Social philosophy

The Portability of Indianness: Some Propositions

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Pramod K. Nayar,  University of Hyderabad, India

We live in the age of portability. When the Government of India (GoI) offered Mobile Number Portability (commonly abbreviated as MNP) and the eventual abolition of national ‘roaming charges’ it was only one more instance of what might be called the portability-ethos of our everyday lives. Our everyday lives can go with us anywhere we go in India. Indeed, I am proposing here that we perform Indianness in the form of a certain portability. Keep Reading

Black Feminist Discourse of Power in For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide

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Lamia Khalil Hammad, Yarmouk University, Jordan

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Abstract

This paper discusses black feminist discourse of power in Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem For Colored Girls Who have considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf. The work depicts the struggle of black women through a rainbow of experiences. At the end, the girls arrive at ‘selfhood’ by finding God in themselves. This paper focuses on how the patriarchal discourse lead to their suffereing and how they were able to claim back their identities as black females who only need to be loved and appreciated. Keep Reading

A Feminist Aesthetics of Nature

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Tegan Zimmerman, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

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Abstract

This article examines the relatively unstudied field of the aesthetics of nature from a feminist perspective. Currently a feminist aesthetics of nature does not exist in scholarship, though I argue in our age of eco-crisis this is necessary. I explore what this feminist approach might entail by discussing three essential elements to the current masculinist study of nature: 1) the role of the subject or observer, 2) method of appreciation, and 3) appropriate object for appreciation. By focusing on the recent impasse in feminism, between essentialism and non-essentialism, this paper looks at how each side of the debate would approach these above three topics, and what future paths feminism might take in creating an adequate study of the aesthetics of nature.  Keep Reading

Heart versus Head: Hard Times as a radical critique of Industrial Capitalism

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Manjeet Rathee, Maharshi Dayanand University, Rohtak

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Hard Times, published in 1854, at the time of the initial ‘textile phase’ of the England’s Industrial revolution, is a powerful indictment of the inherent exploitative and repressive character of the emerging industrial system that based itself on the reduction and dehumanization of the factory workers as mere mechanical units of manufacture and production, devoid of any human sentiments and emotions. Rightly described as ‘the socially conscious novel’, or ‘the condition of England’ novel’, Hard Times, offers to present, through its structural principle of ‘the conflict of opposites’, an extremely authentic and radical critique of the class exploitation in a newly industrializing England economy that in its overenthusiastic adoption of industrial capitalist ethos tended to threaten the very existence of human individual into a machine and that of the industrial worker into a mere unit of ‘labor power.’ This was sought to be done at various levels ranging from public life in a factory to private existence in a family affecting crucial decisions of love and marriage and through the role of power in education system affecting the growth and development of children as thinking and imaginative individuals. The novel, through its two chief advocates of industrial capitalism- Gradgrind and Bounderby- provides a socio-economic critique of the times of early phase of capitalism when the processes of production were ideologically privileged over the inhuman existence of the workers and when a uniform monotonous life of facts found supremacy in private as well as public life, institutional structures and value system that guided the middle nineteenth century England. The resultant crisis referring to working class reactions in the form of various militant actions has aptly been described by one of the eminent historians of the Industrial Revolution: Keep Reading

Hard Times as a Dickensian Dystopia

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P. Prayer Elmo Raj, Karunya University Coimbatore

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Hard Times is a dystopia. Hard Times investigates and launches the deplorable Victorian industrial society through the presentation of its setting and characters. The society which the Hard Times explores is one characterized by poverty, denial and oppression. Freedom and happiness were established by the political and economic elites. Right to think and right to fancy was determined by the dominant. The prevalent Utilitarian educational philosophy created havoc in the lives of pupils who were prepared to work in the factories. This paper is an attempt to map the dystopian account of Victorian industrial society as portrayed by Charles Dickens in the Hard Times. Keep Reading

What is Performance Studies?

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Richard Schechner

Tisch School of the Arts, New York University

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Because performance studies is so broad-ranging and open to new possibilities, no one can actually grasp its totality or press all its vastness and variety into a single writing book. My points of departure are my own teaching, research, artistic practice, and life experiences.

Performances are actions. As a discipline, performance studies takes actions very seriously in four ways. First, behavior is the “object of study” of performance studies. Although performance studies scholars use the “archive” extensively – what’s in books, photographs, the archaeological record, historical remains, etc. – their dedicated focus is on the “repertory,” namely, what people do in the activity of their doing it. Second, artistic practice is a big part of the performance studies project. A number of performance studies scholars are also practicing artists working in the avant-garde, in community-based performance, and elsewhere; others have mastered a variety of non-Western and Western traditional forms. The relationship between studying performance and doing performance is integral. Third, fieldwork as “participant observation” is a much-prized method adapted from anthropology and put to new uses. In anthropological fieldwork, participant observation is a way of learning about cultures other than that of the field-worker. In anthropology, for the most part, the “home culture” is Western, the “other” non-Western. But in performance studies, the “other” may be a part of one’s own culture (non-Western or Western), or even an aspect of one’s own behavior. That positions the performance studies fieldworker at a Brechtian distance, allowing for criticism, irony, and personal commentary as well as sympathetic participation. In this active way, one performs fieldwork. Taking a critical distance from the objects of study and self invites revision, the recognition that social circumstances– including knowledge itself – are not fixed, but subject to the “rehearsal process” of testing and revising. Fourth, it follows that performance studies is actively involved in social practices and advocacies. Many who practice performance studies do not aspire to ideological neutrality. In fact, a basic theoretical claim is that no approach or position is “neutral”. There is no such thing as unbiased. The challenge is to become as aware as possible of one’s own stances in relation to the positions of others – and then take steps to maintain or change positions. Keep Reading

Semiotic Encryption of Women, Violence and Hysteria in Indian Women Dramaturgy

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Praggnaparamita Biswas,  Banaras Hindu University, India

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The juxtaposing depiction of women, violence and hysteria as semiotic elements in women-centric play-texts attempts to translate the theatrical meanings because of its demonstrable approach to unearth the textual meanings and its relational politics of representation. From semiological aspect, the interplay of women, violence and hysteria generates a kind of semiotic femaleness in order to prognosticate the feminist route of cultural politics imbedded in the narratives of female composed drama. The present paper intends to analyze the semiotic transformation of Indian women dramaturgy in the plays of Padmanabhan, Mehta and Sengupta. Each of their plays tries to interpret new meanings hidden under the semiotic signs used by these playwrights and also attempt to project the gender politics visualized in the realm of feminist theatre.   Keep Reading

Challenging Enlightenment Paradigms: Responses of Benjamin and Tagore

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Debmalya Das, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India

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European Enlightenment in the eighteenth century marked a paradigm shift in its perception of time and in the practice of historiography. The idea of linear/teleological classification of time and the notion of empirical documentation of history was combined with the notion of progress, which saw civilization as a development from the state of barbarity to that of refinement. The appropriation of this progressivist ideology by the powerful in society has served as a tool of domination. Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940) and Rabindranath Tagore’s “Crisis in Civilization”(1941), written in the wake of World War II, provide us with two radical perspectives which challenge such progressivist assumptions. Expanding the critical span into their other writings, this paper seeks to historicize the two figures in their varied positions of marginality as two counter-Enlightenment ideologues, writing at a moment of human history when the idea of being civilized was continually threatened by manifestations of barbarity in the socio-political/cultural dynamics of the entire world. Keep Reading

Two Cosmopolitan Friends: Tagore and Cousins

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Utpal Mitra,Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India

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The word cosmopolitanism has different connotations. According to the philosophical cosmopolitans, who are also designated as Moral Universalists, there does not exist any boundary between nations, states and cultures, as they believe all human beings to be fellow citizens and compatriots. This article attempts to address the cosmopolitan ideas of Rabindranath Tagore and James H. Cousins. Moving beyond the parochial notion of nationalism, both Tagore and Cousins adopted the notion of universalism that assimilates all cultures, races and religions under the broader category of Humanism. Keep Reading

Unheeded Caveats: Examining Pax Americana in the Light of Tagore’s Nationalism

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Abin Chakraborty, University of Calcutta, India

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Rabindranath Tagore’s much discussed opposition to nationalism has often been seen as a source of consternating confusion which not only invoked the ire of many contemporary nationalists who interpreted his vision as one of helpless inaction as well as by certain contemporary critics who have considered Nationalism to be a disorienting product of “impassioned myth-making” which falls within the tradition of English liberalism[1]. This paper seeks to analyse Nationalism, as well as other related texts, in a different light, by comparing Tagore’s assessment of ‘Nation’ and Nationalism in the West’, with both the Communist Manifesto, as well as Lenin’s Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism in order to reveal how Tagore’s explorations constitute a sustained and scathing critique of capitalism, as manifested through the European bourgeois nation-state which is also relevant for this present age of U.S. imperialism and its consequences as many of the crises unfolding around us were presaged by Tagore’s unheeded caveats. The paper also suggests that whatever post-imperial vision we may imagine for our future, they must always be based on those values that Tagore championed throughout his life and which have often been dismissed as sentimental naivety. Keep Reading