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Victimhood, Health Challenges and Violent Restiveness in Blood and Oil: Music, Characterization and Colours as Metaphors

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277 views

Uche-Chinemere Nwaozuzu1, Adebowale O. Adeogun2, Cindy Ezeugwu3, Alphonsus C. Ugwu4 & Emeka Aniago5

1Associate Professor, Theatre & Film Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Nigeria

2Senior Lecturer, Music, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Nigeria

3Lecturer, Theatre & Film Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Nigeria

4Lecturer, Mass Communication, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Nigeria

5Senior Lecturer, Theatre & Film Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Nigeria. ORCID iD: 0000-0003-3194-1463. Email: emeka.aniago@unn.edu.ng 

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.36

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 Abstract

This study examines the aesthetics, efficacy, and propriety of the embedded metaphors in characterization, music, and colour application as creative vision in projecting victimhood atmosphere around traumatized Niger-Deltans due to many years of deprivation in Blood and Oil. Thus, this study explains how Blood and Oil represents a credible narrative, subsuming polemics of environmental degradation, health misery, massive unemployment, subjugation, and violent restiveness in Niger Delta due to poor political leadership, greed, and corruption. On creative vision, we are discussing how the ingenious application of characterization, music, and colour combined effectively in creating an enduring mood for the scenes in the film as channels of accentuating intended messages. To add relevant scholarly rigor, we applied victimhood theory and interpretive discuss approach to create relevant and lucid insights regarding the inclinations and actions of select characters in the film as well as analysis of relevant secondary texts. In the end, we deduce that the apt portrayal of Niger-Delta oil communities’ extensively degraded and polluted environment validates the reality of anguish and victimhood because of the massively diminished fishing and farming prospects. Lastly, the implication of this scenario is increased unemployment, psychological distress, diseases, and violent restiveness which have reduced enormously the wellbeing of Niger Delta inhabitants.  

Keywords: crude oil, health concerns, Niger-Delta, Nollywood, restiveness, victimhood

Conversations through Web 2.0 tools: Nurturing 21st century Values in the ESL Classroom

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341 views

Kshema Jose

Department for Training and Development, School of English Language Education, The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India. ORCID: 0000-0003-3204-7404. Email: kshema@efluniversity.ac.in

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.35

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 Abstract

21st century skills framework proposed by the World Economic Forum (2015) suggests that the development of foundational literacies, competencies and character qualities in students can help them function as responsible and productive global citizens. However, most educational systems focus only on developing foundational literacies like reading and writing, numeracy, scientific literacy, etc. This paper describes an exploratory research conducted to investigate how the 21st century ESL teacher can nurture the development of competencies and character qualities through language development tasks delivered using digital tools. The paper is based on the premise that since character qualities are both social and individualistic in nature, they are ideally delivered through collaborative events and acquired best through self-reflection. Reporting from an ESL teacher’s perspective, the paper elucidates how participating in the communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creativity activities mediated through web 2.0 tools can facilitate the acquisition of character qualities like curiosity, persistence, adaptability, social and cultural awareness, etc.  It was found that certain features of web 2.0 tools like participatory environments, asynchronicity and ease of use for creating content offered students multiple opportunities for meaningful, sustained and reflective conversations. Using observational data, the researcher identifies the acquisition of character qualities and the development of competencies in students through these conversations.

Keywords: Adult learning, Value Education, Collaborative learning, 21st century character qualities, ESL classrooms 

 

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A Stylistic Investigation of the Act of Murder in Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing

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399 views

Ujjal Jeet

Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, Punjab. ORCID: 0000-0003-1897-2142. Email: ujjal.eng@gndu.ac.in

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.34

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Abstract

This paper is a functional stylistic study of a selected passage from Doris Lessing’s novel The Grass is Singing. In the novel The Grass is Singing, a white woman in Rhodesia is killed by her black servant but surprisingly the murder instead of bringing a stir spreads a silence in the local white community. Further, the text on an intuitive reading seems to absolve the murderer of the crime which forms the research question of the paper. Thus, close and systematic textual analysis of the text representing the murder scene was conducted and it was found that the linguistic choices of the text does create a semantic universe where the murder and the murdered are allegorical figures representing nature and nurture in a mutual conflict. The methodology for linguistic analysis of the selected text is borrowed from Michael Halliday’s theoretical system Systemic Functional Linguistics. The text is analysed by means of transitivity system which provides the investigative tools to study the representational choices of the text.

 Keywords: Functional Stylistics; Systemic Functional Linguistics; Transitivity; Ideational metafunction; Experiential Choices; Lessing Studies

The Uneasy Gaze – Appearing for Interviews to get Married – An Empirical Investigation into the Pre-marital Arranged Marriage Negotiations in Urban Kolkata

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407 views

Sucharita Sen
PhD Scholar, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Email: sucharitasen13@gmail.com

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.33

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Indian society, when viewed from a Foucauldian feminist perspective offers a curious and unique example of societal scrutiny over its members. This overt exercise of power influences individual behaviour, attitudes and has a profound influence on decision making. In this context, this paper argues, within an empirical framework, the limitations of freedom of choice for women in pre-marital arranged marriage negotiations. Women find themselves coercively thrust into uneasy situations of objectification, forced to mould themselves to fit into hegemonic patriarchal parameters. They are lambasted if they fail to fulfil the required expectations. Based on a survey of 250 young brides and prospective brides of upper-caste, middle-class background in urban Kolkata, I argue that the pre-marital negotiations in arranged marriages systematically subjugate the women. Faced with societal and familial pressure, the women often find themselves marginalised and subjugated in the process of arranged marriage.

Keywords: Women, Patriarchy, Arranged Marriages, Objectification.

Performance Space of the Digital Performer/Reader inside Andy Campbell and Judi Alston’s Digital Fiction the Nightingale’s Playground

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306 views

Gitanjali Roy

Assistant Professor, Department of English, Faculty of Liberal Arts, ICFAI University, Tripura. Research Scholar, Dept of English, Tripura University. ORCID: 0000-0003-3672-3481. E-mail: itzgitz@gmail.com/gitanjaliroy@iutriipura.edu.in 

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.32

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 Abstract:

A digital performer has to negotiate with different kinds of affordances inside the space of a digital text. The Nightingale’s Playground (2010), a digital fiction authored by Andy Campbell and Judi Alston offers the reader/player with four versions of the text centering on the protagonist Carl Robertson who tries hard to search for his lost school friend Alex Nightingale. The online texts (‘Consensus Trance’, ‘Fieldwork Book’) and the gaming version of the digital fiction (‘Consensus Trance II’) offer the reader different decisional platforms. This makes it a challenging task for the reader to connect the affordances of the digital text. At the same time, the offline pdf version of the digital fiction hints at Carl being affected by a psychological disorder. The paper shall focus on how a digital reader negotiates his/her position inside the digital text by decoding the programmer’s/author’s encoded plot.

Keywords: Digital, Performer, Text, Nightingale’s Playground, Reader, Player.

Who is a Refugee? Understanding the Figure of the Refugee against the Backdrop of the Bengal Partition (1947-1970)

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457 views

Sumallya Mukhopadhyay

Doctoral Fellow and Teaching Assistant, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi. ORCID ID: 0000-0002-4762-2099. Email: mukhopadhyay.sumallya@gmail.com,

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.31

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Abstract

The paper intends to study the figure of the refugee in post-Partition West Bengal by critically examining the oral history narratives of individuals who migrated from East Pakistan in the wake of the 1947 Partition. It underscores the value and relevance of narrativity in the representation of factual history, the motivation and manifestation of which make history subjective, interpretive and contingent on the refugee’s narrative. The narrative act presents the refugees’ transition from, what may be called, figurative to socio-material subjects who interrupt and derange the nationalising exercise of the nation-state. The multivalent understanding of refugees makes the nation-state suffer from an anxiety of incompleteness (Appadurai 2006). The paper extends the idea of incompleteness by showing that however much the nation-state attempts to frame a particular brand of nationalism, variants of ethnocultural nationalism do exist, demonstrating the diverse subjectivities embodied by the refugees/narrators. Such ethnocultural nationalism can be read as alternative forms of self-assertion deeply etched in the social memory of the refugees.

 Keywords: Partition, Bengal, Refugees, Migration, Narratives, Ethnocultural

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Critiquing 21st Century Creative Violence: Tagore’s Concord (Milan) and Harmony (Samanjaysya) Imagining “One World”

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296 views

Ayanita Banerjee (Ph.D)

University of Engineering and Management.New-Town, Kolkata. West Bengal. Email: abayanita8@gmail.com

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.30

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Modern science, acclaiming the success of the creative human brain as ‘progressive changes’ in the 21st century continues to prosper through prominent images of scientism, ingestion, cartelized capitalism, chemistry and rocket technology to name a few. Introspecting the 21st century from the given nexus, we are quite likely to conclude that it has remained a century when the human destructiveness has reached its creative pinnacle. ‘Creative progression’ disguised under the garb of SARS COVID-19 is currently ransacking mankind, resulting in mass genocide, destruction of cultures and worldviews. The creative human self now remains predisposed with the activation of low-grade mental illness. depression, anxiety and trauma. Tagore’s ‘creative self’ with a magisterial rebuke had always protested the prevalent dominant theories of violence and counter- violence down the time line. His philosophical vision intertwined with the humane self of ‘being’ instead of ‘becoming’ counterpoises this ‘creative enigma’ of scientific and material human progression even to this day. Standing on the threshold of the 21st century we earnestly look forward to reminiscence Tagore’s vision of Concord (milan) nurturing the “living bonds in a society” and brewing Harmony (samanjaysya) as the “wholeness and wholesomeness of human ideals” to provide a remedy for re-thinking the possibilities of “One World” (my italics) defined in terms of ‘becoming’ instead of ‘humane -being’.

 Keywords: Tagore, creative violence, mechanization, concord, harmony, one world

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The Era of Environmental Derangement: Witnessing Climate Crisis in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island

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Nupur Pancholi1, Sanjit Kumar Mishra2

1Research Scholar, Department of Applied Science & Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, India. E-mail: npancholi@as.iitr.ac.in, nupurvpancholi@gmail.com
2Professor, Department of Humanities & Social Science, Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, India. E-mail: sanjit.mishra@hs.iitr.ac.in

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.29

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Abstract

Drawing on Amitav Ghosh’s novel Gun Island (2019) together with his nonfictional The Great Derangement (2016), the article strives to present that while advancing endless desires, human-centric culture and the idea of ‘good life’ drive climate change and environmental deterioration. It seeks to enumerate the devastating consequences of changing climatic conditions and degenerating ecosystems and their cumulative impacts on the humankind and non-human world. It aims to locate how human life at the margins has been affected by these cataclysmic consequences through analysing Ghosh’s Gun Island. It attempts to show that human interventions had significantly fuelled the global climate crisis in the seventeenth century, decoding the myth of Bonduki Sadagar that Ghosh identifies in Gun Island.

 Keywords: Climate change, human-centric culture, the idea of ‘good life’, environmental derangement, myth of Bonduki Sadagar

Locating Women in the Naxalbari Movement: A Story of Resistance and Fabrication of the Individual Female Identity

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441 views

Pritha Sarkar

Research Scholar; Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur; spritha353@gmail.com

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.28

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The objective in this paper is to explore the role of women in the Naxalbari movement by studying how a woman resists all the patriarchal authorities and carves her own space in a male-dominated movement through The Naxalites: A Novel (1979), a representative text on the Naxalbari movement in Indian English Literature. The Naxalbari movement (1965-1975) is the first peasant revolution within twenty years of Indian Independence that initiated in a small village named Naxalbari situated in the Darjeeling district of West Bengal. Though there have been many scholarly studies on the movement, the representation of women and their experiences in the texts on the movement in Indian English Literature has not yet been traversed upon. The paper, therefore, addresses this gap by studying the movement from the feminist standpoint through one of the representative texts. While on one hand, historical records show how women had been frontline warriors in the initial phase of the movement only to be marginalized with the spread of the movement; on the other, none of the chronicles on the movement recognizes the role of women and their contributions in it. Through the text of The Naxalites: A Novel, this paper engages with such problematic and contradictory location of women through the portrayal of a female character who attempts to change the whole direction of the movement with the aim to make it more sustainable. Thus, the paper tries to analyze women as a subversive force within the movement who represent the critical voice against the patriarchal framework by suggesting an alternative modus operandi while staying within the folds of the movement.

Keywords: Women, Movement, Patriarchy, Female Identity

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The Dislocations and Transgressions in Bhajju Shyam’s The London Jungle Book (2004)

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304 views

Shikha Singh

PhD Scholar, Centre for English Studies, School of Language, Literature and Cultural Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, shikha52_llg@jnu.ac.in, ORCID: 0000-0003-0255-8289

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.27

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  Abstract

The paper explores the multiple transgressions and border-crossings elaborated in the visual travelogue The London Jungle Book (2004), by Bhajju Shyam, a Pardhan-Gond artist and produced by Tara Books, an independent artists’ collective specialising in experimental visual literature. The paper discusses the cultural history of “Pardhan-Gond art” and the dislocations and relocations of the art form in the contemporary art world. The paper argues that the personal experience of the artist appears to reflect these shifting categorizations, movements and locations of performance of the art form. The images and metaphors of displacement and transgression have varied connotations in the visual travelogue as they reveal the complex mechanisms of travel and mobility in the contemporary world. The text also articulates the response of the artist to the social, political and economic conditions surrounding the production and circulation of his art, through reimagining his homeland, his cultural ties and his own identity. In a paradoxical sense, the experience of travel and mobility does not symbolise the uprootedness or detachment of the artist, but it brings into effect, with more immediacy, the cultural identity and ties of the artist, as a Pardhan-Gond artist, in the contemporary art world. Furthermore, the materiality of the crossover text challenges the notions of media, genre and readership, associated with the picturebook format, destabilising the categories and assumptions associated with the literary genre.

Keywords: Pardhan-Gond art, Bhajju Shyam, Tara Books, tribal art, book illustration.

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