email id: rchamling@cus.ac.in. ORCID id: 0000-0002-4936-4767.

 Volume 13, Number 4, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.09

Abstract

Tribality simply means the characteristic features of various tribal communities and the qualities of being tribal. In the 1940s leading anthropologists like Verrier Elwin and G.S.Ghurye tried to theorize and categorize tribal identities. However, they were often accused of representing either a ‘protective’ or ‘romantic’ notions of tribality. One cannot determine the tribality of a person based on their features, dialects, food habits or geographical location. Tribality is said to bind the pan-Indian Tribal literature which is again problematic considering language which is considered as the useful indicator of any identity. Tribal Literature is a distinct form of writing to represent people, things and ideas in their cultural authenticities. The tribals essentially have an oral culture and thus when a tribal writer like Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, a Government Doctor by profession, writes in the canonical English language, we will be tempted to probe if he seeks to ‘write in’ or ‘write back’ to the mainstream literary culture; or if his works can fit into the mould of minor literature, thereby making the seemingly personal an intensely political statement. This paper also aims to interrogate issues of tribal identity and their representation through a critical engagement with Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s The Adivasi Will Not Dance: Stories (2017).

Keywords: Adivasi, Tribality, Identity, Representation, Minor Literature

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Articulating Difference: Self, Identity and Representation

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Mohan Dharavath

Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Hyderabad. Email: mohan.dharavath@tiss.edu

 Volume 13, Number 4, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.08

Abstract

The Adivasis are often presented as they exist in a timeless, historical space, untouched and unperturbed by complex changes in society, politics and culture though the reality is the other way round. The self-esteem and the identity of the Adivasis are not just distraught and distorted by the non-Adivasi writers but is a fraught with misconceptions. In such a scenario, the writings of the Adivasi writers on Adivasi become more significant with all due respect since it reflects the insiders’ perspective. The paper therefore examines the voices and concerns of the Adivasi through Adivasi writings and attempts to substantiate assertively on how and why any non-Adivasi writers could not escape from representing the Adivasi without distortion. It further explores that the non-Adivasi writer, an outsider is more than fascinated to write more of the fetish, exotic and criminalization of the Adivasi on one hand and on the other hand stereotyping them rather understanding the Adivasi life. It also focuses on and discusses the broader concerns of the Adivasi life and experience that ensure the subject happens to occur from the locational similarity.

Keywords: Adivasi, Articulation, Identity, Self, Representation

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Writing Northeast: Nandita Haksar’s Across the Chicken Neck

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Rosy Chamling

Department of English, Sikkim University. Email: rosychamling@gamil.com

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.18

Abstract

Traditionally travel literature has been a genre known for boosting colonial expansionist projects and the construction of the European ‘Other’. Travel writing as an imperialist discourse serving to connect with the ideological apparatus of the European nation-state has been explored in Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturalism (1992). But contemporary travel literature is more subject-oriented, focussing on both the place and the people therein and the politics involved in the formation of their identity. It assumes the form of a cultural critique, called the ‘countertravel’ writing. Countertravel writing, then, aims not to delight the readers in its presentation of the exotic ‘Other’ but rather serves to transport the complacent reader causing the “unmapping” of “mapped” worldviews. (Richard Phillip, 1997). Within this paradigm of the ‘countertravel’ narrative, my engagement with Nandita Haksar’s Across the Chicken Neck: Travels in Northeast India (2013) will be to show how Haksar seeks to ‘unmap’ the Northeast by writing her experiences with the people and places of Northeast India. Travelling through the ‘chicken neck’ which is a narrow strip of land connecting the Northeast with the rest of India; this paper will show how the apparently homogeneous Northeast has a diversity of stories and histories to tell. Burdened with histories of secessionism and insurgencies, Haksar’s exploration exposes how these histories are subsumed by the larger national narrative.

Keywords : Northeast, Countertravel Writing, History, Identity.

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The Self and the Other in Jnanadabhiram Barua’s Bilator Sithi (Letters from Abroad)

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Nandini Kalita

Doctoral Fellow and Teaching Assistant, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Email: nandinik970@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.16

Abstract

Jnanadabhiram Barua’s Bilator Sithi (Letters from Abroad), a travel narrative in Assamese depicts the author’s life in England at the beginning of the twentieth century. It consists of a series of letters where Barua attempts to understand the specificities of a culture that appears foreign to him. The narrative highlights the complex negotiations that the author has to make as a colonized subject in the colonizer’s land. I want to look at how these negotiations were shaped by the dominant discourse of imperial superiority. What are its implications on the subject’s sense of the self? What does encountering foreignness entail in this particular context? Travel writing has often been associated with the expansion of European imperialism. I plan to examine if this genre undergoes a change of perspective in the hands of a subject of European imperialism. How does the relationship between the self and the other play out in this text? Who is the other in Barua’s narrative? I want to probe deeper into how the construction of the other in this case is influenced by the popular notions about Assamese identity.

Keywords: Travel Writing, Self and Other, Identity, Colonialism, Recognition, Modernity

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Performative Subjects & the Irresistible Lack of Understanding in David Mamet’s Oleanna: a Butlerian Discourse Analysis

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Hojatolla Borzabadi Farahani1 & Mariam Beyad2

1Department of English language, Arak Branch, Islamic Azad University, Arak, Iran

2Associate Professor, University of Tehran. Email: n_bfarahani@yahoo.com

 Volume 12, Number 2, April-June, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n2.16

Abstract:

The present study tends to explore the constitution of power and its formative effects on David Mamet’s play, Oleanna, a very controversial work dealing with sexual harassment and political correctness. The analysis is going to be done applying views and results of Judith Butler’s notion of gender and identity trouble to the play first through explanation of related key concepts like difference, decentering, subject and language, and then utilizing them to analyze the roots of sudden, surprising transformations and role-reversals of the involved characters, John and Carol, through the three acts. Furthermore, it is tried to find out the causes of unavoidable violence within the contexts of the relations going between the characters.

Keywords: gender, identity, difference, decentering, performative, understanding, violence, discourses, language

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Revisiting the Kazakh Famine at the Beginning of the 1930s in Fine Art Forms from the Perspective of Cultural Memory

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Dilyara Safargaliyevna Sharipova1, Ainur Berikovna Kenjakulova2, Svetlana Zhumasultanovna Kobzhanova3, Kaldykul Serikbaevna Orazkulova4 & Leila Abdyganievna Kenzhebayeva

1, 2Institute of Literature and Art named after M. Auezov of the Science Committee of the Ministry of Education and Science of Kazakhstan, Almaty, Kazakhstan. Email: dilyarazam@mail.ru

3A. Kasteyev State Museum of Arts of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Almaty, Kazakhstan

4Kazakh National Academy of Arts named after T.K. Zhurgenov, Almaty, Kazakhstan

5Kazakh National Academy of Arts named after T.K. Zhurgenov, Almaty, Kazakhstan

 Volume 12, Number 1, January-March, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n1.16

Abstract

Reflecting on the past is the foundation for national unity. In this context, it appears relevant to conduct research into fine art as storage of memory and a resource for the reconstruction of lasting images of the past. This article looks at the issue of cultural memory in Kazakhstan through the study of works of figurative art devoted to the history of the famine of the beginning of the 1930s. The authors examine how this topic was reflected in Soviet art, as well as at the current stage of cultural development. The forms of representation of cultural trauma as a metaphor and an affective experience are also explored in the article. Nowadays, monuments of grief perform socio-cultural functions that are inextricably connected with the development of national identity.

Keywords: monument, sculpture, famine, communicative memory, cultural memory, commemoration, nomadism, identity.

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Reconstructing the Changing Urban Landscape beyond Spatio-Temporal Dimensions: Post-colonial ‘Allahabad’ in Neelum Saran Gour’s Invisible Ink

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Chhandita Das1 & Priyanka Tripathi2

1Institute Fellow (PhD), Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Patna. daschhandita1993@gmail.com

2Associate Professor of English, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Patna. priyankatripathi@iitp.ac.in. ORCID: 0000-0002-9522-3391.

 Volume 12, Number 1, January-March, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n1.07

 

Abstract:

One of the pressing concerns of our times is the rapid change of urban landscape resulting in environmental degradation. However, there are other concerns too that leads this paper to deliberate on how individual and collective experiences and identities get reshaped extensively with the change of urban landscape across temporality. Within this framework, this paper analyses Neelum Saran Gour’s novel Invisible Ink (2015) which projects Indian city ‘Allahabad’, now referred as ‘Prayagraj’ in two different time scales with a gap of forty-four years mostly through the subjective experiences of two women characters, Rekha and Amina.  In the conventional discipline of Geography, landscape is often assumed to be a visual entity (Cresswell, 2015) but appropriating Leila Scannell and Robert Gifford’s “Defining Place Attachment: A Tripartite Organizing Framework” (2010), landscape (both built and natural) unfolds its meaning more through human interaction constructing cultural values leading to spatial distinctiveness which is always in flux. Thus, urbanization is not just a transformation of physical topography of the ‘city’ but ‘includes the changing façade of socio-cultural environments which unquestionably impacts on the existing values of both private and public space reshaping the experiences of its people. Therefore, this article will also examine the ways in which literature documents urban spaces.

Keywords: ‘Landscape’, ‘Urbanization’, ‘Experience’, ‘Identity’, ‘Public space’

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The Political role of ‘Bihu’ in Assam Movement (1979)

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Debajit Bora

Assistant Professor, Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research, Jamia Millia Islamia, debojeetbora@gmail.com, ORCID: 0000-0002-6424-2522

Volume 12, Number 1, January-March, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n1.02

Abstract

This paper aims to understand the political role of Assamese traditional performance ‘Bihu’ during Assam movement in 1979. It argues that beyond its role as Assamese cultural identity, ‘Bihu’ had transformed itself into a political space and fueled upon expanding the idea of Stage Bihu. While looking at the performance as medium of political messaging, the paper brings together the three specific case studies seemingly unknown in the documented cultural history and located in the rural Assam. The idea is to comprehend the larger scope of traditional performance in accommodating political events. The debates are being weaved together through theoretical frames of historian Eric Hobsbawm’s ‘Inventing tradition’ Thomas Postlewait’s ‘theatre event’ in order to see the transformation and changes within the repertoire of Bihu. The paper tries to resurrect an alternative historical discourse, often neglected by the dominant historical cannons.

Keywords: performance, identity, Assam movement, politics, Assam.

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