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Book Review: Tomb of Sand (Ret Samadhi)

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Geetanjali Shree, Trans. Daisy Rockwell, Tomb of Sand, Penguin India, 2022, p.738, INR 700. ISBN: 9780143448471

Reviewed by 
Dr Sharmila Narayana
Professor, Christ (Deemed to be University), Bangalore. Email: sharmila.narayana@christuniversity.in

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

First published: October 14, 2022 | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This review is published under Volume 14, Number 3, 2022)
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International Booker prize winner for 2022, Geethanjali Shree’s novel, Ret Samadhi translated as Tomb of Sand by Daisy Rockwell, is about borders – between genders, religions and nations. The story, set in Northern India, is about the eighty-year-old protagonist, Ma, who recovers from deep depression after her husband’s death and much to the consternation of her children, expresses the desire to travel to Pakistan – to her roots and thus reclaims her identity as Chandraprabha Devi. Ma’s travel is also a journey into her own self, opening doors and scaling walls, hitherto unknown.

The book is divided into three sections, indicating three phases of Ma’s life – the first section is titled ‘Ma’s back,’ and it focuses on her life after her husband’s death and her daily routine before that. The readers are also subtly made aware of the patriarchal structures in place in this house. The extensive use of metaphors like walls, doors and borders clearly indicates the confined life of women.  Ma has spent all her life taking care of the family that she now lays, “back to the world, as though dead” (Shree, 2022,p.39). This section concludes with Ma deciding to shift to Beti’s house for a while, moving away from Bade (eldest son), with whom she had been residing all along.

The second section titled ‘Sunlight’ begins with Ma entering Beti’s house. The one sentence in the beginning, “this is the door that opens to reveal a world created by Beti alone” says it all. The darkness, doors and walls in Bade’s house give way to light and colours. “The sunlight arrived each morning, kissing Ma’s face…and the two of them would sit and gaze affectionately at each other” (Shree, 2022,p.248). The sounds of peace and the quiet chirping of birds prevail. Ma sips her morning tea ‘as though drinking in a bird’s song’ (Shree, 2022,p.267). Ma and Beti enjoy each other’s company and bond well. Rosie Bua, the transgender, brings in a ‘fresh gust of wind’, (Shree, 2022,p.310) with her regular visits. As the section concludes,  Ma takes the strong decision to travel to Pakistan.

Section three titled ‘Back to the front’, commences with Ma and Beti reaching the Wagah border. The various partition narratives mentioned in this section, take the readers through the trauma of partition and Ma’s past is slowly unveiled. Ma relives her childhood and the sorrow of separation from loved ones. She rediscovers herself as Ali Anwar’s Chanda. The story concludes with Beti ‘leaping out of the window, filled with longing’ (Shree, 2022,p.732).

Tomb of Sand easily falls into the genre of partition literature and revolves around the life of Ma, who suddenly becomes conscious of her needs and desires and decides to live on her own terms. The novel begins by talking about borders… “ this particular tale has a border and women who come and go as they please” (Shree, 2022, p.11). The first section of the book is replete with strong metaphors like walls, doors and windows, clearly indicating the borders between men and women.  Ma, Bahu and Beti – the characters in the novel could be the mother, daughter-in-law and daughter of any Indian household, leading a mundane existence, confined within the walls and doors of a house, ‘invisible even in moments of stillness’ (Shree, 2022, p.37).

The novel traces the transformation of Ma, who was just a tomb of sand, toiling for the family till eighty, deciding to fly away like the wishing tree, ‘gliding into her own arteries and aerosols’ (Shree, 2022,p.56). In fact, travelling with Ma to Pakistan, seeing her zeal, Beti wonders, “When did I become me, and am I me, or have I become Ma?” (Shree, 2022,p.465). Beti is in awe when she gets to see a Ma, who is totally different from the person that she used to be at home, where “everyone’s breath flowed through her” (Shree, 2022,p.19). The journey to Pakistan is also a time for introspection for Beti when she actually gets to know Ma and the realization dawns on her as to how progressive her mother is.

Ma’s bonding with the transgender Rosie, is viewed suspiciously by her own ‘progressive’ children, revealing middle-class hypocrisies.  As the narration meanders through the traumatic events of partition to the present, the author also sarcastically touches upon all major socio-political issues in India, till date –  religious intolerance, communal riots, episodes of lynching by the cow vigilantes, Buddhism, political manipulations, problems of minorities and strong engagement with environmental issues, arising out of massive urbanisation.

Shree has crafted a story richly woven with images, symbols and metaphors that speak volumes, unspoken. The form and structure of the novel are quite different. The story is narrated from multiple perspectives, with strokes of magical realism splashed here and there.  Some chapters are just a few sentences, while two pages of another chapter are just one sentence. The casual way of narration makes the story highly relatable to Indian readers. The story does not progress in a linear manner and is a beautiful compilation of scattered thoughts and some loud thinking. The chapters are strewn with images from nature – earth,  birds, flowers and animals- that at times the reader just feels the sheer magic of poetry. The powerful animal imagery reminds one of Ted Hughes’ poems. Through subtle sarcasm, Shree depicts the intensity of discrimination practised in Ma’s house, as in “shouting is a tradition, an ancient Indian custom upheld by eldest sons” (Shree, 2022,p.45).

Ma’s name is only revealed towards the end of the novel, when she reclaims her identity, as Anwar Ali’s Chanda. Characters are described in detail so that one can almost feel their presence around. The youngest son’s inability to laugh and the way Shree engages in this description indicates how strict adherence to customs and traditions could impact men too. In another chapter, she says, “the state of families is rather like that of the city of Delhi” (Shree, 2022,p.187) and goes into a detailed comparison of the two. The style of narration lures the readers to stay hooked to the book, unravelling the twists and turns, as the journey to Pakistan progresses.

Daisy Rockwell’s translation needs special mention in this context. She has successfully captured the ethos of Ma’s home, without compromising on its flavour. Be it the broken sentences frequently used, or the unstructured flow of words, Rockwell has captured the music and poetry of Shree’s language. For a book that abounds with images and metaphors, layered with subtle sarcasm, the translation would have been a daunting task. However, Rockwell has aesthetically managed the recreation of the ‘English dhwani’ (Translator’s note, 2022,p.735) of the original Hindi version.

Tomb of Sand is not a tragic story about partition, rather, it is an unforgettable tale of the triumph of humanity, inclusivity and plurality. This is what makes it different from other partition pieces of literature of our time. The novel, through the strong character of Ma demonstrates “anything worth doing transcends borders” (Shree, 2022,p.12).

Book Review: Transient by Tapati Gupta

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Bolpur: Birutjatio Sahitya Sammiloni, 2021. 150 pp. Rs. 375. ISBN: 978-81-953067-3-2

Reviewed by
Somdatta Mandal
Former Professor of English, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. Email: somdattam@gmail.com

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022, Pages 1-3.  https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.27

First published: June 27, 2022 | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This review is published under Volume 14, Number 2, 2022)
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For a literary, art critic, as well as a painter who has specialized in drama criticism, Tapati Gupta dons many hats. Her latest contribution is a wonderfully rich collection of poems that she had been writing over time across decades, and after being confined at home for a long period of time, especially during the lock-down months, they have at last seen the light of day. These poems, according to the Foreword written by the renowned poet Bashabi Fraser, “have moved from the private notebook to the public sphere” and have provided her readers with different emotions that according to Gupta’s own words played “hide and seek between the inside and the outside that rattled our lives all through the lockdown months.” Though including many pre-pandemic poems as well, the poems in this collection overall provides release “from micro-time in micro space” and along with several paintings, “enabled her to remain positive throughout those dark days” (iv).

There is no particular order in which Gupta presents her poems to the readers. They evoke different emotions ranging from anger and anguish to love and peace. But as readers, we find several categories under which they can be broadly classified. The first and foremost group is on familial relationships. In ‘Ma’, she evokes her mother by remembering the all-encompassing affinity with her as a true friend – “You give me company still wherever I am.” Similar feelings come out for her father where she longs for him in his absence, remembering “a long-cherished bondage” (‘To My Father’). In another poem she specifically remembers the details of her daughter’s birth in Ashar, June 16, 1980 and in ‘Pain,’ after remembering different kinds of pain, she admits, “one pain that makes me endure is the pain of missing you in my arms, my daughter.”

As an English teacher specializing in drama, it is expected that some of her poems will discuss or mention this genre. Referring to the story of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra in a long poem titled, ‘Agamemnon,’ she begins by addressing him directly, “When last in Greece I met you Agamemnon/ looking at the ruins of your own estate,” and then goes on to state” “The curse over your dynasty Agamemnon/ has done a good deed.” Explaining the reason for it she succinctly adds —

            “We prefer drama and art and poetry

            and think it is politically and intellectually correct

            to think like this.

            You made great art to happen,

            so better to live and do and die as you did

            and still be Agamemnon.”

There are several poems which Gupta wrote while touring different places of Europe and the Middle East. The titles of these poems are self-explanatory – ‘Istanbul Memories,’ ‘Ultramarine Istanbul’ (“Why did you squeeze that tube of ultramarine/onto that line of land?”), ‘Dolphins in the Bosphorous,’ ‘Rider on the Waves,’ ‘The Ottoman Hamam,’ where “the whiteness struck with its moon-haze.” In Europe she is moved by ‘Da Vinci by the Loire,’ ‘Piraeus in the Twilight,’ ‘Eiffel Tower,’ ‘Notre Dame,’ ‘Paris at Night,’ she remembers Vienna and the Danube, the ‘Night Train to Barcelona,’ and in ‘Tagore in Mykonos’ she narrates the story of an old woman and Greek men who are enamoured by the poet’s music though they could not understand the song’s meanings. Along with touring different places, she also writes about the birds, animals and nature she witnessed there. Thus, we get a long poem on the seagull obviously inspired by Jonathan Livingstone Seagull by Richard Bach and says, “You are ready to take off/with your wings coloured by golden dreams” (‘The Young Seagull’) and another one where she praises the lifestyle of the condor which she saw while driving down from the skiing resort in Valle Nevado in Chile (‘Condor in the Andes’). She even invites the reader, “Come I will take you into the desert.” Willunga, Adelaide in Australia also finds a place in the anthology. Closer home she even records her experiences after visiting the crematorium at Tarapith.

Personal emotions also play a significant role in many of Gupta’s poems. In ‘Twenty Years From Now,’ she feels “the world may be a little better because/ I was important in the life of a student.” In ‘The Identity Card,’ she states, “Today I lost my identity/and found my many selves” and then she goes to a dream world. Later she gets out of it and says, “When morning dawned I was back again/in the old worn world of cold rationality/ My lost identity lay there beside my first cup of tea.” In another interesting poem called ‘Elusive,’ she declares –“Elusive poetry, do not elude me” and then states, “Poetry I have no time for you/but do not go away/ wait till I finish watching the grand show.” In ‘Birthday Thoughts,’ she exclaims, “Thank you! My friends for making the day so different.” She longs for all the lost things from her life, “When will be the day that will/bring back all the lost times” (‘Lost’).

Towards the end of her collection comes a series of poems based on experiences of being cloistered at home during the pandemic situation. These poems are very moving and express real-life situations as poetically as possible. A couple of poems had been inspired by the death of the veteran actor Soumitra Chatterjee. In ‘The Other Room’ she mentions people going in but not coming out at all. The poem on the hundreds of miles that the migrant workers had to walk to reach home after the lock-down was declared, is extremely moving, especially as it is accompanied by a pencil sketch (‘The Walk.’) In ‘Bodies Everywhere,’ we read about harsh reality where “instead of melodies and flowers/he finds blood stench everywhere.” In the long poem entitled ‘Monologue 2020’ the poet begins with a question, “Who am I?/Just a unit in time”. Her soul searching goes on throughout the poem and she blames mankind for neglecting nature too much and “covidising the world” and ends with these lines – “May you re-achieve the zenith of perfection/ but do not forget me, the dauntless 2020 /build me a memorial with grass flowers and thorns.” In the last poem in this collection, the poet watches three birds circling and playing with each other outside and then writes, “From my window I watch/ till they enter and peck me urging me /to make the distant near/ nearer and nearer till I become one /with those who want to remember me” (“Epilogue”).

Dedicated to her husband Swapan Gupta, who was always the first listener of her poetic musings, the multifarious nature of subjects and styles of the poems makes this book interesting to read. The world is brought alive through the different kinds of poems which are often stylistically quite different from one another. The aesthetically pleasing cover image titled “Inspiration” done in oil on canvas and along with several other poems that are accompanied by illustrations from her own repertoire of paintings, the book is a must read for everyone as the poems evoke the ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ as well as the Wordsworthian dictum of ‘emotions recollected in tranquility.’ Fraser rightly compares Gupta’s poems with Wordsworth Lucy poems, content to hide behind a mossy stone undiscovered but brimming with truth, life and colour. After this first book of poems the reader will expectantly wait for the next volume.

Somdatta Mandal, critic and translator, is Former Professor of English, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan.

Book Review: The Inheritance of Words: Writing from Arunachal Pradesh by Mamang Dai (ed.)

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Publishers: Zubaan. Date of Publication: 2021. Language: English. Number of pages: 186. Price: Rs 495/- $20. ISBN No. 978 81 94760 53 5

Reviewed by
Preetinicha Barman
Women’s College (NEHU), Shillong, India. Email: preetinichabarman@gmail.com

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022. Pages 1-7. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne45

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

(This review is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
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Mamang Dai, one of the most eminent literary voices from Northeast India, compiles a unique collection of writings and creative expressions exclusively by women authors and artists from Arunachal Pradesh. The collection, aptly titled Inheritance of Words, includes short fiction, poetry, essays, artworks, and graphic narratives by women belonging to various ethnic communities of Arunachal Pradesh which is home to many indigenous tribes like Adi, Apataini, Galo, Nyishi, Monpa, Mishmi, Aka and so on. Some of the authors included are well-known and a number of them are quite young, still struggling with the trepidation to bring out their first volume. The rich and diverse land of Arunachal is also a land of many indigenous languages which are primarily oral but vibrant and at the same time, some of them stare at the steady shrinking and receding of their languages. As Yater Nyokir points out in an essay of the book, there are 25 tribes and 90 languages spoken in Arunachal. Nyokir also points out that despite such plurality, there is one ‘common feature’, that is they are ‘great storytellers’ (p.158). The orality of the indigenous language has provided deeper and intense linkages with their folkways and native mores and, in a very significant way, it is the ethereal nuances of sounds of their words, and not necessarily the visuals of the graphemes as in the case of the written languages, are what the communities have inherited as part of their cultural heirloom; hence this is an ‘inheritance of words’. In the absence of a written script, the literary writing from Arunachal, in its early years, used to be primarily in Assamese, which used to be the lingua franca following long geo-historical proximities between Assam and the northern valleys, the territory which the colonial administrators described as the North East Frontier Agency (NEFA) and later became Arunachal Pradesh. Two of the famous writers emerged from Arunachal telling the tales of their land and people are Lummer Dai and Yeshe Dorjee Thongshi who used to write in Assamese and have won several prestigious literary awards and honours. Later, this frontier state produced some of the most powerful authors who have chosen English as the preferred language of their literary expressions. Sahitya Akademi award-winning author Mamang Dai is the most prominent among them. Hindi is relatively a recent phenomenon in the state when the Indian government initiated the move to spread the language in a frontier state of the country apparently to bring the region closer to the mainland. A number of authors have come up now who write in this newly introduced language.   In her introduction, Mamang Dai writes, “This is a story of story, one of many to explain the absence of a script among the Arunachal tribes” (p. 1). She describes the book as the “first of its kind because it brings together the diverse voices of Arunachali women writing in English and Hindi” (p.2). Though the authors belong to various tribal categories, with indigenous languages of their own, their writing in English and Hindi, two of the acquired languages, quite efficiently represent the native cultural realities.

The diversity of their ethnic identities has not necessarily made the writings effectively distant from each other, rather there are resonances of similarities in their writings and expressions. The poems included are by poets belonging to various tribal identities, yet they reflect similar emotive nuances and intensity. There are celebrations and disquiets of womanhood and at the same time, the poems also go beyond the limits of gender boundaries to peek into the psychic realms of men as well. The first poem of the volume, “A Man I Know” by Samy Moyong  speaks of a man’s efforts to conceal his heart amidst sorrows:

He puts on a mask when asked of his day

And talks of everything but himself

He calls himself evil but acts like a human

Confusing himself and all others. (p. 12)

Her next poem, “I Am”, is a bold assertion of a woman against turmoil and brutal repression that she resists with powerful idioms:

Before you dismiss me as a mere being

Someone you could trample crush and kill

I just want you to know

That I was a candle in the woods

Burning bright in an aura of my own.  (p. 13)

Moyong asserts to turn her body into a site of amorous freedom as well as into a badge of preservation, “When all you can think of is about the pleasure/ Of that extended flesh hanging between your thighs/ I wish the vagina could bite” (p. 15)

While speaking about the body, Toril Moi writes, “The body is at once what we are and the medium through which we are able to have a world” (p.5). Moi refers to Simone de Beauvoir where she rejects the Cartesian ‘body/ mind split’ (p. 4). Tolum Chumchum positions herself beyond this range of Cartesian solipsism and speaks of her body to unravel it as a site of her unabashed self by enunciating the affinities between her feminity and her biological body. Therefore, in her poem, “The Darkest 5 days”, she candidly confides in one of the intimate pains that she suffers every month following menstruation. Both the physical discomfort and the social taboos make those five ‘5 days’ more poignant and acute:

There you show up again redhead huh?

Blossoming on my sheets

Like a barrel of red wine

Between my leg

……………………..

My stomach bloats

My head throbs

My limbs ache

The cry of my body

Like a cooking show going, on my belly   (p. 89)

 Doirangsi Kri’s “Little Life” presents the joy of childbirth which is universal and personal at the same time, uniquely experienced only by a woman. Compared to this “Offspring” written by Ayinam Ering is rather a critique of the social expectation of at least one male child. There are short poems like Kolpi Dai’s “Which Part of Me” that presents two contradictory images of universal womanhood — one introvert and the other extrovert. Long poems like Ngurang Reena’s “My Ane’s Tribal Love Affair” portrays the ‘first wife’ of a patriarch, who is pushed to the margins by her society. The poetic persona asks her ‘Ane’ (mother) after the death of her father to start thinking about herself and finding a partner to grow old together with, instead of cursing her ‘God Donyi Polo’ (p. 43).

The poems of Rebom Belo, Ponung Ering Angu, Nomi Maga Gumro, Omili Borang, Tunung Tabing are deeply personal, and reflective of the psychic state against specific junctures of moments haunted by the nostalgia for home, its ‘hearth’, customs and rituals, landscape and seasons. Such metaphors also recur in the poems of Jamuna Bini (translated from Hindi), Gyati T.M. Ampi, Mishimbu Miri and Chasoom Bosai. As in Hélèn Cixous’ Medusa (“The Laugh of Medusa”), from whose head snakes dangle symbolizing the different forms of the female self, the feminine images deflect off these scripted texts. They are vivid, self-assured, and yet bogged down by social codes.

Ayinam Ering’s “I Am a Tree” is perhaps one of the most powerful eco-feminist poems ever written, the poem gains further significance and power since it is written by one whose authentic intimacy with nature is more immediate and deeper. She writes:

I am a tree

I’m strong. I’m steady.

So what if autumn turns my leaves yellow?

So what if the assailant wind strips all my branches bare?

I’m still alive from inside,

and I possess the strength

to spread greenery again.  (p.43)

The prose pieces of this volume vary from tales to memoirs to critical essays. The essays, “Indigenous Tribal Languages of North East India: Strategies for Revitalization” by Toku Anu and “Linguistic Transitions” by Yaniam Chukhu express the concern at the growing disappearance of the indigenous languages of Arunachal Pradesh. Toku Anu expresses a premonition that the Bugu and Sherdukpen languages with just about 3000 speakers left might as well disappear soon with the last generation of speakers still holding on to it. Yaniam Chuku, a native Nyishi speaker, finds himself in an ironic situation when even to complete a Nyishi sentence she has to depend on English or Hindi as a ‘desperate crutch’ (p. 120). She also points out how the speakers of Hrusso Aka language are fast dwindling.  A similar view is expressed in the story “The Spectre Dentist” by Millo Ankha where the protagonist ponders over the disharmony between the spatial and linguistic identity of an Arunachali. Ironically, this is one crucial issue that the book encounters as it itself is a compilation of writings in English and Hindi translated into English, though composed by the native Arunachalis having distinctive tribal languages of their own. Referring to Ng?g? wa Thing’o’s concept of ‘orature’, Toku Anu has brought in a number of references to certain other linguists who insist on the importance of oral literature. Like Ng?g? wa Thing’o, they also feel that the imposition of non-native languages is hegemonic and detrimental to the native languages. Yaniam Chukhu laments, “Unlike Nagamese, an increasing number of families in Arunachal are resorting to this Arunachali Hindi over their mother tongue, even in private spaces. Amongst the young generation it has taken over as the preferred language over one’s indigenous tongue even within the same community” (p. 125). However, Anu looks forward to the prospects of the newly developed Wancho script and hopes that the emergence of such new scripts would suit the languages and literature of different tribes of Arunachal. In a similar optimistic tone Yater Nyokir in her “Bards from Dawn-lit Mountains” gives an account of literature produced by the Arunachalis and underlines the importance of literature written by the Arunachali author  n Assamese, English and now in Hindi which is, as she points out, is just a 20th-century phenomenon with a handful of writers. But they have been able to draw great attention and recognition through awards and honours which speak of their ‘versatility’ (p. 162).

Orature has a strong presence in the narrative imagination of Arunachal Pradesh. Mishimbu Miri’s memoir “Revelations from Idu Mishmi Hymns” narrates ancient lore of the Idu Mishmis that the author learnt from her father who was a shaman himself; so is in Tongam Rina’s “The Interpreter of Dreams” which records the reminiscences of her grandmother who could interpret dreams. When Leki Thungon’s “Doused Flames” refers to the sleepwalkers called Zekumus, Ing Perme’s “A Ballad of the Adi Tribe” refers to the dirges and the world of the spirits. The closing text of the book, an interview (“The Summit”) conducted by Mamang Dai with Tine Mena, the first woman from Arunachal Pradesh to have climbed Mount Everest, reflects the same kind of beliefs on the spirit world from the point of view of a mountaineer.

Significantly, the tales and the memoirs tend to present themes quite similar to those of the poems. “Night and I” presents very personal reflections of the author Nellie N. Manpoong when the question of feminism emerges through the stories of Ronnie Nido’s “The Tina Ceiling” and Ponung Ering Angu’s “Among the Voices in the Dark”. While the need for a female space in the socio-political sphere is highlighted in “The Tina Ceiling”; the image of the oppressed womanhood crushed by the age-old patriarchal customs is poignantly depicted in “Among the Voices in the Dark”. “The Spirit of the Forest” by Subi Taba tells the tale of how nature, in the form of thunder, avenges the perpetrators who had set the forest on fire in order to plunder the resources. This reminds one of similar wildfire caused by men that spread in the Amazon forests which generated huge concern over environmental sustainability throughout the world.

The artworks and the photographs featured in the book are an exquisite juxtaposition of art and written texts reminding one of the ancient Chinese poetry-paintings, the Medieval Persian miniatures, Japanese Haiga-Haiku combinations, as well as the arts of the Pre-Raphaelites, especially the intricate pencil works of Bahnu Tatak. Bhanu Tatak’s art is a celebration of details that reflect the extraordinary mastery of the artist to confidently freak out with ink. “Home is This and Much More” is Stuti Mamen Lowang’s collage of sketches that evocatively captures the oscillation between the warmth of hearths and the hopes for the familiar homes interspersed with the uncanny visitations of terror and violence. After a brief introduction to her sketches, “Tradition: An Illusion of Continuance”, Rinchin Choden presents her artworks accompanied by commentaries on the intrusive challenges of modernity to the settled landscape of tradition.

The silver lining in the dark cloud of modernity. The mother, the home and the solace where we first learn about tradition. We need to respect her and learn from her about the outside world. Her warm embrace teaches us not to falter in the face of adversity. (Rinchin Choden, p. 27)

The photo essay of Karry Padu under the title, “I Am Property” critiques the concept of the patriarchal imperatives imposed on a woman to be a living mannequin of exotica to deck herself up with the material markers of tradition. Significantly, in the images where the woman figure is seen embellished with traditional costume and ornaments, her face is conspicuously outside the frame of the composition underlining the process of reducing a woman into an impersonal display unit where her individual self is redundant.  This gets more evident from one of the accompanying verses that run as “When I was young, I had no idea how important it was to be a tribal woman…/ I am its daughter, this land owns me. / I am its property” (p.109).

Figure 1: The Wrap

The book is unique in its structural planning which is a celebration of womanhood in totality as it is a collection of writings and art by women, edited by a woman, translators are women, and published by a publication house dedicated to providing the much-needed platform to the women who want their voices to be heard. The captivating editorial introduction by Mamang Dai is followed by the assorted texts, images, and notes on contributors and a glossary as the postscripts. The varied genres assume individual spaces but they reflect a thematic coherence letting the readers an assured transition from one genre to another exploring the plurality of the land flowing through the works of the women of Arunachal.  Despite being by only women, the collection never devolves into tedious overlapping of perspectives. However, one limitation of the book might be the reticence in the ‘Notes on the Contributors’ section to provide the ethnic affiliations of the individual authors, which might well have been deliberate obfuscation on the part of the editor, nevertheless, one is sure that many might have this anthropological curiosity to know little more about the authors though, in a number of texts, the specific tribal identity of the writers is rater explicitly visible. However, Ponung Ering Angu’s “Dying Lights” provides a metaphoric lead to summarise the collective longing of the poets who, against the certainty of changes aspire to nurture their belongings in the assured horizons of the past:

            As the dawn breaks over and the darkness dies

            Things are easy but nothing ever lasts

            Oh the love, the strength and our enduring will

            Are struck somewhere in the walls of a past.  (p. 33)      

A book from Northeast featuring poems, essays, memoirs, art and photos all by women from one state, is the only one of its kind. Mamang Dai has made a historic contribution to help the women’s writings from her state achieve a new level of distinctive visibility to reach out to readers not only across India but also all over the world. This is a book one must possess.

Reference

Beauvoir, Simone de. (2015). The second sex. Vintage Classics.

Cixous, Hélène. (1976). The Laugh of the Medusa. Tr. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs.  Summer. Vol. 1, No. 4 (Summer, 1976), pp. 875-893. University of Chicago Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3173239.

Moi, Toil. (1999). “I am a Woman”: The body as background in the second sex. Journal Paroles gelées, 17(2) ISSN 1094-7264. DOI 10.5070/PG7172003099

Preetinicha Barman is an Assistant Professor of English at Women’s College (NEHU), Shillong who did her Ph.D. on the works on Orhan Pamuk. Apart from research articles, she has also published her poems in English and Rajbanshi languages. Her published books include Orhan Pamuk: A Critical Reading and Aiyor Photok, a collection of her Rajbanshi poems. She is also a classical Manipuri Dancer.   

Book Review: Materiality and Visuality in North-East India: An Interdisciplinary Perspective by Tiplut Nongbri and Rashi Bhargava

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Publisher: Springer, Singapore. Date of publication: 2021. Language: English. ISBN 978-981-16-1969-4 ISBN 978-981-16-1970-0 (eBook) Price of the book- INR 10,152 (pages 217)

Reviewed by

Richa Chilana

School of Liberal Studies, University of Petroleum and Energy Studies (UPES), Dehradun, India. Email: richa.chilana@ddn.upes.ac.in

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022. Pages 1-4. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne41

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

(This review is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
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Materiality and Visuality in North-East India (2021), is a valuable addition to the field of material and visual studies, bridging the gap between fields that are seen as belonging to two different discursive domains. While material studies engages with the link between people and things that are deployed to signify or question identity, visual studies grapples with the production and distribution of visual images. The foreword penned by Patricia Uberoi underlines the importance of this bridge as it recognises the agency of the subject in their representation, contesting the dominant colonial and neo-colonial narratives and the ubiquitous ‘culture industry.’ The foreword also narrates the journey of ‘Uberoi Collection of Indian Calendar Art’ which emerged at a time when Indian art historians were solely interested in antiquated pieces while those working within the domain of folk narratives and crafts bemoaned the loss/disappearance of artefacts or made them marketable to be used as home décor. Film critics premised their judgement by making a distinction between what qualifies as art and what is ‘popular’, while social science considered the idea of interpreting images as frivolous when juxtaposed with ‘real’ social, cultural, and political problems. It was much later that a serious engagement with visual studies began in humanities and social sciences.

This volume was a consequence of the discussions and deliberations at the International Conference by the same name organised by the Centre for North-East Studies and Policy Research (CNESPR), Jamia Millia Islamia in 2019. It looks at photography, advertisements, clothing, textile production, indie comics, foodscapes, musical forms, tea gardens, and digital media by tremendously expanding the range of visual and material signs. The book focuses on the cognitive dimension of images by looking at how their construction, representation, and circulation enable a certain kind of construction of the self and its other.

Although North-East has diverse and various sub-regional cultures, it is often seen as a monolithic, homogenous category by ‘mainstream’ India. The editors and authors do not succumb to the temptation of offering an alternative definition or understanding of the category of North-East but make a strong case for agency in defining and representing their selves instead of being the object of material and visual studies. Although it is set in the North-East of India the authors do not attempt a sociological reading of the term, instead, they build their argument by taking it as a geopolitical space to unravel the issues it encounters. The focus on material and visual culture offers a window to unravel the changes that have happened in the region and discusses how and why certain images and discourses are produced and disseminated and how can we better understand the lived and discursive realities of the present. The contributors to the volume use the available analytical tools of humanities and social sciences but also intervene methodologically by not reducing materiality and visuality to aesthetic delights and insist on their ability to construct, contest and disseminate meanings.

The linguistic turn in the social sciences iterated the significance of text and textuality but the last three decades have witnessed a material and visual turn with a focus on objects and images which constitute culture. Instead of looking at methodological approaches and analytical tools within social sciences in a linear way, it is imperative that we draw upon all of these to sharpen our understanding of the complexities and ambiguities of our times while also being self-reflective of our approaches. Instead of a mere structural and semiotic analysis, the material and visual turn are revelatory of the functioning of power and systems of knowledge production and distribution. The authors and editors argue how material and visual are “powerful agents in not only ways of seeing but also ways of knowing and, consequently, of being” (p. xi). This shift in approach also makes us alert to why certain forms of knowledge appear and disappear at certain moments of time in history and why some images are circulated more than others. This shift of lens also shows how communities in the North-East are defining themselves and their cultural identity, although it remains to be seen how these definitions are repetitions or contestations of existing ideas about the North-East.

The material culture of North-East India has been a subject of discussion in fields as diverse as history, museology, anthropology, geography, ethnography, etc. but they have largely been seen as artefacts or objects of a social structure or organization. In both colonial and post-colonial research, they have been reproduced in written texts to complement the argument, thus indicating the logophilia and iconophobia of disciplines like anthropology. The choice of images is solely contingent on the whims and fancies of the ethnographer with those who are being photographed being completely robbed of a voice and agency. Avitoli Zimo argues in her chapter how early anthropologists used photographs to prove their presence and their ‘scientific approach’ with a complete absence of self-reflexivity while depicting the ‘exotic’ other in the form of Naga tribes. The exoticization of North-East India has continued since colonial times, an approach that is theoretically unsound and dangerous since policy-making is often governed by stereotypes about the North-East.

A deeper focus on material and spiritual as “communicative agents (non-human actors) and objects of knowledge production” also helps us understand the sites where these objects are produced and circulated. Objects exist in relation to each other and materiality is linked to immateriality, thus the absence of something is as significant as its presence in terms of its contribution to meaning. The volume draws upon W. J. T Mitchell’s understanding of visuality as a dialectical relationship between images and society and Ramaswamy’s “regimes of seeing and being seen” (2003, xiv). Nicholas Mirzoeff’s visuality (how dominant regimes separate, classify and create a hierarchy of images) and counter-visuality (how the dominated assert their subjectivity) is also enabling to look at the structures and processes of North-East India and the thorny relationship between the dominant and the dominated. Chapters such as that of Alban von Stockhausen look at photography and clothing to understand how colonial modernity is embodied and the way the lens created by the colonial gaze determines one’s perception of one’s self. Through its methodological approach, the chapter challenges the binary of observer and observed to indicate the fluid nature of the relationship between the two.

The book is divided into three sections — “Objects, Images and Meanings: Methodological Interventions”, “Material and Visual as Vehicles of Power and Hegemony: Adaptations and Negotiations” and “Imagination, Imagery and Identity: Representations and Subversions.” The three chapters in the first section contribute to the ever-expanding field of Naga studies, for instance, the chapter by Alison Kahn and Catriona Child attempts to unravel the history of museums containing Naga artefacts in Europe, imagining them as biographical entities undertaking a journey from the museum to Nagaland and back, collecting new voices or commentary on the museums by the source communities. The chapters in the second section with a focus on tea estates in Assam, photographs were taken during official events in Arunachal Pradesh between 1950 and 1970, musical practices of the Hau-Tangkhul community in Mizoram, sartorial practices of the Mizos, and images of tea in print advertisements such as that of Times of India in the 1940s engage with how objects are embedded in power relations and how communities respond to these objects. For instance, the chapter by Prithiraj Borah and Rowena Robinson discusses the gendered space of the cha-bagan of Assam by focusing on material structures such as the Bungalow, and the dissemination of images of minis (women plantation workers) on social media. The hierarchical and deeply entrenched power dynamics are glossed over by the idyllic and exotic images of plantations in advertisements, billboards etc. The third section while looking at food and foodscapes, the metaphorical use of momo in C. Sailo’s graphic novel Momo Sapiens, the ways in which Assam has been imagined over the years, and the textile practices of the Tangkhul Nagas sdddd a cautionary note on the dangers of romanticising or glamourising any and every act of resistance/subversion.

All the chapters in the volume with their close scrutiny of materiality and visuality indicate the intermeshing of what we see, how we derive meaning from, “seeing, knowing and being” (p. xxv), and processes that change with the change in social, cultural, economic and political contexts. This volume is crucial in terms of its ethnographic focus on the North-East, the methodological interventions in the sustained focus on materiality and visuality, and its thematic link, i.e., the dialectic between ways of seeing, epistemology and ontology. Although the book focuses on North-East India, the broader focus on materialty and visuality lends it a universal appeal, especially with regard to the erstwhile colonised communities.

References

Mirzoeff, N. (2011). The Right to Look: The Counterhistory of Visulaity. Duke University Press.

Mitchell, W. J. T. (2002). Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture. Journal of Visual Culture. Vol 1(2): 165–81

Ramaswamy, S, ed. (2003). Beyond Appearances (?): Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India. Sage Publications.

Richa Chilana is an Assistant Professor in the School Liberal Studies at the University of Petroleum and Energy Studies, Dehradun. Earlier she served for a decade at the Department of English, Maitreyi College, University of Delhi. She did her PhD from JNU, the title of her doctoral thesis was Negotiating the Veil: Purdah in Twentieth-Century Indian English Writing.

Book Review: The Last Light of Glory Days: Stories from Nagaland by Avinuo Kire

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Publisher: Speaking Tiger. Date of Publication: 2021. Language” English. Price: Rs.350/- Number of Pages: 184. ISBN: 9789390477456

Reviewed by

Lucy Keneikhrienuo Yhome

Department of English and Cultural Studies, CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bangalore, India. Email id: keneikhrienuo.yhome@res.christuniversity.in

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022. Pages 1-4. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne40

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

(This review is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
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“The times, how strange they were” (p. 9). The opening sentence of Avinuo Kire’s The Last Light of Glory Days: Stories from Nagaland plunges its readers straight into the book’s unforgettable perspectives on the lived experiences of the Naga communities, which are often referred to as ‘people stories’. Kire’s portrayal of the Naga lifeworld offers tales of terror, magic, myths, cultural rituals, spiritualism, and traditions that are interwoven with contemporary Naga narratives.

The Indo-Naga conflict has had a lifelong impact on the Naga tribal community; the devastating effects of border politics on tribal culture have led to the intrusion of mainland India into people’s lives and scarred the Nagas and their relationship with the Indian government for decades. The Indo-Naga conflict is an ongoing dispute; Nagaland was declared a “disturbed area,” extending power to the AFSPA since 1958.

What spectators, critics, academicians, and even the media have failed to recognise and represent is the lived reality of the Nagas. Examining lived experiences illuminates the resilience of people for whom political horrors are an everyday reality: terror and magic coexist with military occupancy in the Naga hills. The Last Light of Glory Days: Stories from Nagaland is divided into two sections: ‘The Disturbance’ and ‘New Tales from an Old World’. The end of the colonial era was indeed the beginning of the actual war, termed ‘The Disturbance,’ for the Nagas. ‘The Disturbance’ clubs together three women’s intergenerational family stories, set against the backdrop of the Indo-Naga conflict. ‘New Tales from an Old World’ introduces the Naga lifeworld imbued with nativised Naga Christianity, myths, and folklore.

The titular story, “The Last Light of Glory Days,” offers a historical perspective on Naga history narrated through women’s eyes. A young, naive Angami woman, Neimenuo speaks about how the Nagaland in which she grew up in the 1960s was infused with terror, love, marriage, family, and the enthusiasm for the Naga nationalism. As the conflict between the Nagas and the Indian military intensifies with the formation of the state of Nagaland in 1963 under the Indian Union, Neimenuo’s dream of a normal life is disrupted when her young fiancé joins the Naga Army. “I remember thinking the colour of happiness must be sanguine,” (p. 16) she says of her wedding day, implying how the term also etymologically invokes bloodshed. What is particularly devastating is the murder of Zhabu by another Naga factional group; Naga nationalism drifts completely from its original ambitions as more factional groups are formed. The silencing of women in such meta-narratives is highlighted by Neimenuo when she asserts, “I like to think that I have also served our nation in my own way” (p. 17).

 In the second story, “Flower Children,” the little girl Pete is taken away by the Indian army on her way back from school for interrogation, leaving her traumatised for life. The author emphasises the representation of Nagaland in the 1990s through the perspective of Neimenuo’s granddaughter, focusing on the continued disturbance in the state within the Naga factional groups or with the Indian paramilitary forces. People’s lives are defined by encroachment of the centre in the form of unannounced raids and the torture of the family members of the Naga Army.

 In “Sharing Stories,” the author examines the stigma of racial hatred, xenophobia, and the unresolved generational trauma between the Indian and Naga races. The protagonist marries a mainland Indian, breaking generational trauma but scarring her relationship with her grandmother. The author reinstates the ongoing tension and mistrust between the mainland Indians, the ‘tephremia,’ and Nagas: “For Grandmother, India was synonymous with the army; with the sweaty men in green” (p. 46). The grandmother and granddaughter’s conflicting ideologies towards British colonialism underscore how racism is faced by the later generations of migrant Indians in Nagaland and by Nagas in mainland India. Kire’s writing powerfully explores the longstanding psychoses that characterise racism and xenophobia.

The second section of the book, “New Tales from an Old World,” consists of seven stories about ordinary people and their extraordinary lives, delving into the Naga lifeworld and tribal philosophy, epistemologies, and spiritualism. Storytelling as an art and life form for the Nagas is believed to have psychological values, especially for oral communities. “The Memory Healer” authenticates the value of storytelling and listening in the contemporary Naga world through Neinuo, the memory healer who epitomises a repository of traumatic memories. The nightmares of the war veteran, the wounded look of a single mother with her three children, and the stoic child who is sexually abused by her neighbour are examples of the many untold stories in Naga society that come to life through Kire’s skillful blending of magic realism and political realities.

“The Visitors” plunges the reader into the lifeworld and tribal belief systems in Naga societies, deconstructing the binary between the human and the spirit worlds as human beings wage wars with the spirits. Neibou hosts the spirits, and the little girl Khriesinuo witnesses the warrior spirits demonstrating that spirits and humans can interact despite occupying different worlds. “When the Millet Flower Grows” investigates the dilemma of Christianity and traditional faith in the Naga lifeworld. The native faith finds its place in the contemporary Naga world through traditional rituals and the “Tekhumiavi” or were-tiger. “Tekhumiavi” is more than a myth in the Angami community: it is portrayed as a reality that breaks the binaries of the human and the non-human, linking the two worlds.

“The Light” powerfully represents the issue of sexual abuse in Naga society and the importance f being informed about sexual harassment. The child is abused by her tutor, but her parents are ignorant of the situation; the light saves her from further horrors. The notion of the Spirit always finds its place in the lived realities of the Nagas, and one such is the forest spirit. “Forest Spirit” narrates the story of a schoolboy named Olio who possesses a magical stone and his spiritual journey with the gemstone. Olio possesses something that belongs to the forest. The author enlightens her readers on environmental consciousness through the forest spirit and tribal practices, which reflect the belief that one should take from nature only what is needed. “Longkhum” represents a village in Mokokchung, believed to be a place where the souls of a person go before their final transition to heaven. The story is about the last journey of Keze with her husband Sato before his demise, extending towards Naga spiritualism on the meanings of life and death.

From the academic perspective, The Last Light of Glory Days: Stories from Nagaland is an extraordinarily incisive contribution to contemporary narratives on Naga studies. It formulates detailed historical information, specifically on people’s experience of the Indo-Naga conflict, and expands the Naga worldview. Besides scholarship, the book offers an insider’s perspective on the Naga community.  Kire’s didactic execution of the stories about her people and implementation of the Tenyidie dialect in the stories propagate a decisive commitment: the volume is described as “both a political declaration and a personal love-note to her land” (the back cover blurb).

Another invaluable way in which this collection is significant is in its representation of the many Naga women, barely mentioned in history books, who are war survivors, freedom fighters, and single, economically independent parents. The anthology is a seminal affirmation of the Nagas’ lived experience against the backdrop of the Indo-Naga conflict, hence for researchers from the disciplines of history, literature, and cultural studies, the book is an indispensable source of information offering critical assessments on the Indo-Naga conflict and its long-term impact on the Naga community. Writing in English blended with distinctly Naga sociolinguistic elements simultaneously contributes authenticity and aids in inviting a larger global audience to participate in the act of gathering and narrating ‘peoplestories’.

The first short story, “The Last Light of Glory Days,” is perhaps the most haunting of the collection, with its constant reminders that experiences are replete with paradoxes: the terrible political turbulence of ‘The Disturbance’ is personally “a time of sublime happiness” (p. 12) for Neimenuo because she’s in love. Her narrative ends with the image of her biting into a cherry tomato from her garden: “It burst into flavour inside my mouth, unmistakably sweet and sour, all at once” (p. 27). The book is ending with an evocative image in the final story, “Longkhum,” in which Keze’s “hot, happy tears” (p. 183) wet the petals of the red rhododendron cupped in her hand as she closes her eyes and relives the past. Kire’s prose vividly juxtaposes the personal and the political, blurring the lines between the binaries of epistemic categories to remind us that ambiguities are ubiquitous, especially in conflict-ridden times and places.

Lucy Keneikhrienuo Yhome is presently a PhD scholar in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at Christ (Deemed to be) University, Bangalore working on the thesis titled, Intersecting Gender and Ecocriticism in the works of Naga writer, Easterine Kire. She also obtained her M.Phil on Elie Wiesel and Yael Dayan from the same university.

Book Review: Translating China as Cross-Identity Performance by James St. Andre?

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Translating China as Cross-Identity Performance builds upon and departs from the 2010 book chapter in which some theoretical issues between translation and metaphor have been foregrounded. By developing the methodology initiated in the chapter, St. Andre? in the book further testifies it by applying it to the translation issues that surfaced in the historical Sino-Western interactions…

Publisher: University of Hawai‘i Press. Date of Publication: 2018. Language: English. ISBN: 9780824875305

Reviewed by

[wp-svg-icons icon=”user” wrap=”i”] Cao Qilin [wp-svg-icons icon=”envelop” wrap=”i”]

Department of English, University of Macau

Rupktha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 1, January-March, 2022, Pages 1–3. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n1.20

Received: 5 Mar 2021 | Revised: 17 Mar 2021 | Accepted: 22 Oct 2021 | First Published: 5 February 2022

(This review is published under the Themed Issue Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Literary and Cultural Studies)
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Book Review: Translating China as Cross-Identity Performance by James St. Andre?

Ever since the renewal of interest in metaphors prevailed in the mid-20th century, related research has empowered metaphors to possess more theoretical implications rather than to function as mere linguistic representations. The following decades bear witness to how metaphors are integrated into contemporary academic discussions and what roles the metaphor theory, having been continuously practised and enriched, plays in dealing with cognitive, linguistic, and sociocultural issues. Relevant works of importance are not only limited to more classic ones, such as Metaphor and Thought (1979) edited by Andrew Ortony, Metaphors We Live By (1980) written by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, but also those more recently published, such as Stern Josef’s Metaphor in Context (2000), and Denis Donoghue’s Metaphor  (2014). Given this academic context, St. Andre?’s Translating China as Cross-Identity Performance is another worthwhile attempt in venturing the frontier of metaphor theory by conceptualizing translation with metaphors, during which an academic model is set for employing metaphors to theorize a particular discipline and to investigate specific disciplinary cases.

James St. Andre? is the Chairman and Associate Professor of the Department of Translation at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research mainly focuses on the translations from Chinese into English and French between the 17th century and 20th century. His early contribution in combining translation with metaphors could be traced back to the 2010 book he edited entitled Thinking Through Translation with Metaphors. A variety of metaphors are adopted in this book to reconceptualize translation, and the chapter contributed by St. Andre?, titled “Translation as Cross-Identity Performance”, is tellingly the pilot study of the book that is the subject of this review.

Translating China as Cross-Identity Performance builds upon and departs from the 2010 book chapter in which some theoretical issues between translation and metaphor have been foregrounded. By developing the methodology initiated in the chapter, St. Andre? in the book further testifies it by applying it to the translation issues that surfaced in the historical Sino-Western interactions. A judicious thoroughness is carried out in elaborating the mythological taxonomy inspired by the typology of cross-identity metaphors, i.e., blackface, whiteface, passing, drag, mimicry, and masquerade. This taxonomy not only showcases another academic route to overcome the problem of theoretical compatibility between translation studies and gender studies but also unravels its pertinency and qualification to examine relevant Sino-Western translations between the 17th and 20th centuries.

This taxonomy also serves as the structure of the book by treating individual metaphors as a conceptual lens to chronologically look into relevant translations. The translations of St. Andre?’s enquiry are mostly those translated by Westerners before China and Western countries had large-scale interactions. Translations of this period did not serve to enhance communication, the function that translations commonly perform by following faithfully the source text; rather, they legitimized themselves by gloating over the suspicious achievements they made in overcoming the linguistic barriers and therefore enjoyed the plausible privilege to betray the rules of being faithful, inviting different forces to achieve varied goals of their concern. In this sense, as the connection between the source text and the target text has been largely disconnected, a new space is opened to metaphorize translations of this period as acts of changing identities. Under this observation, this book’s theoretical building and research scope are tightly tied up, and the content, as shown below, is appropriately situated.

In the book, the author begins his investigation with the 17th and 18th century Oriental tales prevailing in the West by proving those tales as meaningful others to ridicule (blackface) or compliment (whiteface) the Western self. Oriental tales, in the name of translation, are thus argued to be the yardstick to which the Western countries were self-measured. In the second chapter, the earliest Western translations of The Sorrow of Han are considered as passing, through which the author argues that both the French and English translators employed Chinese characters and pronunciations to justify their translations as authentic against the reality that the demand for authentic translations was escalating. The next chapter moves to translation as drag, emphasizing the more radical alteration entailed by relevant translations. These translations are found to convey a kind of Chineseness to their Western readers, and this Chineseness, as St. Andre? argues, was accessorized and dragged by the Western conventional concepts about China. The next part of translation as mimicry unravels how the Western sinologists attempted to mimic the sight and sound of Chinese, during which the Chinese was plausibly more thoroughly perceived by the West in terms of linguistic differences. In the final part of thinking translation as masquerade, two Chinese translators, i.e., Gu Hongming and Lin Yutang, are argued to follow but also derail the Western conceptions about China to establish their own Chinese identity. Compared to the previous chapters, this chapter concentrates on the Oriental side which ponders anew the issues of how the Oriental translators could masquerade themselves for innovating Orientalness while conforming to the Western conventions.

As reviewed above, translation, as a practice of linguistic shifting, has been compared to behaviours of changing make-ups, costumes, and accessories in the field of gender and performance studies. The value of this comparison is not a mere similarity between linguistic shifting and appearance changing but the commensurability between these two practices of reconsidering relevant identity issues brought forth by the act of crossing. While in this book crossing undeniably refers to the linguistic switch from Chinese to Western languages, its underlying meanings are more closely related to the agents who enacted the behaviour of crossing and the contexts in which translations as cross-identity practices happened. The agents and contexts, as told by the book, were mostly Western; therefore, the emphasis of this book is on how China was conceptualized by the Western. In doing so, it elucidates not only how the discourse of China was developed in the West through translation, but also how the West projected Western values and purposes on translation to cater to the Western imagination of China as the other. In this sense, the novelty of this book is its embodiment of how the Oriental was more Orientalised and the Chinese became more Chinese in the Western perspective, and how the Western identity was constructed and reinforced through translations of Chinese texts, even though many parts in the translation were fabricated.

Conceptualizing translation as cross-identity performance does not confine its discussion at the linguistic level; instead, it attempts to metaphorize these linguistic features as performative techniques which impose great influences on identity-shaping. What matters in thinking translation as cross-identity performance is who initiates the performance under what contexts for what audience. This approach is more about the way translation functions in the target area for target readers, which neatly avoids some clichéd discussions resulting from the overwhelming concerns about the source text. But, meanwhile, the deficiency of this tendency is admittedly obvious. The way of emphasizing the target end and therefore including those texts which are not authentic translations but are accepted as translations would be easily trapped in the danger of diluting the nature of translation.

Overall, this book offers insights into the translation issues of translating China for the West and should be considered as a meaningful practice of integrating translation with metaphors and of moving both metaphor theory and translation studies further. Not only the practitioners of translation studies, but also the students interested in Chinese literature, language, and history are potential target readers of this book.

References

Donoghue, D. (2014). Metaphor. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press.

Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (2003). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Ortony, A. (ed.) (1979). Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

St. Andre?, J. (2018). Translating China as Cross-Identity Performance. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.

St. Andre?, J. (ed.) (2010). Thinking Through Translation with Metaphors. New York: Routledge.

Stern, J. (2000). Metaphor in Context. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Cao Qilin is currently a PhD student in the Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Macau. His research interests include translation studies, cultural studies, and intercultural studies.

 

Book Review: Twenty-First-Century Children’s Gothic: from the Wanderer to Nomadic Subject by Chloé Germaine Buckley

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Publisher: Edinburgh University Press. Date of Publication: 2018. Language: English.ISBN: 9781474430173

Reviewed by

[wp-svg-icons icon=”user” wrap=”i”] Zhao Yifan [wp-svg-icons icon=”envelop” wrap=”i”]

Ocean University of China

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 1, January-March, 2022, Pages 1–2. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n1.25

Complete review received: 6 Sept 2021 | Accepted: 14 Sept 2021 | First Published: 5 February 2022

(This review is published under the Themed Issue Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Literary and Cultural Studies)
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Book Review: Twenty-First-Century Children’s Gothic: from the Wanderer to Nomadic Subject by Chloé Germaine Buckley

Children’s literature has long intertwined with Gothic motifs, yet contrasting with the profound Gothic inheritance of children’s literature, the relevant research remains to be a relatively new direction, which has gained increasing popularity only in recent years. As the newest monograph in the field, Twenty-First-Century Children’s Gothic: from the Wanderer to Nomadic Subject brings out an exciting outlook to children’s Gothic studies, tracing through a range of children’s Gothic fictions between 2000 and 2015. Following Braidotti’s account of nomadic subjectivity, the book’s author Dr Chloé Germaine Buckley concludes that the theme of homelessness is a major concern for post-millennial children’s Gothic, which does not lead to despair but positive possibilities to new lives, regarding homelessness as nomadism—a concept echoing with the nomadic ethics of Deleuze’s philosophy, which expresses a process ontology that values change and motion over stability (Braidotti, 2013, p. 344).

Throughout the five chapters of her book, Buckley challenges the melancholic assumptions about children’s Gothic and reconfigures a negative condition into a productive precondition: homelessness as nomadism. The reading of homelessness as nomadism is a productive interpretation that transforms a catastrophic strike into a call to adventure. She takes the recurring theme of un-homing as a nomadic playfulness. This rejection of home is—as Deleuze would put it—the rejection of sameness, the rejection of static, sterile and self-replicating life. Buckley’s accounting for children’s Gothic emphasizes children’s subjectivity, which situates outside of a pedagogical framework. Having faith in children’s power of creating their own “line of flight,” Buckley regards a child as a self that is continually in the process of becoming and calls on new perspectives to account for children’s Gothic, instead of dwelling in the traditional humanist concepts and ego-relational psychology.

In her innovative and rigorous analysis, Buckley disagrees with many accepted claims and demonstrates her affirmative perspective of children’s Gothic, just like the post-millennial fictions she focuses on. For example, counter to the wide praise of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline as the exemplary work of “‘uncanny’ nature of childhood”(Buckley, 2018, p. 40), she argues that it offers a new intertextual mode of writing in the post-millennial period, which in this case is the intertextuality between Gothic, psychoanalysis and children’s fiction. And instead of Coraline, A Series of Unfortunate Events by Daniel Handler (under the pen name Lemony Snicket) is the one that exemplifies this new form of Gothic writing for children, which offers a promising hope rather than an “unlikely” hope (Olson, 2010, p. 522).

Buckley’s reading of post-millennial children’s Gothic offers a nomadic alternative. The monograph itself can be seen as a manifestation of the rhizomatic nature of 21st-century Gothic intertextuality, weaving studies of Gothic and children’s literature as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts together, and at the same responding to the dominant humanist and constructivist approach to children’s fiction. Buckley demonstrates her ideas of homelessness as nomadism explicitly in well-written words, bringing out an exhilarating approach to Gothic and children’s literature alike. Just as Buckley’s intention, the book has contributed to a wider cultural and theoretical project of nomadic subjectivity, which is expressed by “emerging subjects-in-progress and new patterns of becoming” (Buckley, 2018, p. 204). However, this interpretation is only one possible mode among all the possibilities, which Buckley has made clear in her book that it is not a totalising account. Of course, there is still space for debate whether this “line of flight” is the most constructive direction free from the aporia of deconstruction since the becoming children in her interpretation remain unresolved. Besides, though the examples she chooses (including 8 fantasy novels in total) explicitly express what she has concluded, if another 8 exemplary novels were picked, it is possible to induct another central argument led by a perfectly logical chain. In the diversified and various post-modern cultures, to say homelessness as nomadism is the only trend might sound too inclusive. But what Buckley has done is to open a gateway for us to trace down and explore multiple understandings of children’s Gothic.

Affirmative and generative, Buckley’s book celebrates the nomadic existence of children in twenty-first-century children’s Gothic, initiating a viewpoint of nomadic subjectivity. Being willing to engage with difference and otherness, Buckley is a mobile and active subject herself. Readers can easily sense her passion for studies of Gothic and children’s literature in her book, which can be a good reference for those who share the same passion, for it provides a promising nomadic perspective and allows readers to review traditional approaches through her introduction and confrontation with a range of fundamental works in the related field for beginners to refer to.

References

Braidotti, R. (2013). Nomadic Ethics. Deleuze Studies, 7(3), 342-359

Buckley, C. G. (2018). Twenty-First-Century Children’s Gothic: from the Wanderer to Nomadic Subject. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 40+204

Olson, D. (2010). The Longest Gothic Goodbye in the World: Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. In D. Olsen (Ed.), 21st-Century Gothic: Great Gothic Novels Since 2000. MD: Scarecrow Press. 522

Zhao Yifan, a PhD candidate at the Ocean University of China, is especially interested in studies of children’s literature with dark motifs and its translation.

Book Review: Digital Humanities: Knowledge and Critique in a Digital Age by David M. Berry and Anders Fagerjord

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Publisher: Polity Press. Date of Publication: 2017. Language: English. ISBN: 9780745697659

Reviewed by

[wp-svg-icons icon=”user” wrap=”i”] Xi Li & Jie Zeng* [wp-svg-icons icon=”envelop” wrap=”i”]

Chungdu Normal University, Sichuan Province, China. *Corresponding author.

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 1, January-March, 2022, Pages 1–3. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n1.24

Received: 27 Feb 2021 | Revised : 29 Mar 2021 | 2nd round revision: 11 Dec 2021 | Accepted: 12 Dec 2021 | First Published: 05 February 2022

(This review is published under the Themed Issue Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Literary and Cultural Studies)
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Book Review: Digital Humanities: Knowledge and Critique in a Digital Age by David M. Berry and Anders Fagerjord

It is no doubt that we are living in an increasingly digitalized world. Seemingly ubiquitous, digitalization has significantly influenced our way of life and thinking. The rapid development and widespread application of digital technology has also stimulated the growth of scholarship. Amongst them, digital humanities is a relatively new discipline that lies at the intersection of computer technology and the humanities. By applying digital tools and technology to the traditional discipline of the humanities, digital humanities is an interdisciplinary and even transdisciplinary field that aims to advance our understanding of humanities as well as digital technology.

Digital Humanities: Knowledge and Critique in a Digital Age by David M. Berry and Anders Fagerjord is another work that joins the academic exploration of this nascent discipline. This slender and massively sourced volume outlines the history, eruptions, and epistemic contexts in which this burgeoning field has sprung. Berry and Anders point out that the digital humanities give us powerful theories, methods and tools for exploring new ways of being in a digital age. They provide a compelling guide by exploring the history, intellectual work, key arguments, and ideas of this emerging discipline. They also offer an important critique, suggesting ways in which the humanities can be enriched through computing as well as how cultural critique can transform the digital humanities.

Drawing on research in the fields of media and communications, digital media, sociology, informatics, and the humanities more broadly, this volume starts with an introductory chapter that offers an overview of this book. Barry and Fagerjord then take readers on an impressive voyage of the history, development, ways of thinking, infrastructures, methods, tools, and critical thinking of digital humanities. In chapter two “Genealogies of the Digital Humanities,” the authors delineate the origin, history, and development of this discipline. They also acknowledgement the contradictions and contentions, and multiple definitions that surrounds this discipline. Chapter 3 and chapter 4 examine the epistemology of digital humanities. In Chapter 3 “Computational Thinking,” fully aware of the interdisciplinary nature of digital humanities, the authors provide an example that attests to such nature rather than simply offering the algorithms. They also acknowledge the constructive role of programming language while pointing out that other approaches to humanities are also welcome. Following the discussion of algorithms, Chapter 4, titled “Knowledge Representation and Archives,” offers a quick view of the questions brought by and the practices related to the representation of knowledge. The fifth Chapter “Research Infrastructures” examines the significance of research infrastructures in supporting digital humanities and the conditions of possibility for widening humanities scholarship. The authors call for thinking about research infrastructure not only as material to be stored and preserved but also as a process that helps the transformation of primary sources and the generation of new forms of scholarship. Also, throughout this chapter, the authors suggest that research infrastructure not only exist in physical forms—libraries, labs, research centers—but also in virtual, hybrid forms, thus acknowledging the multi-dimension and development of research infrastructure. As the chapter title “Digital Methods and Tools” suggests, Chapter 6 focuses on the specific methods and approaches that are used to collect digital data in the discipline. The authors also argue that the scope of digital methods can be broadened by incorporating other approaches, such as software studies and the study of works that are not digitized but created digitally.  The seventh chapter “Digital Scholarship and Interface Criticism” looks into the question of the interface from a broad perspective, thinking about how to display, publish the results of digital humanities research. Supported by several examples, the authors contend that the understanding of the concept of the interface should go beyond simplistic thinking. Threading all the intersecting concerns in previous chapters, the final chapter “Towards a Critical Digital Humanities” summarizes the possible future directions for the digital humanities by relating it to the notion of critical digital humanities and the social, cultural, economic and political questions of recontextualization of the digital humanities in a social field. Raising a set of questions, this chapter emphasizes again and expands the scope for critical reflexivity.

The strength of this book lies in its sustained call for critical and dialectical thinking in understanding digital humanities. The field has been criticized for privileging techniques, such as technical tools and methods while neglecting the more traditional humanistic perspective. Throughout the volume, the authors have demonstrated a clear awareness of the hybrid or interdisciplinary nature of this discipline and always urge the importance of broadening the understanding and scope of digital humanities. Overall, Digital Humanities effectively demonstrates the computational way of doing humanities research. This volume has documented how digital humanities has grown and developed, mapped its challenges, and proposed new approaches of reconfiguring research and teaching to safeguard critical and rational thought in a digital age. In so doing, this book serves as a helpful guide for anyone who wants to have a basic understanding of digital humanities. Of course, the questions it raises and the suggestions it offers are also generative for future research.

Acknowledgement

Foundation Project: The general project of  Sichuan Education Informatization Application and Development Research Center “Neuroscience Research on Brain-like Intelligence and Foreign Language Education” (JYXX21-008)

References

Berry, David M., and Anders Fagerjord. (2017). Digital Humanities: Knowledge and Critique in a Digital Age. John Wiley & Sons.

Xi Li is a PhD candidate at the School of English Studies, Sichuan International Studies University and an associate professor at the School of Foreign Languages, Chengdu Normal University.

Jie Zeng is an Associate Professor at the School of Foreign Languages, Chengdu Normal University. Both of them are interested in digital humanities.

Book Review Chinese American Literature without Borders: Gender, Genre, and Form by King-Kok Cheung

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Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan | Date of Publication: 2016 | Language: English | ISBN: 978-1137453532

Reviewed by

[wp-svg-icons icon=”user” wrap=”i”] Windy Xiao Xue [wp-svg-icons icon=”envelop” wrap=”i”]

Department of English, University of Macau

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 1, January-March, 2022, Pages 1–3. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n1.23

Received: 30 April 2021 | Revised: 29 July 2021 | Accepted: 23 Aug 2021 | First Published: 5 February 2022

(This review is published under the Themed Issue Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Literary and Cultural Studies)
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Book Review Chinese American Literature without Borders: Gender, Genre, and Form by King-Kok Cheung

Chinese American Literature without Borders: Gender, Genre, and Form is a compelling model in the transnational comparative study, which examines the consciousness and aesthetics of Chinese American literature by throwing off shackles of language, culture and literary traditions.

“It looks to and from both the United States and China to reveal the multiple engagements of American-born and Sinophone writers”(1).

The author King-Kok Cheung, professor of Asian American Studies at UCLA, is an intellectual migrant standing at the crossroad between American and Chinese culture. This background affords her insight into the commonalities and differences between Chinese and Chinese American literature and the awareness of the significance of making the muffled voice heard on the two shores.

The whole book is divided into two parts, focusing on gender and genre & form respectively. The first part begins with the long-standing feud between Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston, which Cheung points out seems to center on the problem of literary authenticity, but reveals the crisis of masculine identity in Asian American men, that is, males fear that their already asexual image would be further tarnished by Kingston’s memoir. To fully analyze this, in Chapter 2 Cheung introduces wen-wu dyad in traditional Chinese norms to disclose that reconstructing masculine identity by emphasizing wu (martial arts) and ignoring wen (arts) is a mistake as it merely caters to the western ideal; after using protagonists in China Boy by Gus Lee and Pangs of love by David Wong Louie to support this view in Chapter 3, Cheung further argues that this way to revive the image of Asian males is “a double bind” (p.94): if simply chasing the western ideal, they always fall short of it and risk restoring the patriarchal order; if sticking to Chinese wenren (poet-scholar), they feel afraid to perpetuate the existing stereotype. To solve this dilemma, Cheung proposes that Asian Americans should “resist one-way adaptation and turn racial stereotype on its head and into a source of inspiration” (p.95), recodifying traditional Chinese male image as manly, sexual and seductive, and teaching people from other cultural backgrounds to appreciate the charisma. Thereupon, in Chapter 4 and 5, she propounds and analyzes her ideal of masculinity—— Xu Zhimo, a romantic poet, and protagonists from American Knees by Shawn Wong, The Winged Seed by Li-Young Lee and Phoenix Eyes by Russell Leong, whose masculinity is demonstrated through arts and solicitude.

Part Two explores various innovations that Chinese and Chinese American writers have attempted. It first, in Chapter 6, zeros in on the innovation in the genre of autobiography, arguing that Chinese and Chinese American writers have fused familial, social and ethnic subjectivity into this genre, making this navel-gazing genre cross the boundaries of “generations, nations, epochs, race, gender, class, languages, accents, even across fact and fiction” (p.195). Chapter 7 examines a short story The Photograph written by Chinese author Bing Xin about a white woman’s life in China. Its uniqueness lies in its reversal of white gaze, and its description of the complexity of dynamics between two cultures. The last two chapters focus on innovation in language done by immigrant writer Ha Jin, who explores his bilingual style of expression, and poets Marilyn Chin and Russell Leong, who manoeuvre slanted allusion to Chinese tropes to bridge the gap between two cultures. 

One of the strengths of this study, in my opinion, is that the innovation of autobiographies is read through a transcultural lens. Going beyond the prolonged controversy of literary authenticity in this field, Cheung turns to analyze the root that generates the transformation of the autobiography. She adopts the concept of Gish Jen’s “two very different models of self-construal, independent and interdependent self” (p.173): the former is associated to the west, particularly America, while the latter is associated to the east, including China. Normally, autobiography is a western genre constantly showing the independent and individual self, while Asian American writers infuse this American “independent self” with the Chinese “interdependent self”. Thus, compared with Chinese autobiography writers, they stress self-invention and empowerment; compared with western autobiographers, they write less subjectively, constructing a multi-voiced narrative, taking account of the history and social environment, and fighting against the dominant culture. This fresh way to look at the innovation of Asian American literature is insightful and incisive. From such a vantage of point, we should not appreciate Asian American literature according to a single standard or mores but treat it as a convergence of two cultures.

Since this book covers literary works in both Chinese and English, an inconvenience that readers might encounter is the different translations of one single word or character. For example, Chapter 2 mentions several times Guan Yu, a character from a Chinese Classic The Three Kingdoms. But due to the different translations, he is expressed as Guan Yu (his name in Pinyin), or Guan Gong (his honorific in Pinyin), or Kwan Kung (his honorific in Cantonese). Therefore, it might be confusing for readers who are not familiar with Chinese culture. However, Cheung, who has predicted this potential difficulty for non-Chinese readers, adds an index at the end of this book which lists all the works and writers that she has mentioned in the book with different versions of names. In this way, readers can refer to this part for the clarification of these proper names.

To conclude, Chinese American Literature without Borders: Gender, Genre, and Form is an inclusive comparative study on Asian American Literature, which covers a wide range of works written by Sinophone, American-born, and immigrant writers, be they autobiographies which rewrite feminine codes, novels which present alternatives to masculinity, short stories which critique orientalism, or poems which assert heritage from both Chinese and Western cultures. The eclectic selection of literary works and the embracing attitude towards innovations in Asian American literature are not only intriguing to readers but also illuminating to postgraduate students and scholars in this field.

References

Cheung, K. (2016). Chinese American Literature without Borders: Gender, Genre, and Form. Palgrave Macmillan.

Windy Xiao Xue is currently an MA student in the English department of the University of Macau. She is researching in the field of Asian American literature.

Book Review: Translingual Words: An East Asian Lexical Encounter with English by Jieun Kiaer

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The book examines the history and reasons for the development of the translingual process, its two-way influence on culture and the lexicon of both parties combined with clear interpretations of linguistic terms.

Publisher: Routledge. Date of Publication: 2019. Language: English. ISBN: 9780367607517

Reviewed by

[wp-svg-icons icon=”user” wrap=”i”] Yi Xuan Jia [wp-svg-icons icon=”envelop” wrap=”i”]

University of Macau, Macau

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 1, January-March, 2022, Pages 1–4. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n1.22

Received: 16 Mar 2021 | Revised: 9 June 2021 | Accepted: 22 Oct 2021 | First Published: 5 February 2022

(This review is published under the Themed Issue Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Literary and Cultural Studies)
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Book Review: Translingual Words: An East Asian Lexical Encounter with English by Jieun Kiaer

The book examines the history and reasons for the development of the translingual process, its two-way influence on culture and the lexicon of both parties combined with clear interpretations of linguistic terms. The first chapter lays a theoretical foundation for the following two parts, which respectively introduce two formation pathways of the words. The author strives to raise awareness of translation theories beyond Europe and promotes the legitimacy of translingual words.

The author Jieun Kiaer is a Korean linguist who is currently the Associate Professor of Korean Language and Linguistics at the University of Oxford, UK. Kiaer’s research interests lie in theoretical linguistics, applied linguistics as well as Korean and East Asian linguistics. Before this book, Kiaer has published works in relevant fields, such as The History of English Loanwords in Korean (2014) and Hybrid Words in Korea and Japanese: A strange Brew or an Asset for Global English (2017). Based on previous research, this work expands the topics to East Asia. Familiar with both European and Asian culture, Kiaer gives down-to-earth examples of translingual words and analyzes them from linguistic, cultural and sociopolitical perspectives.

In terms of methodology, the online database Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is used as a criterion for tracing translingual words and defining their degree of fusion in English culture. The book also includes a large amount of content analysis of social media, such as how the words are used in the context of local culture, which also provides examples used in the book. Google Trends and Google N-gram are deployed for tracing the use of English words for both inner and outer English speakers.

 Basics of Translingual Words

The author considers terms like “borrowed words” or “loanwords” inappropriate given that English has a global identity and does not grant ownership to anyone. Therefore, Kiaer introduces and clarifies the definition of related terms, such as “foreign words,” “hybrid words,” “subcultural words” and “translingual words” in the four chapters of the first part. This is crucial because these terms are referred to throughout the book. Translingual words include the former three terms, and they can be English words in the form of Eastern languages or the romanization of Eastern languages.

Kiaer introduces the lexicon interaction model and the sunflower model to show how words’ meanings are negotiated and transformed between cultures, emphasizing the function of English as Lingua Franca (ELF). A large number of examples in Chinese, Korea and Japan are used to explain terms and theories. The author compares the translingual process of the three countries, revealing how socio-political and historic factors can affect the speed and way of lexical integration. Colonization was identified as the initiator of translanguaging, and words flow mainly from European countries to Asian countries in the earlier historical stage, though the distinction between foreign words and native words is blurred in the age of globalization and digitalization. According to ELF, the existence of hybrid words is justified since they are integrated into local culture (p. 20). This kind of words faces prejudice, though they are “an indispensable part of a multilingual society and may even be the greatest asset of our future lexicon” on the way to “a new world order in languages” (Graddol, 2006, p. 23) along with globalization. Subcultural words, the once considered short-lived words, are valued for allowing people of international backgrounds to communicate on the internet, especially in Japan and Korea, where non-English words enter the English lexicon despite the prejudice they receive in reality. Emoji is compared with translingual words since they both have shareability and semantic value.

 Words from East Asian to English Lexicon

As is mentioned above, translanguaging can be carried out in both directions, from East Asian to European, and vice versa. The second part of the book focuses on the analysis of East Asian words in English. The author starts from the history in the chapter “First Arrivals, ” then analyzes various media platforms with case studies to explore the settlement of the words and examines attitudes of the locals towards translingual words.

Kiaer sorts out the sequences of major historical and political stages that affect the process and differentiates degrees in which Chinese, Japanese and Korean enter the English lexicon. Graphs and statistics are used to demonstrate the difference in amount and categories of settled words from the three languages. Problems in defining East Asian words are carried out since most of them are of Sinitic origin, making it hard to categorize which one of the three countries the words come from. East Asian words’ popularization through Southeast Asian English is identified as a shortcut to translanguaging, but the author does not include a large number of ethnic Chinese as a possible explanation.

Content and data analysis in registers such as OED (dictionary), magazines and newspapers, and social media platforms are then used to discuss the settling patterns of the words. The three categories of media have incremental tolerance for translingual words. The author suggests that the conventional attitude of OED to translingual words should be shifted given that English is entering a “multilingual era” (p. 83). Case studies on The Times, New York Times, and The Economists show the life span and diverse preferences of Asian-born words in different press or countries. Social media platforms are where Asian words are treated as part of the English lexicon and used in daily life by the general public. Hashtags are used to trace the variation of Romanisations and the combination of the words. The former results from the unsmooth procedure (p. 89) and controversial pronunciation adaptation methods. Kiaer uses graphs to show the declining frequencies of “special treatment” (p. 93) to selected Asian words, which indicates their integration into the English lexicon in time.

To explore the effect of translinguism in the socio-linguistic field, the author takes a survey among British native university students and concludes that young British are open to translingual words and are more familiar with Japanese words. However, it should be noted that this result does not reflect the general attitude of young British, since education level may be a variable to openness to Asian words and culture.

 Words from English to East Asian Lexicon

The last part is about the existence of English words in East Asia. Kiaer introduces the directly imported words which closely link with history in the chapter, analyzes the formation mechanism and attitudes towards localized English words in the next chapter, and eventually identifies global words.

To analyze why and how the words are directly imported, the author introduces the linguistic landscape shift from Chinese (Sino-centric) to English in Korea and Japan, which results in the increasing familiarity of English rather than Chinese among citizens. Following Japan, Korea and China start to accept English as a language which brings in western culture and modernity. The expansion of the usage of words originated from English from science to genuine lexicon of daily life, from culture borrowing to westernization of local words can be observed and studied through media, where the author generalizes the way language usage pattern changes. Kiaer refers to survey results in Japan and Korea to conclude that the use of English words results simply from convenience with little prejudice towards the English words, though some scholars argue that the phenomenon reflects “flunkeyism towards the West” (Shin, 2009, p. 104). Linguistic experts believe it is beneficial for communication, though it raises awareness of the negative influence on the native lexicon.

Compared with Korea and Japan, China is much slower in exchanging lexicon with English words. Lexical exchanges are visible mainly on brand and shop names, in which semiotic values are adopted. The “non-sensical” (p. 134) use of English words in Taiwan is justified because of this. Kiaer refers to terms and theories in word-formation to explain the patterns of locally made word formation in Japanese and Korean as well as difficulties to hybrid Chinese with English. Four categories of global words are chosen for exploration and analysis: food words, fashion and cosmetic words, socio-cultural words and foreign branding. The author introduces their evolution and impact on the international lexicon, in which process the meaning of words expand.

The overall structure of the book is clear, presenting a complete view of the translanguaging phenomenon between the western and eastern worlds throughout history. The book shows the influence of history, politics, culture and language on each other, the fact that language is dynamic and is always negotiated by people, and forecasts the future trend of further translinguism. Terms and theories of linguistics are introduced with adequate frequency, plain explanation and examples, making the book both academic and friendly to newcomers. Nevertheless, the third part seems to be flooded with examples, making the logic harder to follow than previous chapters. The way of interpretation in this book respects the countries or regions mentioned in the book and the author puts the languages and their hybrid versions in equal positions. Kiaer sees the translingual process from a global view, which may result from her positive attitude towards translingual words, though it should be noted that the effect should be viewed more critically concerning its influence on local culture, education, and ideology. The book uses unsophisticated language to show research data and examples, which makes the book easily understood, even for those unfamiliar with Asian languages or without linguistic background.

References

Kiaer, J. (2019). Translingual Words: An East Asian Lexical Encounter with English (1st ed.). Routledge.

Kiaer, J. (2014). The history of English loanwords in Korean. Munich: LINCOM Europa.

Kiaer, J., & Bordilovskaya, A. (2017). Hybrid English words in Korean and Japanese: A strange brew or an asset for Global English? Asian Englishes, 19(2), 169–187.

Graddol, D. (2006). English Next (Vol. 62). London: British Council.

Shin, M.-S. (2009). The ‘Almighty English’ phenomenon in our era. Foreign Language Education Research, 12, 78–94.

Yi Xuan, Jia is currently finishing her bachelor’s degree at the University of Macau. Jia is especially enthusiastic about linguistics, cultural studies and education, where she wishes to continue her graduate studies.

 

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