Editorial

Editorial Introduction: Poetics of Self-construal in Postcolonial Literature

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Maria-Ana Tupan     
Doctoral School, Alba Iulia University, Romania.

Rupkatha Journal, Special Issue on Poetics of Self-construal in Postcolonial Literature, 2023. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v15n5.00
[Article History: Published: 28 December 2023]
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How man is made and how he makes himself was at the crux of the anthropological inquiry launched by Immanuel Kant in his 1798 Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. The subsequent story of the discipline, progressively aided by others, both from the field of humanities (philosophy, sociology, psychology, ethnography) and of sciences (biology, physics, physiology, psychiatry), followed one or the other paths opened by the Königsberg philosopher.

The self grounded in physiology is considered by Kant egoistic, self-centred and motivated by irrational drives: involuntary perception, subconscious associations, arbitrary taste or unaccountable desires. Keep Reading

Editorial Introduction to “Current and Future Directions in TESOL Studies”

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John R. Baker
Ton Duc Thang University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. ORCID: 0000-0003-3379-4751. Email: drjohnrbaker@tdtu.edu.vn

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 15, Issue 1, April-May, 2023. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v15n1.00
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I am delighted to present this special issue of the Rupkatha Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, titled Current and Future Directions in TESOL Studies. This issue brings together manuscripts authored by a diverse community of academics, researchers, teachers, graduate students, and TESOL professionals from across the globe to share an inclusive range of research findings, experiences, and practical and theoretical issues that celebrate the multifaceted nature of our field.

This ongoing exchange is a global imperative as it underscores the importance of language and learning in fostering understanding and cooperation, thus bridging gaps between individuals and communities. In a world often fragmented by language, culture, and politics, communication across these divides is more critical than ever. As such, I am particularly pleased to note that the articles featured in this edition resonantly contribute to the furtherance of this goal.

I-Jane Janet Weng’s International Electronic-Service-Learning (eSL) offers an insightful exploration of a pedagogical innovation spanning virtual borders between Taiwan and Cambodia. The author illustrates how this creative approach effectively united students in a shared pursuit of selfless service, resulting in a genuine sense of global understanding. Additionally, the author demonstrates that students experienced heightened intercultural competence, which fostered meaningful interaction and communication that facilitated their transformation into intercultural citizens.

Theron Muller’s How Textual Production Processes Shape English Language Teaching Research Discourse explores the importance of investigating textual production processes in academic writing within the field of language teaching. Through the lens of critical discourse and text history analysis, the article highlights the challenges two Japanese authors face in understanding reviewer comments. Additionally, the author highlights the transformation of their initial pedagogy-centered manuscripts into more research-orientated publications.

Quinta Kemende Wunseh’s A Conceptual Framework for Inclusive Pedagogy in South African Multilingual Higher Education Classrooms provides an insightful perspective of the linguistic diversity found in South African undergraduate classrooms. The author then outlines a range of strategies and factors that facilitate inclusive pedagogy in these diverse settings, including, but not limited to, translanguaging, professional development, and lecturer self-awarenesss and preparedness, which she posits contributes to a potential conceptual framework with implications for language policy, practice, and research.

Nguyen Ngoc Vu and his coauthors’ (Truong Le Hai, Tran Ngoc Ha, Bui Duc Tien) Exploring the Effect of the LearnEnglish Grammar Mobile App on English Language Learners’ Grammatical Competence investigates the impact of the LearnEnglish Grammar app on the grammatical accuracy of 10th-graders attending a gifted high school in Vietnam. The authors further suggest the comprehensive integration of mobile learning applications across various school subjects to facilitate student achievement.

Ngoc Thai Bao Pham’s The Role of Congruency in Collocation Acquisition: A Case Study of Vietnamese Students Learning English Adjective + Noun Collocations highlights that collocational competence is critical to EFL learners’ language proficiency and investigates Vietnamese students’ recognition and use of congruent and incongruent English adjective + noun collocations. The author further emphasizes the importance of explicitly teaching congruent and incongruent collocations in EFL classrooms.

Michel Riquelme-Sanderson and A. Longoria’s LGBTQ+ Language Teacher Educators’ Identities and Pedagogies: Testimonio and Duoethnography examines LGBTQ+ educators’ identities, pedagogies, and experiences during initial teacher education in Chile and the USA. The authors identify several shared themes, including pedagogies’ impact on identities, LGBTQ+ teacher visibility, the intersectionality of LGBTQ+ issues, and non-LGBTQ+ allies. The authors also emphasize the importance of LGBTQ+ language teacher educators as social justice agents.

Wisma Yunita and her coauthors’ (Syahrial and Ira Maisarah) Strategies and Reasons When Addressing Grammatical Problems in Thesis Writing explains that to write an acceptable thesis, English language learner graduate students often use strategies to address grammatical errors and have reasons for their strategy preferences. The authors further identify strategies Indonesian graduate students use to address such errors and the students’ rationales for utilizing these strategies.

Phan Thi Ngoc Le’s The Effectiveness of and Students’ Perceptions of Peer Feedback: A Vietnam Action Research Project examines the utilization and impact of peer feedback within the Vietnamese context. Through the lens of action research, the author acknowledges that although peer feedback is a well-established and growing global trend, its implementation and exploration in Vietnam have been relatively limited. The author further investigates the effectiveness of peer feedback and explores students’ perceptions of its advantages and disadvantages in a Vietnamese university context.

Ibiere Cookey and her coauthors’ (Michael O. Ukonu, Emeka S. Orekye, and Olanrewaju Mgboji) An A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Newspaper Coverage and Reader Response to Covid-19 Reports acknowledges the importance of official languages in multilingual societies but notes that it is challenging for majority and minority language speakers to identify with their sociocultural orientations when using a lingua franca. The authors further examine the themes, narrative viewpoints, and language modes in Nigerian newspaper reports on Covid-19 and readers’ responses to these reports, highlighting the link between trust in information sources and attitudes toward health risks.

Phu Si Nguyen’s review of Natasha Broodie’s Give Me Tea, Please: Practical Ingredients for Tasteful Language offers a perceptive overview of a profoundly enlightening guidebook. Nguyen illustrates how Broodie, drawing on a variety of multilingual and cross-cultural experiences, provides valuable insights into improving communication, skillfully highlights cultural differences that lead to communication breakdowns in multicultural and multilingual environments, and elucidates effective approaches for navigating even the most challenging forms of formal, informal, direct, and indirect communication.

Divya Shantha Kumari Adinarayanan and her coauthors’ (Shanthi Nambi, Raman Krishnan,. and Rajagopalan Vijayaraghavan) Let the child take the lead: Intervention for enriching parent-child interactions during shared book reading emphasizes that parent-child conversations during shared book reading (SBR) can facilitate children’s language skill development. The authors further demonstrate how SBR intervention can support this, resulting in significantly longer parent responses, more conversational turns, and greater expressive language skills.

On behalf of the Rupkatha Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, I would like to express our gratitude to the authors, reviewers, and editorial team whose expertise and commitment have brought this TESOL Edition to fruition. Their dedication ensures that the articles presented within these pages are rigorous, relevant, and impactful. Furthermore, by bringing together various perspectives and experiences, we trust that their efforts in publishing this issue have furthered a global dialogue that transcends geographical and cultural boundaries.

Approaching and Re-stating the Question of Global Anxieties: Some Suggestions for Psychology and Therapy Studies

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Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay
Universidad de Guanajuato

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 4, December, 2022. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n4.00 
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Pedagogy of the Global Anxieties

Anxiety caused by the psychosocial reality of war, pandemic, natural disasters, or poverty, among other factors, may be studied from two kinds of methodological premises: first, the deep and unencumbered perception of anxiety as a metacognitive process indicating diminution in energy levels and normative expression or behaviors of individuals. The subject finds oneself in a situation that is out of sync with the environment, and experiences low emotive valence. Anxiety is cognitively visible as a state of depression that continues to intimidate and demoralize the person. It represents a dispirited state of the individual as it encounters a world of depleted resources, and as it constantly fears for its existence or survival. The collective cognitive fear that underlays human survival also creates preconditions for global anxiety. Global anxiety is a global category – an obscure, introspective moment in the lives of peoples within a territory or among migrant populations across frontiers. Secondly, it could indicate toward historically localized expressions and as such anxiety could be studied pluralistically – as its pre-conditions arise in times and locations. Yet on the whole, if we were to analyse the causal variants or consequences of anxieties on a quantitative scale, we could possibly determine how conditions conducive to emotional redressal could be procured or administered for well-being and the Human devolopment index. In either case, the need to identify, analyze and alleviate the pressures and tensions causing anxiousness, and to diminish or palliate physiological conditions that induce anxiety remain our conscious rudder for anxiety studies.

Emotive Binaries

What kind of interdisciplinary approaches to anxieties could help us understand and consider the fuller range or ambit of any anxiety disorder emotion. Interdisciplinary methodology has the potential of explaining the complete circumplex of emotions, first suggested by Russell (1980). Any emotive condition (or dysfunction) is capable of being viewed through its affective other, or valence or alteredness. I refer to the circumplex model to suggest  how anxiety is cognitively manifested: such dysfunctional behaviors have been considered in great detail by the studies of Russell (1980), Frijda (1986) and others. Frijda’s works are most impactful in this regard till date and also contains a description of what Frijda calls arousal. Indeed, arousal is an indispensable factor for the evocation of emotions, including ‘basic emotion states’ (Ekman 1977), like that of fear or anxiety. Barrett (2014) also develops an architecture of arousal. We may propose however to include the insights into emotions available in traditions of emotion studies from very different philosophical or analytical traditions. The same emotional traumas could be aroused and contemplated in a positive state of affects – so that the emotion or affect may harbor an intrinsic potential to transform and get aroused as its altered affect on the circumplex scale. ‘Valence’ is crucial here and is directly related to the dramatic practice of potentializing optimal feelings of well-being and self-esteem, and in general, developing the ability to negotiate with negatively valenced states of depression or traumatic withdrawal. Anxieties of global nature could be seen in this context of our Eastern, Indian psychosocial systems, as posing these great potential questions on alleviatory mechanisms for procurement of well-being or of humane states of feeling (Mukhopadhyay forthcoming 2023). Anxiety studies will therefore find its fuller purpose in the knowledge of ‘transforming’ valences of physiologically built-in emotive conditions or potentials of our psychosomatic architecture. How much such transformative potentials effect emotive base change in the synaptic neurodynamic processes may thus be considered in neurosciences of the future. Levitt asked in a very relevant manner: Does the pattern of physiological reaction differ among emotional states; can these patterns be used to differentiate among the emotions? (Levitt 2015). I believe that these are very important questions for the analysis of anxiety and fear – that should be raised, even if it were in a rather inchoate form, in contemporary Applied Psychology and psychosocial behaviorism. They point to the need for a re-consideration of the Basic Emotion paradigm in psychology and replace it with a ‘basic dynamic circumplex emotion model’ which looks at how emotion potentials are capable of being triggered or aroused and modified in their nature as sources of their own medicine. Feelings caused by trauma could also be a source of self-transformational cure of the trauma – of looking at how trauma could also contain itself, like a protean emotion entity, and therefore be cultivated by practice to be contemplated as its altered and therapeutic other, on a binary scale of crisis management within the retinue of self-induced therapies.

Political Emotion

The search for wellness, mental health, mindfulness and freedom could be therefore re-stated in terms of the primacy of the dynamic architectonics that build human emotions and make them so valuable. Not the nature of the emotion and not merely the category of emotion or the Basic Emotion itself – is what now appears to us to matter. In its place what is in focus is the question of a dynamic alteration in the circuit of appraisals.  The global anxieties are best resolved in terms of a politics or praxis whose root actions include policy decisions in favor of positive emotive arousal in matters of decisions involving life-transformations. The foundations of this kind of political thinking is already evident in the knowledge of transformations of the kind that change the perception of a prosocial need from conflict to peace and self-abnegatory activism. The instances set by Gandhi and Nelson Mandela in the last century – have been overwhelmingly confirmed in the political actions of Pepe Mujica – the former President of Uruguay, and Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the current President and leader of the 4th Transformation in Mexico. The ardent fervor of their activism is executed in movements that explore the transformation and containment of anxieties through their exploration in alternate expressions of self-abnegation and the emotional freedom of the individual. This is our take away from the re-evaluation of emotional praxis for the contemporary world.

 

Reference                               

Barrett, L. F. & Russell, J. A. (Eds.). (2014). The psychological construction of emotion. Guilford Publications.

Frijda, N. H. (1986). The emotions. Cambridge University Press.

Levitt, E. E. (2015). The psychology of anxiety. Routledge.

Russell JA. A circumplex model of affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 1980;39:1161–1178.  

Mukhopadhyay Tirtha Prasad. Emotion According to the Ancients and the Ancients According to Emotions in “Emotion, Communication, Interaction: Emerging Perspectives” edited by Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay and Shoji Nagataki. Taylor and Francis. Forthcoming.

Editorial Introduction: The Saga of the A·bri dal·gipa: The Ontological Turn in Northeast Studies

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Jyotirmoy Prodhani

North-Eastern Hill University (NEHU), Shillong, India. Email: jprodhani@nehu.ac.in/ rajaprodhani@gmail.com.

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022. Pages 1-8. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne00

First published: June 30, 2022 | Area: Northeast India | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This editorial is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
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Though the territory that is known as the Northeast of India is an ancient region in terms of its civilisation, culture, and history; the emergence of Northeast as a discursive terrain, however, is a relatively recent phenomenon. In that, it has significant linkages with its assertions of resistance against the metanarratives of pan-Indian nationalism. In his seminal essay, “The Margin Strikes Back” (2005), Udayon Misra argued how the Northeast, commonly referred to as the periphery or the margin of the mainland, almost soon after India’s independence, had given the first ‘jolt’ to the metadiscursive idea of ‘one nation’ (p. 266). It was the tiny territory of Nagaland that had posed the biggest epistemic challenge forcing a paradigmatic shift in re-defining the parameters of the nation-state. This resistance has also shaped one of the primary categories of Northeast—a space of dissension and resistance. As Misra (2005) pointed out, it was the Naga question that had prompted Jayprakash Narayan, as the head of the Naga Peace Mission in 1964, to recognise the legitimacy of the ‘small nations’ and brought into circulation the idioms like ‘self-determination’ and the ‘urge to preserve’ culture and identity (p. 268) into the parlance of political discourses wherein the notion of ‘the mainstream’ (p. 266) found to have been not essentially central but rather incidental. What Northeast has defied is the singularity of meaning, the essentialist absolutism. This resistance has been one of the embedded cores of the region to deal with the multiplicities of voices inherent to the lay of the land. Notably, on fundamentalism and its growing dominance to assign primacy to the singular immensity of meanings, eminent critic and writer, Pradip Acharya expressed his understanding of the term as ‘ruling out doubts’, and as a contrast, he said, ‘In the Northeast, we celebrate doubt’ (2017, p. 3).

In the imaginary of what can be said as the national mainstream, in continuation of the colonial cartographic orientalistation, the Northeast has been largely perceived as a frontier, what Michiel Baud and Willem van Schendel (1997) would define as an ‘empty area’ (p. 213), a vague territory without meaning, historicity and even an agency of its own, a veritable empty signifier. Nevertheless, this region has been one of the primeval territories having its eminent presence since the times of the great Indian epics, a territory with profound historical, literary, and cultural antiquity, and more importantly, a region with its own medieval history when the rest of India mostly had a shared medieval history by being part of the common political empire.

 The story of Northeast is quite similar to that of the abiding fable by Amitav Ghosh, The Living Mountain (2022). Quite significantly, the book resonates with the geo-cultural history of the Northeast too, for the region has gone through similar crises and turbulences like that of the Elderpeople and the Adepts, the indigenous men and women, of the Great Mountain, the Mahaparbat, where they were reduced by the imperialist Anthropois into Varvarois as they were rendered culturally inadequate and subjected to brutal dislocations. But finally, it was the resurgence of the native pedagogy that had redeemed indigenous inhabitants. Northeast too is a metaphoric Mahaparbat. A region with almost half of the 450 tribes of India who speak about 200 different indigenous languages (Sharma, 2019, p. 1), it is indeed an a·bri dal·gipa, an A·chik phrase for great mountain.

However, the immensity of the region cannot be measured only in terms of its spatial coordinates, rather one has to take into account its vast cultural contexts. From being a terra exotica, it has formidably emerged as a terra significatio; from being an exotic space of mystery and enigma for the onlookers, it emerged as a territory of discursive significations; instead of just being part of the newspaper footnotes, it has evolved into a powerful domain of literary and cultural discourses. Following the substantial proliferation of its native literature in the English language, reaching out to readers across the world, Northeast has acquired a space of its own. The English language in the Northeast has been provincialized as one of its ‘local languages’ (Prodhani, 2022), as language has not necessarily affected an alienation in the literary expressions of the region. As Robin S. Ngangom (2018) has said about the English poetry from the Northeast, “Instead of the expected radical break with the near past, Northeast poetry written in English suggests a continuity with the past” (para. 2). However, English is not the only language in which major literary works have been produced in this region. Literature from the region in the other native languages in written form has deeper antiquity going back to the 10th to the 12th century CE and beyond, especially in Assam and Manipur. The region’s oral literary tradition is even older. Tilottoma Misra (2016) defined the history of literature of the Northeast as a ‘complex literary tradition’. She points out, “This complex literary tradition requires a detailed analysis of the historical process of the emergence of manuscript and printed texts in cultures which were predominantly oral” (p. 46). A comprehensive volume on Northeast literature, therefore, is always challenging, for it must not privilege the written over the oral; it should also include all the eight states that form the Northeast and therefore such a volume, by default, would be polyglossic, which, of course, is one of its biggest strengths.

  In this special issue on Northeast literature and culture, papers from various states of the region—Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim, and Tripura —address a wide range of genres; from poetry to fiction, from theatre to cinema, from folklore to graphic narratives and so on. Among other innovative critical engagements, the young scholars from the region have made some audacious departures from the dominant center-periphery paradigm and have tried to make epistemic interventions affecting a possible new turn in the critical discourses on the Northeast through their attempts to theorise ‘land’ as a crucial ontological premise towards evolving an indigenous hermeneutics. From the perennial presence of violence and identity anxieties, the emerging critical discourses have turned to exploring the embedded ecology of the region to come up with fresh critical insights. One of the most potential dimensions of the prospective new direction in the Northeast discourse might well be, what Fabricant and Postero (2018) called the ‘Indigenous Turn’ (p. 128) wherein ecology and decoloniality are some of the most crucial influences. This has engendered fresh energy among the young thinkers from the region. The scholars have also engaged to problematise the insider-outsider binaries, a phenomenon that has gained attention in recent times. Though the insider-outsider discourse has quite subtly made certain legitimations to re-orientalise the region as a territory of native xenophobes putting the entire range of obligations on the insiders of the region absolving the outsiders of any such ethical imperatives, the papers here have tried to provide alternative idioms to look at the issue from nuanced critical vantages.

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Here is a brief introduction to the papers included in this special issue. Two of the articles in this themed issue look at the unique tradition of buranji as a vernacular history project of the 13th century Assam.  In the essay, “Buranji in Northeast India: A 13th Century History Project of Assam”, Dwijen Sharma refers to Suryya Kumar Bhuyan’s model of vernacular history writing and examines how the buranjis constitute a unique form of history that is indigenous and considerably different from the western paradigm of historiography disseminated by the colonial project. Dhurjjati Sarma in his paper “Vernacular Historiography and North-East Literature” specifically looks at the representation of the Kacharis, a formidable cultural community and a powerful political entity, in the historical narrative of the Ahom buranjis.

Anjali Daimari in her paper, “Internal Instabilities: Nationalism in the Context of Nagaland” has taken up two seminal novels, Birendra Kumar Bhattacharya’s Yaruingam and Easterine Kire’s Bitter Wormwood” and attempts to understand the ambivalences in the discourses of Nationalism as ‘internal instabilities’.  In the context of Nagaland, the author explores the prospects of a ‘human solution’ to address the Naga question.  In their essay, “Travel, Empire and Ethnographic Self-Fashioning of a White Headhunter”, Mehdi Hasan Chowdhury and Dipendu Das have taken up Christoph von Furer-Haimendorf’s travelogue, The Naked Nagas, for a critical re-look on contested affinities among ‘travel, empire and ethnographic exercises’ and their role in the configuration of colonial Northeast India as a ‘frontier’. Shiv Kumar in his paper, “Imagined Ethnography and Cultural Strategies: A Study of Easterine Kire’s Sky is My Father and Don’t Run, My Love looks at how Easterine Kire reinvents folklore of the Nagas and evolves a politically conscious positionality through her fictional narratives. Suganya V. and Padmanabhan B. have taken up stories from the iconic collection of short stories by Temsula Ao, These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone, to look at the role of storytelling as a means to preserve linkages with the past of the community against the context of transgenerational transmission of trauma.

This issue has included papers that look at the poetry from the Northeast from the perspectives of fresh critical insights. Kshetrimayum Premchandra in his essay, “The Rise of Yawol Poetry in Manipuri Literature” looks at yawol poetry of Manipur which is associated with militancy in the state. In the paper, he tries to explain why for a significant number of poets blood and violence keep coming as recurring motifs in their poems. The paper, “Resistance and Ungendering” looks at the emerging feminist voices in the Northeast with special reference to the poems of Monalisa Changkija and Mona Zote wherein Debajyoti Biswas and Pratyusha Pramanik have argued how ‘performativity’ has been utilised as a discursive tool to counter gendered societies and ‘un-gendering’ the essence of cultural constructs.  In the paper, “Yemapoetics: Towards a Theory of Healing in Indigenous Poetry from Sikkim”, the authors, Swarnim Subba and Namrata Chaturvedi have tried to formulate an indigenous theory of poetry based on the idea of poetry as shamanism what they have described as ‘Yemapoetics’ with reference to the poems of the Limboo community from Sikkim. The paper, co-authored by Austin Okeke, Emeka Aniago, Mary-Isabella Ada Igbokwe and Kenneth C. Ahaiwe, “Monumental Inhumanity beyond Tears: Lamentations of Despoil in Nagaland and Niger Delta Eco-poetics” makes a comparative study of the select poems of Temsula Ao of Nagaland and Tenure Ojaide of Nigeria to underline how both theses poets have reflected their anxieties in the growing despoiling of the eco-heritages in their respective locations.  The authors, Gourab Chatterjee, Debanjali Roy and Tanmoy Putatunda have taken up the poems of Temsula Ao, Mamang Dai, and Esther Syiem in their paper, “From Anonymity to Identity: Orality in Three Women Poets from North-East India” and explore how these poets have utilized native orature as a primary tool to construct an indigenous poetics dismantling the colonial hierarchy that privileges the written over the oral. Gunajeet Mazumdar in his paper, “Topophrenia and Indigenous Belonging”, takes up Rajbanshi poetry, one of the peripheral and emerging literary developments of Northeast, and problematises the notion of spatial memory in Rajbanshi poetry taking a recourse to Robert Tally’s concept of Spatial Memory and the decolonial critic Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s theory of land as pedagogy. Analysing the poems of Northeast from a purely linguistic perspective is not quite common. Charanjit Singh and Gurjit Kaur have carried out a linguistic analysis of two of the major poets from Northeast using the tools of Systematic Functional Linguistics (SFL) techniques in their paper, “Text Formation in the Poetry of Robin S. Ngangom and Mamang Dai”

 There are papers that have attempted to explore the possibilities of constructing alternative hermeneutics based on the indigenous cultural discourses. Kimthianvak Vaiphei, in her paper, “Indigenous Ontology In Zo Oral Narratives: A Study of the Zo Indigenous Cosmovision”, explores the indigenous ontology and argues that the Eurocentric critical frameworks, which are often inadequate to interpret and understand the indigenous culture and native epistemology, needs to be replaced with fresh ontologies grounded in indigeneity. Taking the folklore and oral narratives of the Zo tribe of Southern Manipur, the paper attempts at evolving indigenous hermeneutics to herald a possible critical turn in Northeast studies.  Zothanchhingi Khiangte in the paper “An Identity Born Out of Shared Grief: The Account of Rambuai in Contemporary Mizo Literary Texts” takes up three fictions from Mizoram to examine how the memories of rumbuai evolved the Mizo identity forging the spiritual and the cultural past of the community. Karyir Riba, in her paper “The forest is my wife”: The Ethno-political and Gendered Relationship of Land and the Indigene”, takes up select texts by Easterine Kire and Mamang Dai and argues that ‘Land’ has a personified presence in indigenous literature where there is a merger of land with that of the women self, that nurtures its feminine dimensions of fertility and service. Partha Sarathi Gupta takes an anti-anthropocene approach to study the folk orature of the Bongcher and Chakma communities of Tripura in his paper titled, “Art, Ecology and Affective Encounters: An Ecosophical Study of Folk Tales from Tripura”. Drawing on Guattari’s notion of ‘ecosophy’, he tries to look at how the folk narratives of Northeast have encompassed ecology as one of its intimate affinities. Pronami Bhattacharya takes up the folktales from Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Arunachal, Tripura in her paper, “Ecofeminist Consciousness in Select Folktales from Northeast India”, wherein she explores the possibility of constructing indigenous critical perspectives on nature and ecofeminism. Usham Rojio in his paper, “Performing the Landscape: Orature around Loktak Lake and the Love Story of Khamba Thoibi”, explores the relations between landscape and performative traditions around Loktak Lake and Moirang of Manipur with special reference to the epic narrative of Khamba Thoibi. Aritra Gupta in the paper, “Architecture without architects: Eve’s dropping into the Reang House’s Dialogue with its Environment”, looks at the indigenous Reang houses of Tripura and explores the materials and methods of their constructions to explore what the paper has described as vernacular architecture.

 Theatre has a vibrant history in the Northeast, however research in this area is not quite adequate yet.  Parismita Hazarika and Debarshi Prasad Nath have taken up the plays of two of the major cultural icons of Assam, Jyotiprasad Agarwala and Bishnuprasad Rava, to address the issue of Assamese nationalism and the critical parameters with which it has been evolving across various phases of history. Pranjal Sarma Basisth and Gautam Sarmah in their paper, “Kanhailal’s ‘Theatre of the Earth’ as Political Allegory”, look at the unique theatre genre developed by Kanhailal which is apparently minimal but thematically potent and prophetic. The paper also discusses how Kanhailal’s theatre was influenced by Jerzy Grotowsky’s Poor Theatre, Badal Sircar’s Third Theatre, and how Kanhailal, in turn, made his impact on the next generation of theatre directors from the Northeast like Gunakar Dev Goswami and Sukracharya Rabha. Namrata Pathak discusses the poetics of theatre developed by a very promising theatre activist, Sukracharya Rabha (1977-2018) in her paper, “Under the Canopy of Sal Trees”. The paper looks at how Sukracharya Rabha, who obtained his theatre training from Kanhailal, evolved a new set of theatre idioms combining ecology, ethnicity, and culture as the syntax of ‘minimalist theatre’. Mohammad Rezaul Karim in his paper, “Adaptation of Shakespeare’s Plays into Assamese Farce: A Study on Historical Perspective”, looks at the Assamese translations and adaptations of Shakespearean comedies and examines the influence of Shakespeare on modern Assamese plays, especially the Assamese comedies.

Sib Sankar Majumder’s “Penology in Colonial Times: A Reading of Sangrami Jibonor Atmakatha”, looks at a very unusual text from Assam which is a prison notebook by Robin Kakati, a Gandhian freedom fighter. In the paper, the author analyses the anatomy of incarceration in colonial Assam with reference to Kakati’s memoir.  Children’s literature has drawn major critical attention in recent times, but not so in the context of the Northeast but Himaxee Bordoloi and Rohini Mokashi have taken up a popular Assamese text for children in their paper, “Navakanta Barua’s Posthuman Wonderland in Siyali Palegoi Ratanpur. In the paper, the authors have looked at the celebrated text from the perspective of posthumanism and animality and tried to examine how, through the deployment of nonsense and fantasy, Barua had posed a challenge to the anthropocene paradigm of human centrality. Nizara Hazarika deals with a marginal territory of Assamese literature in her paper, “Transgressive Spatialities: Mapping Identity and Liminality in Contemporary Queer Narratives from Assam”. Hazarika argues that the queer narrative in Assam reflects a new direction for the nonheteronormative people towards claiming a distinct positionality against the hegemonic knowledge production determined by the dominance of heteronormative ideologies. Manashi Bora in her paper, “History, Memory and Trauma” takes up the select short stories of Arupa Patanagia Kalita of Assam and draws on the critical aspects of history, postcoloniality, memory, and trauma to examine how the author has problematised and interpreted her encounter with the social upheavals and the banalities of everyday experiences against those contexts. In her essay, “Anatomy of Peace: Reading How to Tell Story the Story of an Insurgency”, Avantika Debroy has closely analysed the collection of Assamese short stories to arrive at a deeper understanding of one of the most tumultuous junctures of Assam’s political history marked by the rise and the receding of the ULFA insurgency and the deepening of the discourses revolved around the idea of a swadhin Asom.

In the context of the Northeast, anxieties arising out of migration, displacement, and relocation of communities in the wake of India’s Partition, other forms of migration, and the insider-outsider binaries are some of the crucial issues that have gained critical attention.  Suranjana Choudhury in her paper, “Partition and its afterlife”, draws upon memory studies to examine how personal memories of ‘Partition and its afterlife’ shaped the literary imaginations of the displaced Sylhetis in the Barak valley of Assam. Rimi Nath in her paper, “The question of the ‘foreigners’ in select fictional narratives from Assam”, addresses one of the most crucial aspects that has dominated the discourses in the Northeast for quite some time. She has made nuanced arguments by taking literary narratives from the two valleys of Assam—the Barak and the Brahmaputra. Liji Varghese in, “Narrating ‘Indias’: Liminal Narratives of Northeast and Assertion of Identity”, takes up three significant authors from the region—Anjum Hassan, Siddharth Deb and Zoe Lungkumer — and argues that it is imperative to envisage ‘Indias’ in order to open up and accommodate polyphonic narratives and in this the writings from Northeast can re-construct the idioms in order to re-define the Indian experience. Amanda B. Basaiawmoit and Paonam Sudeep Mangang, in their paper, “The Battle of Belonging: A Study of Contemporary Shillong Poets”, deal with the issue of ‘belonging’ and ‘unbelonging’ with reference to the select poems of non-tribal poets from Shillong to analyse their negotiation with their adopted spaces and the struggle to gain a sense of belonging.

There has been a significant proliferation of visual and graphic narratives in the context of the Northeast that has generated a great amount of critical attention. Amit Rahul Baishya in his paper, “The Animate Circuit of the Ordinary” attempts, as he says, to unearth the fugitive potentials immanent in every day, taking into account the photomontage of Niam/Faith/Hynñiewtrep by the Shillong filmmaker, Tarun Bhartiya. Renu Elizabeth Abraham in her paper, “The Politics of Cultural Homogenization and Territorialization” critically analyses the character of Mapui Kawlim as a superhero in Tinkle’s WingStar series and argues that the representation of Northeast in such mainstream popular comics has erased the ethnic markers of the character as an attempt at ‘sanitised representation’ of a character from the region affecting the national imagination on cultural ethnicities and diversities. Rolla Das and Abhaya N B in their paper, “Humanising History through Graphic Narratives: Exploring Stories of Home and Displacement from the North-East of India” take up select graphic novels to explore how these works have responded to the heterogeneity of the region to bring forth ‘the intersection of the performative of the text and image’ in order to create a unique oral poetics of the region.

 Cinema is a very important and significant cultural medium in the Northeast, which is known for several offbeat and cerebral films acclaimed both nationally and internationally. Farddina Hussain in her paper, “Filming Folktales”, looks at the changing relationship between folktales and films in the context of Assamese cinema and analyses Bhaskar Hazarika’s Kothatnadi as a ‘dialectical simulation of images created by the auteur’ that turns a grandma’s bedtime story into an uncanny horror folktale. Alicia Jacob and Dishari Chattaraj have taken up one of the most complex Assamese films made in recent times—Aamis—by Bhaskar Hazarika in their paper, “Forbidden Cravings”, and they have argued that the film, apparently a dark love story, has dealt with multiple layers of significations turning meat into a metaphor of deeper cultural associations and resistance. Munmi Bora’s essay, “Cultural Differences, Racism and Trauma”, makes a critical analysis of Nicholas Kharkongor’s film, Axone: A Recipe for Disaster, to address the issues pertinent to the Northeast experience as an outsider in the mainland. She has also raised questions as to what might be the effective response against prejudices and hostilities to beat a retreat and resign into the shell or make efforts to find a way out to establish an informed relationship in a space where several cultures can converge and co-exist.

 Besides the critical articles, the issue also features special interviews of Mamang Dai, the eminent writer and poet from Arunachal Pradesh and Ratan Thiyam, the eminent theatre Director from Manipur and one of the pioneers of the Theatre of Roots movement in India. In the Book Review section, the reviewers have taken up some of the recent creative and critical works from the Northeast for their perceptive reviews.

 There was an overwhelming response to the CFP for the special themed issue of Rupkatha on Northeast literature and culture. Out of nearly about five hundred abstracts, only a handful of them was to be shortlisted, which was quite a daunting task by itself. I am particularly thankful to all the eminent academicians and colleagues who have spared their precious time to help shortlist the abstracts and review the papers with very valuable opinions, inputs and suggestions. Thanks to all the contributors and also to the authors who had responded to the CFP but we failed to accommodate them in this issue. What is heartening to see is that Northeast literature and culture as a category has generated academic interest among scholars and researchers not only in the region but also in the other parts of the country. The volume has also got contributions from the US and Africa, which indicates the growing reach of the literary works of the Northeast across boundaries.

That a special volume on Northeast literature has been facilitated by a major literary journal of the country, Rupkatha, is a significant intervention for Northeast studies as a discipline to grow. I am grateful to the Chief Editor of the journal, Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay, and the Managing Editor, Tarun Tapas Mukherjee for their trust in me to edit this special issue and for their constant guidance in the process.

 Hopefully, this special issue would be able to generate further interest among the readers and scholars leading to more discourses and debates on Northeast literature and culture.

Note:

[1] ’The big mountain’ in A·chik or Garo language. See L.M. Holbrook (1998).

References

Acharya, Pradip. (2017). In the northeast we celebrate doubt. Keynote Address (1-5) in the National Seminar on English Literature from North East India, Gauhati University Institute of North East Studies (GUINES), Gauhati University, 25 March. [Unpublished manuscript]

Baud, Michiel, and Willem Van Schendel. (1997). Toward a comparative history of borderlands.” Journal of World History 8(2): pp. 211-242. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20068594

Fabricant, Nicole and Nancy Postero. (2018). The indigenous studies turn. In Juan Poblote (Ed.), New approaches to Latin American studies (pp. 128-146). Routledge.

Ghosh Amitav, The living mountain: A fable of our times. Fourth Estate.

Holbrook, L.M. (1998). KU·RONGDIK: A·chikku into English dictionary. L.M. Holbrook.

Misra, Tilottoma. (2016). Literary cultures in northeast India shrinking frontiers. In Political and Economic Weekly, SEPTEMBER 17, vol LI, no. 38. (pp. 46-54).

Misra, Udayon. (2005). The margins strike back: echoes of sovereignty and the Indian state. India International Centre Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 2/3, (pp. 265-274)          URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23006033

Ngangom, Robin S. (2018). Alternative poetry of the northeast. Sahapedia. (para2)  https://www.sahapedia.org/alternative-poetry-of-the-northeast.a online

Prodhani, J. (2022). English as a social capital of north east India. The Shillong Times, 21 April. (para 6) https://theshillongtimes.com/2022/04/20/english-as-a-social-capital-of-

Sharma, Dwijen. (Ed.). (2019). Introduction. In Writing from India’s North-East: Recovering the small voices. (pp. 1-13). Aadi Publishers.

Jyotirmoy Prodhani is a Professor and Head of the Department of English at North-Eastern Hill University, (NEHU), Shillong, Meghalaya, India. His areas of research and teaching interests are Theatre and Performance, Translations, Indigenous Studies, Northeast Literature.

Rethinking, Narrating, Consuming Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asia

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[wp-svg-icons icon=”user” wrap=”i”] Jeremy De Chavez [wp-svg-icons icon=”envelop” wrap=”i”]

Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Macau, Macau SAR, China.

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 1, January-March, 2022, Pages 1–3. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n1.01

Published: February 5, 202

(This editorial is published under the Themed Issue Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Literary and Cultural Studies)
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Rethinking, Narrating, Consuming Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asia

As this special issue would not have been possible without the generosity of certain individuals during these most trying times, this modest introduction must necessarily begin with gratitude. My co-editor, Yue Zhang, and I would like to express our sincerest thanks to the tireless and gracious people behind Rupkatha. It is because of their vision and efforts that Rupkatha has become a truly global journal of interdisciplinary Humanities, a home to many ideas that challenge and extend the borders of what it means to do Humanistic research in order to all the more properly respect its integrity. We hope that this special issue that features works from and about the East and Southeast Asian regions, along with their associated diasporic communities, will contribute to the noble vision of Rupkatha. We extend our gratitude to the numerous scholars who shared their expertise as peer-reviewers and whose generosity ensured the success of this special issue. We are also very grateful to our editorial assistants Mr. John, Fong Chi Chon and Mr. Chris, Miao Chi both of whom often went above and beyond the call of duty to ensure the smooth production of this special issue. Of course, we must also thank all those scholars, both established and up-and-coming, who responded to our call for submissions. The response to this special issue could only be described as overwhelmingly robust, which is indicative of the unquestionable vigor in the field of contemporary East and Southeast Asian literary and cultural studies. Indeed, the sheer diversity of the submissions makes it a challenge to collectively introduce the essays without the risk of taking away from their inevitable multiplicity by imposing an artificial thematic unity. Thus, while the concerns of the essays included in this issue cannot be fully contained within their assigned thematic categories, and by no means should be read exclusively within such, I shall nevertheless risk grouping them based on what I conceive to be their principal critical concern—that is to say, rethinking, narrating, consuming.

A substantial number of essays in this special issue have attempted to rethink concepts that have been ossified through convention by bringing them into contact with cultural texts from and about Southeast Asia, revitalizing both concept and cultural text in the process. Carlos Piocos’s “Women Trespassing Borders: Imaginaries of Cosmopolitanism from Below in Mia Alvar’s In the Country” interrogates dominant conceptions of cosmopolitanism by exploring “versions of cosmopolitanism from below” and in the process “examines the intersections and contradictions of class, gender and race in cosmopolitan imaginaries of mobilities in Southeast Asia.” Locating his theoretical intervention within the new materialist and decolonial turns, Christian Jil R. Benitez’s “Bagay: Articulating a new materialism from the Philippine tropics” examines Bagay poetry to “articulate a Philippine rendition of new materialism, through the notion of bagay” and its characteristic tropicality.  Extending his previous work on Chinese Filipino culture, Joseph Ching Velasco’s “From Private Eye to Public “I”:  The Chinese Filipinos in Charlson Ong’s Hard-Boiled Fiction” examines how a generic literary form is strategically disfigured when relocated in the postcolony so that it may speak to post-colonial and diasporic concerns. Hazel T. Biana’s “Traversing Paths/Pasts: Places of Filipino Philosophy” focuses on the concept of place in the work of selected Filipino philosophers to argue that place reveals “the trajectories of their type of philosophizing“ and thus played a significant role in the development of Filipino philosophy. Anton Sutandio’s “Skinned Performance: Female Body Horror in Joko Anwar’s Impetigore” examines the ambivalent status of the female body in cinema to argue that “the portrayal of non-traditional female characters suggests an attempt to challenge the mainstream patriarchal narrative in contemporary Indonesian horror cinema, and at the same time hints at the perpetuating subjectification of woman’s bodies.” Also focused on the representation of the body in cinema is Lynda Susana Widya Fatmawaty et al.’s “The Politics of Gendered Subjects in Indonesian Post-Reform Films.”

Some essays in this issue are critical inquiries into processes of narrating the nation, which as Homi Bhabha astutely observes, is a process that “does not merely draw attention to its language and rhetoric…but also…attempts to alter the conceptual object itself” (p. 18). Kavitha Ganesan’s “Which tongue? The Imported Colonial Standard or Motherland Vernacular? Exploring “Death” as the Birth of Postcolonial Malaysia in Muthammal Palanisamy’s Funeral Chant” examines two versions of a funeral chant (written in English and Tamil) to elaborate on how death functions as a “metaphor to the birth of the nation” with the aim of demonstrating how a form of narrative in-betweeness that emerges out of the process of translation becomes a way within which a “diasporic Indian’s ‘becoming’ national identity is reconstructed.” Louie Jon A. Sánchez’s “The Teleserye Story: Three Periods of the Evolution of the Filipino TV Soap Opera” posits that the teleserye (Philippine TV soap opera) is a cultural form that is “reflective of the country’s life and times, its evolution interconnected with the ebb and flow of Philippine history.” Niccolo Rocamora Vitug’s “Pop Song Translations by Rolando Tinio as Script and Subversion of the Marcos Regime” examines the arguably ambivalent and complicated politics of a Philippine National Artist by paying attention to his song translations. Jie Zeng and Tian Yang’s “English in the Philippines from the Perspective of Linguistic Imperialism” examines the advantages and disadvantages of the continued dominance of the colonial language in the Philippines. Marikit Tara Alto Uychoco’s “Apostol’s Creed: Unveiling the Political Fictions of Colonialism and Nation in the Diasporic Novel” revisits the tension between postcolonial studies and postmodern theory and attempts to locate global critique in a contemporary metafictional novel.

There are also essays included in this collection that are concerned with how markets impact cultural production, reception, and consumption. Maria Gabriela P. Martin’s “Autopoetics, Market Competence, and the Transnational Author” participate in what has seemingly become its scholarly genre: the critique of postcolonial studies. Her essay examines how “program fiction” standardizes texts marketed as postcolonial, a process that speaks to the “auratic authority of postcolonial studies in the First world literary marketplace.” Io Chun Kong’s “Revisiting theatre of the minoritarian in neoliberalism: The Embodied Memories in Denise Uyehara’s and Dan Kwong’s Auto-performances” examines how minoritarian artists negotiate to work in a neoliberal environment. Kong examines auto-performances not merely as forms of individual aesthetic expression but as a politics of multiculturalism.

We hope that the works included in this special issue become an invaluable and generative resource to scholars working in the field. The final words of gratitude must then be offered to the readers of Rupkatha for their dependably gracious gift of attention. Thank you.  

 References

Bhabha, H. (1990). “Introduction: Narrating the Nation,” Nation and Narration. London and NY:

Routledge. 14-30.

Jeremy De Chavez is Assistant Professor of Literatures in English in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Macau, Macau SAR, China.

 

Experiencing and Writing East Asian (Post)modernity

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Yue Zhang 

Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Faculty of Arts and Humanities; Institute of Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Macau, Macau, China.

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 1, January-March, 2022, Pages 1–4. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n1.00

Published: February 5, 202

(This editorial is published under the Themed Issue Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Literary and Cultural Studies)
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Experiencing and Writing East Asian (Post)modernity

Experiencing and Writing East Asian (Post)modernity

The articles on China and Japan in this special issue deal with modernity and postmodernity as exemplified by modern Chinese writers, such as Yu Dafu (1896–1945) and Fei Ming (1901–1967); contemporary Chinese and Japanese writers, such as Can Xue and Sayaka Murata; and the connections between modern life and antiquarian book collections in Macau. These articles, hailing from the different perspectives provided by history, philosophy, and translation studies, collectively contribute to our understanding of the literary manifestation, reflection, and representation of modernity and postmodernity in twentieth-century China and Japan.

Yidan Wang’s article, “Translingual, Transcultural, and Transboundary Scenes: Aesthetic Ideas and Discursive Practice in Yu Dafu’s Landscape Writing,” examines a representative writer of “New Literature.” Previous research on Yu Dafu has largely focused on Yu’s fiction (Denton 1992: 107-123; Levan 2012: 48-87). Wang’s article switches the focus to Yu’s travel writing and investigates his cross-cultural understanding of nature and landscape, arguing, “This paper aims to further explore the mechanism with which Yu began these works, selected multiple discourses, cooperated with authorities and commercial powers, and built a new imaginary of nature in modern China.”[i] Yu’s travel writing, such as “A Sentimental Journey,” “The Trifles of a Fuzhou Journey,” and “Travel Notes in Malacca,” integrates Western culture, such as German Baedekers, with Chinese travel literature in a way that highlights lively personal experience and the narration of local lore. Yu’s fusion creates a unique way of depicting beautiful natural scenery that surpasses the pedagogical approach of traditional travel guides.[ii]

A contemporary of Yu Dafu, Fei Ming is the focus of Candy Fan Wang’s article, “The Poesis of Fei Ming: How Does the Classical Merge with the Modernist.” This article investigates the characteristics of modern Chinese writer Fei Ming’s literary writing, focusing on his free verse modern poetry, by placing it in the context of Chinese literature and philosophy and Western symbolism. This cross-cultural comparative approach lends itself to analyzing Fei Ming, who was influenced by both the traditional Chinese culture of Confucian classics, Daoist canons, and Buddhist sutras as well as Western and especially British literature and culture (Liu 2001: 30-71). Concerning how Fei Ming handled this commingled influence, Wang argues, “[Fei Ming’s] ontological approach enabled him to treat classical Chinese poetry without prejudice and diminished the rupture between tradition and modern with the proposal that modern poetry should take the content of poetry and language of prose.” Fei Ming’s new literary concepts and practice made him a representative writer of the Peking Style.

Tingting Chen and Minhui Xu’s article, “Foreignized Translation of Onomatopoeia in The Last Lover” moves us from modern Chinese literature to a contemporary Chinese writer, Can Xue. Chen and Xu categorize the strategies that Annelise Finegan Wasmoen adopted in translating onomatopoeia in Can Xue’s novel The Last Lover. As a way of providing background for Wasmoen’s foreignizing translation strategy, this article defines the term onomatopoeia and introduces different ways of translating onomatopoeia from other languages into English: “italicized transliteration with target onomatopoeia,” “italicized transliteration with explanation,” and “italicized transliteration with context.” For these three approaches, this article investigates the possible reasons for the translator’s choices, focusing on the background of the translator (in particular, her background in comparative literature) and Can Xue’s engagement throughout the entire translation process. This article reveals the collaborative dynamic between the author and the translator: “The uncompromising author and the unwavering translator successfully delivered a difficult but interesting reading for target readers to experience a dreamlike irrational surrealism with the help of the exotic sound effects.” The article supports its major arguments by examining the text itself, several dictionaries, and appropriate peer-reviewed scholarship. Translation plays an important role in promoting contemporary Chinese literature abroad.

With Chon Chit Tang’s article, “Introduction to Antiquarian Chinese Book Collections in Contemporary Macau,” the issue expands beyond mainland Chinese writers to investigate Macau, a cultural hub that has brought together Chinese and European civilization for centuries. Tang’s article outlines the overall socio-political environment of Macau and then investigates the trajectory of antiquarian Chinese books in the context of Macau culture: their categorizations, preservation history, and contemporary usage and significance. The previous scholarship usually focuses on rare books in mainland China, but this article investigates the overlooked topic of antiquarian Chinese book collections in Macau and their interactions with contemporary Macau society. Government bureaus, educational institutions, religious sites, and individual bibliophiles have collected and preserved these antiquarian books. Based on his many years’ academic experience with antiquarian Chinese books in Macau and mainland China, Tang states, “The study of Macau’s antiquarian books will require an in-depth examination of the antiquarian books available to the public, including their editions, collations, prefaces and postscripts, the situations in which they were circulated, and so on. We should not only focus on enhancing the protection of antiquarian books but also learn to utilize and develop these resources.” The development of digital humanities methods, the publication of studies of antiquarian books, and consistent support from the government of Macau will lead to further investigations of antiquarian Chinese book collections in Macau. These collections will become a window into Macau’s rich local culture, a local culture with international heritage.

From China and Macau, we turn to contemporary Japanese literature with Jaseel P and Rashmi Gaur’s article, “Precarity and Performativity in Post-Fordist Japanese Workplace: A Reading of Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman.” This article adopts Judith Butler’s theories of gender to interpret the Akutagawa Prize-winning novel. In specific, the authors examine “how anxiety-ridden precarious living conditions can also become a foundation for alternative performances troubling gender categories, thereby transcending the narrow social scripts rooted in exclusion and inequality.” This article engages existing scholarship on Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman, such as that of Ayako Kano, Machiko Osawa, Barbara E. Thornbury, and Bryony White. A symbol of postmodernity, the convenience store epitomizes the fast rhythm of capitalist Japanese society. Murata draws on her own work experience in a convenience store to narrate the story and push its development. In order to survive and integrate into this utilitarian society, the leading female character, Keiko Furukura, has to abandon her personality and learn to imitate other people to become part of a homogeneous community. The authors actively apply Butler’s theories to the novel’s plot, providing new insights into the gender and identity issues of Japanese women working in precarity.

During the first half of the twentieth century, Chinese writers actively studied Western technology and culture, and applied it to the task of revolutionizing, restoring, and renovating China. Yu Dafu and Fei Ming both blended Western culture, such as British and German literature, into traditional Chinese ways of depicting nature and articulating one’s voice. They both attempted to improve Chinese literature and make it more lively and interesting with modern narrative methods. Can Xue actively participates in translating her novel into English and experiments with modern translation techniques, which demonstrates the author’s engagement in shaping the reception of contemporary Chinese literature. Just as writers have experimented with different approaches, including those that drew on the past, for experiencing and writing modernity, Macau’s antiquarian books have been digitalized, preserved and integrated into the contemporary life of the city. In postmodern Japan, Murata’s Convenience Store Woman demonstrates how Keiko, a part-time worker in a precarious work situation, deals with anxieties and other people’s expectations. These articles investigate many aspects of Chinese and Japanese literature, spanning multiple forms and genres. The authors, who are from mainland China, Macau, India, and Japan, bring a multidisciplinary approach to bear on modernity and postmodernity in China and Japan. Their different backgrounds contribute to the diversity of this special issue.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Thanks go to my colleague and friend, Jeremy De Chavez, who provided me with this opportunity to co-edit this special issue. My speciality is premodern Chinese literary studies; so for this special issue on modern and contemporary literature, I sincerely appreciate the assistance of the reviewers, who helped me to select the articles through their reports and to improve their overall quality. This is sponsored by my MYRG project (MYRG2020-00018-FAH) at the University of Macau.

Notes

[i] The direct quotes in this introduction all draw from the articles in this special issue, sometimes with slight modification, so the footnotes of these quotes are omitted. The sources for all quotes not from this special issue will be identified through footnotes.

[ii] Yu Dafu is not alone integrating the narration of lore with literary genres. It is a practice that has a long tradition in China. For the treatment of lore and literature in premodern China, see Zhang 2022.

References

Denton, Kirk A.  (1992). “The Distant Shore: Nationalism in Yu Dafu’s ‘Sinking’.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, vol. 14.

Levan, Valerie. (2012). “The Meaning of Foreign Text in Yu Dafu’s ‘Sinking’ Collection.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, vol. 24, no. 1.

Liu, Haoming. (2001). “Fei Ming’s Poetics of Representation: Dream, Fantasy, Illusion, and ?layavijñ?na.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, vol. 13, no. 2.

Zhang, Yue. 2022. Lore and Verse: Poems on History in Early Medieval China. State University of New York Press.

Yue Zhang is Associate Professor of Chinese Literature and Graduate Programme Coordinator at the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Macau, Macau, China.

The Ideological Limits of Digital Poetics

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Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay

Professor and Research Fellow, University of Guanajuato, Mexico. Email: chiefeditor@rupkatha.com

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

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.01

 Abstract

Digital poetics has emerged as a genre following the development of machine augmented literatures. An algorithm could generate transient but successful emotive appraisals that characterize human poetry. Production of cybertext is enabled by the presence of advanced Anglophone Synset compilations, text summarization and development-constrained specifics of the corpora. Digital poetics in regional non-Anglophone languages thus remain marginalized owing to language dependency across the world’s media divide. Whereas such hierarchies are inevitable in a technologically divided world the recognition of these problems and logical solutions may help foment innovation, entrepreneurship and affirmative opportunities for underdeveloped economies.

Keywords: Digital Poetics, Cybertext, Hypertext,  Indowordnet

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Indian English is also Creole: Incorporating Regional Bias in Research Pedagogy

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Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay

Professor, Department of Art and Enterprise, University of Guanajuato, Campus Irapuato-Salamanca, Mexico., Mexico. Email: chiefeditor@rupkatha.com

 Volume 13, Number 3, 2021 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n3.16

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Research pedagogy in India should readjust itself to accommodate claims of regional autonomy in arts and letters. Different ways of reconstructing a pedagogy of research are recommended. Reflexive Humanism ensures adequate assessment and evaluation of cultural, literary, and aesthetic achievements of diverse populations. The Indian English corpus is redefined as a creolized Indian language with lexical and semantic factors borrowed from English. The consciousness of pro-national subjectivism is also considered an essential constituent of Indian English literature. Lines of research are suggested for aspiring scholars in the Indian academy. The author emphasizes a dynamic and sensitive adaptation of research methodology which respects and reintegrates itself with the evolution of globally aware, contemporary society in India.

 Keywords: Anglophone, Creolization, Indian English, Research Pedagogy

 

Editorial Introduction

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Tariq Khan1 & Priyanka Tripathi2

1Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysuru. ORCID: 0000-0003-2763-9675. Email: tariq.khan@gov.in

2Indian Institute of Technology Patna. ORCID: 0000-0002-9522-3391. Email: priyankatripathi@iitp.ac.in

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.12

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Language and translation are phenomena in which the splendours of human intellect abound and become easily perceptible. Perhaps, that is why language and translation are concomitants even though the symbiotic relationship between the two remains occasionally recognized and often ignored. Both language and translation have been playing an instrumental role in creating and carrying forward the access and advances of knowledge, culture, literature, science and technology. Therefore, it is natural that academic writings concerning the issues of language and translation manifest in variegated forms and gets utilized as a means of and pretext for serving different purposes by writers and translators. This issue of the journal encapsulating eight papers may serve as an example to demonstrate the diverse ways in which scholarly pursuits have engaged language and translation and the relationship of mutualism between the two. Here is a bird’s eye view:

An instance of translation necessitates not only a successful transfer of meaning from one language to another but also that of the style of it. Therefore, the instantiations of translation are examples of comparative stylistics. Panchanan Mohanty in his paper liberates translation from the rigmarole of transcreation, adaptation, literal translation etc. and advocates it to be a free text by citing various examples. According to him, the differences that lie between the free and the literal trends in India are primarily due to the oral and the literate traditions. The paper by Sushant Kumar Mishra illustrates the Indian tradition of translation and recreation of metanarrative texts and in doing so he discusses how factors such as ideology and style influence the actions and outcome of the translation. Shilpi Gupta’s paper is an outcome of a translation project. This paper contextualizes the translation of Anzaldua’s book Borderlands in Indian languages. The salient aspect of this paper is that it foregrounds the translation of a work that represents not only mixed language but also diverse perspectives. This paper offers insights about translation challenges arising due to cultural peculiarities and gaps.

Language testing and evaluation are issues that merit attention on par with language teaching and learning. In recent years, automated assessments have become very popular. Shanti Murugan and Balasundram S. R. argue that such popular advances may be easy and economical; however, their application needs to improve considerably. In this paper, the authors demonstrate how affix-based distractor generators can be more reliable especially for generating multiple-choice questions (MCQs) and cloze tests. Automated assessments have also become part of ELT classrooms where a shift towards a student-centric model has been observed. Amal Tom and Nagendra Kumar’s paper discusses the integration of technology in ELT, analyses different perspectives and approaches of individual teachers in developing and evaluating language skills and argues further on how exploring digital avenues have been complementary to traditional classroom teaching especially in the context of effects of the recent pandemic. The paper by Amritha Koiloth Ramat and Shashikantha Koudur examines the role of dictionaries in the modernization of a language. Their paper focuses on Hermann Gundert’s Malayalam-English bilingual dictionary in the context of modernization of Malayalam. Further, this paper discusses the emergence of a new Malayalam that is relatively free of Sanskrit.

The cultural aspects that remain ingrained in translation have frequently occurred in the discussions and the nuanced reading of these translations has successfully stimulated interesting debates too. The paper by Azhar Uddin Sahaji offers a biography of the word ‘noor’ and presents the changes it has undergone while transcending from Classical Arabic to modern languages such as Punjabi and Hindi. Azhar argues that in the process of translation and adaptation the word ‘noor’ has not undergone any large-scale semantic change. The value attached to this word remains unaffected while the change has mostly occurred at the level of transliteration. Febin Vijay and Priyanka Tripathi’s paper explores literature as one the most challenging genres to translate. Exploring the genre of crime/detective fiction through Abir Mukherjee’s A Rising Man enriched with rhetorical devices, puns, and idiomatic expressions the paper clearly indicates how literary genres have evolved significantly over the decades and differs depending on the theoretical framework. The discourse concerning language and translation has kept growing and adding diversity to itself thereby modifying the parameters of the representation. The advancements in various other domains of human intellect have also benefitted from this diversity and contributed to it as well. This issue of the journal stands testimony to the signifying practice of translation. It interrogates our comprehension of reading and writing and also brings to the forefront the location of textual authority along with the possibilities and challenges of translation.

Hope the readers will have a riveting experience!

Editorial Introduction

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 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s0n1

The Rupkatha International Open Conference 2020 is the first international conference that was organized by the Rupkatha journal initiative. It is the first open-access conference organized by  a Scopus indexed journal in the Humanities in India, and indicates a logical  trajectory to Rupkatha’s growing outreach in India and South Asia and indeed all over the world. The RIOC was also organized as a collaborative event with academic support of  Dr. Priyanka Tripathy of IIT, Patna and Dr. Swayam Prabha Satpathy of the Sikhsha and Anusandhan University, Bhubaneswar. We should acknowledge that the collaborative help of the IIT Patna and Sikhsha and Anusandhan have contributed to give a new dimension to the event. The most significant achievement of the Rupkatha initiative has been the participation of hundreds, if not thousands of academicians, academic aspirants and doctoral or graduate and postgraduate level students from worldwide each one of them bringing in their fresh perspectives into the event, responding to the Call for Papers by writing, reflecting and involving a transition across interdisciplinary textuality of the arts, cultures, humanities issues, politics and the environment nto  the debate which nuanced and leveraged both cotinuig and fresh ideas in the academy today. The faculty from IIT Patna and Sikhsha o Anusandhan, along with lesser involvement of faculty from various institutions and Universities all over the world, contributed to the humongous task of the management of responses to the Call for Papers and then reviewing and selecting every possible presentation after critical inquiry and observations throught that are required aspects of any good blind peer review system.

The editors of Rupkatha and the reviewers on the Rupkatha board made it possible to complete the peer review process of close to two thousand extended paper proposals within an incredibly short period of time. The entire process was of course completed in the context of a rigorous online system that was also partially mandated by the restrictions imposed onour movements and interactivity that resulted from the penetration of the novel Corona virus and the worldwide pandemia that interrupted movement, forced people to work from their individual niches, cope with the stress of different and often-extraordinary environments of work and life. Yet, under the funding resources of Rupkatha, which is a essentially a free and open access provider, the collective social effort formed a perfect example of how the large community of academicians, students, social scientists and authors came together to synchronize efforts for hosting the three day international webinar. The fees collected for defraying expenses of platform charges and open-access web hosting of the conference has created the great financial opportunity which could be exploited to conduct the proceedings of the conference in a smooth and extremely professional manner and without any slightest glitch within the entire three day period of transmission involving participation and reception of the high tech Zoom powered webinar that went streaming from the geodesic of the Eastern part of India out across the whole world with its different time-zones. The Rupkatha webinar, hosted with the distributed entanglement of an extraordinarily large community of scholars in different geodesics afforded a most remarkable experience in communication across space and time. The process suggests in what future directions satellite mediated communication is likely to affect a discussion on a global or interterrestrial space and the possibilities already inherent within that system, the breaking of frontiers of time, the collusion of space, the ability to converge on expedient foci by people who are interested in similar issues in different affordances.

The Proceedings have been published on the 17th of October 2020 and launched again on a transnational scale with an event that befittingly seeks to mark the transition of Rupkatha as a conference portal, just as much as a online open-access journal. After a decade long experience of peer-reviewed publication Rupkatha has now successfully implemented rapid issue based conference proceedings publication, maintaining its mission of independent reviews and an elevated quality of academic research. The deliberations of speakers in the inaugural event has demonstrated the possibility of hosting the most important intellectual thinkers in the academy; their willingness to join the Rupkatha movement impels that specific community to sensitise itself around a context like that of Covid. There is no doubt in our minds that the quarantine imposed by Covid does not stand as an intermission. Abdul JanMohamed’s path-breaking inaugural speech has sensitised the post-Covid academia with the death threat that is always unconsciously imposed over an underpriviledged minority in every part of the world. The walls of segregation that separate individuals from individuals needed to be broken down, first intellectually and then physically. The wall contitutes the major persuasive symbolism of  inequity in the contemporary world. The fearlessness and vision of the human being contra death, disease, slavery and war, in a world which is cowered by death remains the abiding message of the RIOC 2020.  An additional feature of this great conference was the inclusion of the social sciences within the spectrum of the conference. Social science perspectives on the social dimensions of the contemporary world has provided this bridge for the humanities in the Rupkatha conference. Few events have actually succeeded in associating social science and language analysis to the humanistic objectives that are at the core of literary and cultural studies. The only way in which the humanist ethics continues to influence the academy is to show, somewhat in the sense of the early Cartesians of the sixteenth century, that the human interest defines any kind of investigation into the psyche and its evolving character in the collective consciousness that is affecting us. I wish to thank each and all for the collaborative effort which yielded the best fruits of the RIOC 2020 and the publications of the proceedings. The success of the effort shall be carried over to future events of Rupkatha.I end with a perorative call for any similar future discourse and Rupkatha’s promise to organize people around these interests.

Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay & Tarun Tapas Mukherjee

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