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Rhizomatous Identity in “The Yellow Wallpaper”: A Deleuzo-Guattarian Perspective

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371 views

Preeti Puri1 & Shefali2’

1Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Management, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar National Institute of Technology Jalandhar. Orcid id: 0000-0002-6822-5420. Email: purip@nitj.ac.in

2Assistant Professor, DAV University. Email: shefalibassi1997@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s6n3 

Abstract

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 Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story, “The Yellow Wall Paper”. It is a cliché belief that multiplicity comprises of 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, identity and self. 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 temporary nervous depression, Lacanian posit that she is a ‘psychotic’ who persistently tries to satisfy the ‘gaze’ of her physician husband John, and for a Deleuzian 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 Jane’s ‘self’ is evacuated from its fixed position to cherish free form of human interaction, and her identity is not handcuffed by any law, rather it is in a state of constant ‘flux’, in a ceaseless motion of ‘becoming’, it is a ‘rhizome’, facilitating a non- hierarchical network.

Keywords: Body Without Organs, Assemblage, Desiring- Machine, Rhizome

Privileging Oddity and Otherness: A Study of Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore

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281 views

Rasleena Thakur1 and Vani Khurana2

1Ph.D. Research Scholar, School of Social Sciences and Languages, Lovely Professional University, Punjab, India.Email: rasleena1103@gmail.com, ORCID ID: 0000-0002-3032-2831

2Assistant Professor, Centre of Professional Enhancement, School of Social Sciences and Languages, Lovely Professional University, Punjab, India.Email: vani.khurana@lpu.co.in

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s6n2 

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 creates 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.

The Search for Identity in Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist and Abdallah Thabit’s The Twentieth Terrorist

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229 views

Bushra Juhi Jani

Nahrain University, Baghdad, Iraq, E-mail: bushrajani@ced.naharinuniv.edu.iq, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8981-7003

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s6n1 

Abstract

This paper investigates the search for identity in two culturally diverse novels, Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist (1985) and Abdallah Thabit’s autobiographical novel The Twentieth Terrorist (2006). The paper examines how identity crisis makes Lessing’s heroine, Alice, squat with a group of radicals in London and be drawn into their terrorist activities, and makes Zahi, the protagonist of Thabit’s novel, accept being recruited by extremist religious group. However, the findings of this study prove the transformation of both Alice and Zahi. Alice is a different woman at the end of the novel and Zahi escapes from being the terrorist number 20 of the September 11th attack.

Keywords: search for identity, radicalization, terrorism, September 11th attacks.

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

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214 views

Babita Devi

Ph.D. Scholar, J.C. Bose University of Science & Technology, YMCA, Faridabad, Haryana, E-mail: babitakpunia@gmail.com, Orcid Id: 0000-0002-9699-864X

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s5n4 

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.

Keywords: Natives, whites, land, culture Silko

Perpetrator Plays the Victim: The Politics of Representation in the Captivity Narratives of the Whites

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195 views

Virender Pal

Assistant Professor, Institute of Integrated &Honors Studies, Kurukshetra University Kurukshetra, Haryana, Email: p2vicky@gmail.com, v_pal@kuk.ac.in, ORCID ID 0000-0003-3569-1289

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s5n3 

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 Reds. 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

 

“In the mountains, we are like prisoners”: Kalinggawasan as Indigenous Freedom of the Mamanwa of Basey, Samar

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274 views

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

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s4n1 

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 ConchingCabadungga, 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, Kalinggawasan, Indigenous, Freedom, Basey, Sagacity

Of Fairy Tales: The Reparative Fantasy in Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”

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352 views

Cassie Jun Lin

University of Macau, mb84026@um.edu.mo, ORCID ID: 0000-0001-7749-1491

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s3n3 

 

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

“…and beyond/ Frighted the reign of Chaos and old Night”: On the Humanities (in times of) Crisis

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173 views

Jeremy De Chavez

Department of English, University of Macau. ORCID: 0000-0003-0320-372X. Email: jeremydechavez@um.edu.mo

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s3n1 

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” (1963, p. 4).

Keywords: humanities crisis, Nussbaum, liberal arts, two cultures

Re-Presenting Protestors as Thugs: The Politics of Labelling Dissenting Voices

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213 views

Lalitha Joseph

Assistant Professor, St. John’s College Anchal, affiliated to the University of Kerala, email id: lalithajoseph@stjohns.ac.in, ORCID:0000-0002-2937-2233

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s2n4

 

Abstract

The use of the word “thugs”, has always precipitated the crisis that has existed longue durée in the history of America. The word 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 word and its strategic use by the world leaders for nefarious purposes 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. The role of post-truth media as the intermediaries and purveyors of the real and the fake is analyzed. Labelling theory is applied to demonstrate how policy makers, mark out a group in order to rationalize the discourse of state violence.  The methods and the outcomes of stigmatizing labelling is illustrated, 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, Racialdiscrimination, Post-truth era, Race-coded language.

Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte and the Post-truth Condition

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299 views

Atri Majumder1 & Gyanabati Khuraijam2

1Research Scholar, Department of Management, Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology Agartala, E-mail: atri.cal@gmail.com,https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2624-5703

2Assistant Professor, Department of Management, Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology Agartala, E-mail: khgyan79@yahoo.com

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s2n3 

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 Quichotteare also to be explored.

Keywords: post-truth, hyperreality, socio-political issues, magic realism, popular culture, intertextuality

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