Select Papers by Mashrur S Hossain
The Routledge Handbook of English Language Education in Bangladesh, 2020
Contrary to a common assumption evident in Bangladesh, reading a train schedule and asking for co... more Contrary to a common assumption evident in Bangladesh, reading a train schedule and asking for coffee in English are not the only things that learners learning English as a foreign language will encounter in real life. They must also learn how to use langu age creatively and responsibly. Incorporating literature in the language class is likely to help teachers mobilise learners to self-attain these two goals, that is, motivation and competence required to perform English creatively and critically. Enduring and engaging, literature is instrumental in enriching learners' language skills, communication skills, critical thinking skills, performance skills, and management skills. The present chapter, being a non-survey analytical research, addresses the creative/visceral and the critical/cerebral potential of literature and explores in three phases the impact of the use of Anglophone literatures in Bangladeshi English language classrooms. The first phase sets the background: It reviews two latest editions of English language textbooks and sketches out metacognitive approach to teaching-learning English. The second phase offers a guide to customised and effective use of literature in teaching-learning seven skills in a language classroom. The third phase outlines critical-affective pedagogy, which, I contend, is instrumental in generating language learners who, instead of demonising or deifying English, are eager and able to use English critically, expeditiously, and feelingly.
BOOK: Culture, History and Politics: South Asian Narratives, 2019
South Asian cultural tradition espouses an ontological worldview of the universe as unified One a... more South Asian cultural tradition espouses an ontological worldview of the universe as unified One and an epistemological understanding of unity-in-diversity, both endorsing the "both-and" paradigm which is in contrast with the Western "either/or" paradigm. An exquisite expression of this "both-and" paradigm is advaita or non-dualism, which through numerous modifications (e.g. Shankar"s Advaita vis-à-vis Nimbarak"s Dvaitadvaita) and appropriations (e.g. Sufistic wahdat al-wujud vis-à-vis Upanishadic Aham Brahma asmi) has had its resonance in the Indian poetics. The present paper is a critical study on the appropriative incorporation of advaita in three South Asian poetics-Sanskrit advaita, Tamil attutvita, and Bangla dvatadvaita-with a view to exploring interliterary unity and variety. Offering a reading of the "macrocsomic" (foundational aspects of literature) and "microcosmic" (generic divisions) aspects of the three poetics, the paper demonstrates how literary macrocosm and microcosm are interdependent and inter-illuminating. The paper contends that underscoring the inter-cultural appropriation of the notion of advaita in different climes and times suggests the continuity and contemporaneity of the corresponding "both-and" paradigm. The understanding of this inter-cultural inter-literariness is an informed way to resist West-centric cognitive colonization and break space for the celebration of pluralism in South Asian poetics.
Reading involves materials; e.g. the plate of transcription, and the bookmark. Reading also invol... more Reading involves materials; e.g. the plate of transcription, and the bookmark. Reading also involves muscular movement; e.g. touching the stone plate of transcriptions, shuffling pages, and pressing computer keys. In the braille system, a visually challenged person touches the text with fingers to read. But, reading can have materiality literally in the sense that reading has thingness, not because it stops working as a material, but because it starts working as such. The present 'posterticle' (poster-article) explores, experiences, and enumerates the tactility of reading literature, that is, the ‘consumptional materiality’ of literature - how contemporary (from surrealist to postmodern) literary texts engage readers in the acts of experiencing, instead of simply decoding, through tactuality. The paper contends that tactile reading re-forms our perceptions and praxis of reading as well as frees touch from mere utilitarianism and activates a new, raw connection with the world of senses.
DESIGN AUTHOR: Zaki Rezwan Rahin
This paper is a part of a project isolating strong-spirited female characters in select literary ... more This paper is a part of a project isolating strong-spirited female characters in select literary discourses with a view to understand if and how women respond to acts of violence against women. The present paper, in its feminist-psychoanalytic reading of Mahashweta Devi’s short story, “Draupadi” (translated by Spivak), situates the rape of Draupadi aka Dopdi against a complex scenario of oppressive state and ideological mechanisms: law, nationalism, castism, classism, mythopoeia, and patriarchy. Exploring and critiquing the voyeuristic and exploitative nature of conventional rape narratives, the paper contends that the narrative of the rape of Dopdi and her post-rape performativity subvert masculinist modes of narration of violence against women.
This paper addresses the problems and potential of teaching postcolonial literature in English in... more This paper addresses the problems and potential of teaching postcolonial literature in English in a Bangladeshi classroom. It isolates three problems that a Bangladeshi student may face while studying postcolonial literature in English: first, lack of information and cultural orientation which may problematize the contextualizing of texts; second, the problem of “english” which may confuse communication; and third, coming to terms with the use of indigenous performance elements which are often integral to the full import of the texts. The paper, then, offers a number of inter-disciplinary keys, or technologies of teaching, which may be used or modified to out-problem these intertextual and intercultural problems. Ranging from compiling ‘Banglish’ dictionary to culture 'shomiksha,' these technologies intend to appropriate the hegemony of ideological and moral indoctrination that education in English (read: the language of the colonizer) often affects and to encourage contrapuntal reading of literary works required in a world traversed by representational politics.
"Tribal Welfare in India," Ed. Jyotiraj Pathak, 2014
This paper discusses the political implication of victimhood in the study of tribal women in Indi... more This paper discusses the political implication of victimhood in the study of tribal women in India. Victimhood is a subject formation that ‘naturalizes’ the assumption that vicitimization is tragically inevitable and, therefore, there is little to do to redress violence. While phallgoocentric narratives promote female victimhood, radical feminists theories too, with a view to stop violence against women, ironically endorse essentialist notion of victimhood. It is recently that victimhood has entered the arena of political theory and promised to have significant impact. The present paper gives a feminist-psychoanalytic reading of Mahasweta Devi’s story, “Draupadi” to underscore if and how victimhood can be contested and transcended. It uses the phrase ‘tribal (female) vicitmhood’ to address the uniqueness of the situation of tribal women (being already doubly oppressed) who participate in rebellious activities. Concentrating on an incisive study of the rape of Dopdi (local variation of ‘Drauapadi) Mejhen and her post-rape action, the paper contends that translocation of the ‘sites of initiation,’ e.g. subalterneity and sexuality, has the potential of transcending victimhood that can have strong political intervention in modifying oppressive administering system and forwarding effective contract and treaties made for tribal welfare.
Discoursing Minority: In-Text and Co-Text, Eds. Anisur Rahman, Supriya Agarwal, and Bhumika Sharma, 2014
If ‘minority’ is construed as a hegemonic construct, some were born as ‘minority’ – e.g. dalit, b... more If ‘minority’ is construed as a hegemonic construct, some were born as ‘minority’ – e.g. dalit, black, and hermaphrodite – and some become ‘minority’ – e.g. bachelor, rape-victim, and school-rejects. Contemporary critical theories have, however, explored the conceptual incoherence of the majority/minority divides that the present paper addresses. It concentrates on ‘men’ (i.e. human beings inhabiting male subject position, including boys, guys, and hijras) who are ‘violated’ and thus, despite being ‘men,’ almost invariably inevitably – linguistically, mentally, culturally – minoritized. One of the most under-stated subjects in news, law, history, and theory, violated men are consistently mis- or zero-represented in film and literature. The paper addresses the issues in three inter-related sections. First section – “Manning Majority” – de-construes what we (who is this ‘we,’ by the way) understand as ‘minority’ to contend that ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ overlap and negotiate incessantly. Second section – “Minority Men” – identifies four major forms of violence against men. Focusing on sexual abuse, it shows how sexual violence against men is either hushed up or not properly perceived, and how, when identified, the boy or man abused is stigmatized, marginalized, and emasculated. This castration-complex-went-reverse often results in trauma, counter-violence, submission, and/or sexual re-orientation. The third section, entitled “I are”, reads three texts – Khaled Hosseini’s novel, The Kite Runner, A Revathi’s autobiographical The Truth about Me: A Hijra Life Story, and Onir’s film, I Am – that add insight into the predicaments of violated ‘men’ (?) from the outside (mainstream discourse), inside (minority discourse), and liminal (intervening discourse) perspectives respectively. The paper argues that sexual and gendered violence when enacted against and not by a man problematizes the majority/minority divides – man/woman, masculine/feminine, active/passive, heterosexual/homosexual – and exposes a liberating but disturbing realization that the signifier, ‘minority,’ slides endlessly in and through discourse. ‘Minority’ may thus become, referencing Deleuze and Guattari, ‘minor’ that not only destabilizes the notion of minority but also, rather more importantly, deterritorializes masculinity and celebrates gender nomadism.
New Perspectives in Diasporic Experience, EBook, 2014
This paper gives a queer reading of select South Asian films and literature with a view to re-con... more This paper gives a queer reading of select South Asian films and literature with a view to re-configure queer diaspora. Viewing diaspora as a topo-temporal phenomenon that negotiates between home and outdoor, stasis and kinesis, lived and imagined places, the paper argues that queer diaspora problematizes both the queer and diaspora. It is divided into three sections. The first section, entitled “We know what he means: the politics of ‘knowing’ and ‘meaning,’” charts in brief the movement in queer diaspora criticism from ‘territory-centred models’ to ‘border paradigm’ that, later, gave way to celebrate the ‘rhizomatic’ potential of diasporic formation and ‘diaspora space.’ The title quips at (read: queers) Alan Sinfield’s “we know what he means” in response to Frank Mort’s conception of a “well-established homosexual diaspora.” The second section – “We know what he means: the politics of ‘we’ and ‘he’” – gives critical reading of select South Asians texts that represent four types of queer diaspora: gay diaspora, lesbian diaspora, trans diaspora, and quuercrip dispora. Taking cue form these texts, the third section, entitled “May we ever ‘know’ what he ‘means’?” contends that imperial, racial, and masculinist binaries often complement and complicate queer diaspora. It contends that queer diaspora connotes movement and negotiation between power blocs, resulting in infinite possibilities of identity and subjectivity formations that are always in dispersal, always deferred. The curious point of negotiation is: queer diaspora deterritorializes diaspora and minoritizes the queer.
"Literature, History and Culture: Writings in Honour of Professor Aali Areefur Rehman", 2014, Department of English, University of Rajshahi, Bagladesh, 2014
This paper re-views four African Nobel Laureates in Literature – Wole Soyinka (Nigeria), Naguib M... more This paper re-views four African Nobel Laureates in Literature – Wole Soyinka (Nigeria), Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt), Nadine Gordimer (South Africa), and J M Coetzee (South Africa) – with a view to understanding their outsiderness and otherness vis-à-vis Nobel Prize which has for long been Eurocentric and white-centric. By offering a critical reading of their Nobel Lectures and Banquet Speeches as well as relevant Press Releases, Citations, and Award Ceremony Speeches made by the Swedish Academy, the paper explores how these writers have appropriated outsiderness and otherness and transformed them into involvement and engagement. This spirit of transformation resonates with the one with which the ‘Merchant of Death,’ Alfred Nobel morphed means of destruction into a ritual to promote activities devoted to, taking words from his will, “the greatest benefit” of humankind. This antinomous spirit of transmutation is essentially Ogunian.
Humanities Circle, Vol. 01 Issue 02, 2013, Central University of Kerala, India, 2013
Mahesh Dattani queers. His plays – both stage and radio – queer (read: destabilize) demarcating l... more Mahesh Dattani queers. His plays – both stage and radio – queer (read: destabilize) demarcating lines and controlling centres that limit human identities into types and stereotypes. The present paper gives a postcolonial reading of Dattani’s ‘queer’ plays to trace the movements that his characters (have to) make within/through/across/over different socio-political institutions. It reads through the predicament, rebellion, and revelry of Dattani ‘men’ to explore how queer guys are dispossessed and dislocated in varying degrees by the ‘racex’ (race-sex) axioms – family, nation, and class/caste – and how they respond to it. The paper contends that Dattani queers heteropatriarchal schema. First, the select ‘queer’ plays expose the façade of heterosexual marriage system, and, more importantly, bring forward alternative forms of family system. Second, the plays contribute to de-demonize orientalist representation of the non-West ‘queerity’ as well as break space for the Indian gay population. Third, Dattani aligns queer experience with class/caste issues to expose both the exploitative mechanism that the poor and outcast gay men are subject to and the potential affirmative relationships that these doubly-othered men may venture. The paper appreciates Dattani both for introducing queerness to the Indian stage not as an appropriated foreign praxis but as an 'aapna' one and for his attempt at resisting reductive identity politics and subverting compulsory heterosexuality.
Harvest, Jahangirnagar University Studies in Language and Literature, Vol 28, 2013, Department of English, Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh, Jun 2013
This paper addresses the problems of using film adaptations of literary classics in teaching the ... more This paper addresses the problems of using film adaptations of literary classics in teaching the same. Hybrid and interdisciplinary, adaptation involves more than generic shift and contextualization. It is essentially interpretative and intricately intertextual. Analysis and appreciation of adaptations, therefore, require rhetorical skill and knowledge of different modes of communication. Concentrating on the ‘film’ adaptations of ‘literary’ classics, the present paper is divided into three parts. First, it offers a short introduction to the complex nature and types of adaptation, and, second, it underscores the essential differences between two mediums – book and film – and how these differences impact on the study of adaptation. Taking threads from the first two chapters, the third one identifies four problems of using film adaptations in literature classes and recommends ways of adapting film adaptations for teaching literature. Reading adaptation vis-à-vis the contemporary era of postmodernism and post-disciplinarity, the paper contends that any study and use of film adaptation of literary classics should be dialogic and critical which will not only leave student-readers in/formed critics and consumers but also help them to transcend the high culture/low culture divide and garner tools to contribute significantly to both the media.
This paper reads “The eye of God in paradise” as an enriching critique of nationalism that often ... more This paper reads “The eye of God in paradise” as an enriching critique of nationalism that often seeks its legitimacy through war and racism as well as an incisive exploration of the pose of fraternity that we often make in a multicultural situation. Divided into two major sections named after two German characters, the paper, first, discusses how nationalism is arbitrarily formed and often expressed through extreme ethnocentrism and xenophobia, or what Baliber calls, 'external racism.' Second, the paper studies bizarre paintings of Dr Kroll, a mysterious doctor in a mental hospital, who paints closed door when he is in extreme of his moods: buoyant or dejected. The words ‘frontier’ and ‘fraternity’ – both culled from war-and-revolution vocabulary – in the title of this paper connote the binary oppositions which nationalism relies on: appearance and reality, the seen and the unseen, visible borders (frontier) that demarcate the bodies and felt emotions (fraternity) that connect. The combination of these two words foregrounds, on the one hand, racism, the internalized boundary that visibly and ritualistically excludes the ‘others,’ and, on the other, how visible borders lead to manufacture internal borders.
The ‘body’ has been instrumental in the act of inscribing and establishing hegemony: colonial, ra... more The ‘body’ has been instrumental in the act of inscribing and establishing hegemony: colonial, racial, sexual, gendered, etc. If so, the same site – the body being material, active, and performative – can be effectively employed to subvert hegemonic codings and reinstate subjectivity. One of the significant aspects of postcolonial theatre is this deconstructive representation of the body. In the recent years, Postcolonial Studies, Body Studies, Queer Theory, and Cultural Studies have re-read human discourses to explore how hetero-patriarchal discursive regimes have controlled and categorized ‘bodies’ to strengthen and maintain power. The present paper, in its reading of a Bangla play, Kit’tonkhola, addresses the issue of the policing and politicizing of the body. Written by one of the greatest Bangalee playwrights, Kit’tonkhola problematizes dominant narrativity (for example, the title itself is in a local language) and foregrounds the power of orature which in turn gives form – body – to the unspoken, unheard voices of the people who are defined – and thus othered and marginalized – by different aspects and movements of the body: so there are migrant labourers (like Shonai the epileptic protagonist), sensual sexworkers (like Bonoshree who commits suicide), homosexual hijras (like Chhaya who has been sexually exploited for long), and subaltern folks (like Dalimon who intend to transcend subalterneity but fails to gather the courage). Equally significantly does the play make a syncretic use of stage to accommodate diverse human experiences that inform the annual fair called ‘Kit’tonkhola.’ The paper argues that Kit’tonkhola, with its epical range of characters, spaces, and events, foregrounds the struggle and stubborn survival of nomadic and subaltern people who cherish a hope – dream probably – to move towards the land of transformation: Dukhaipur.
This paper gives a cultural reading of the representation of ‘man’ and masculinity in the fashion... more This paper gives a cultural reading of the representation of ‘man’ and masculinity in the fashion photo-discourse in Bangladesh with a view to explore if new concepts of masculinity are in the making. By analyzing eight components that form the composition of the visuals, the paper reads visuals of select print adverts and promotional materials with an aim to identify differing codes of masculinity which have arguably re-constructed ‘man’ as an object of desire – an object eroticized, sexualized, and fetishized. Promulgated and popularized through beauty salons, beauty contests, muscular celebrities, body care products, and fashion magazines, the word ‘beauty’ has been added to the conception of masculinity. The first part of a longer paper, this article intends to come to terms with two complex issues: first, if the recent spectacle of masculinity can be labeled as re-conceptualizing of masculinity, and second, if and to what extent it has subverted the representations and understanding of gender identities and the politics of gaze.
This paper gives a cultural reading of the representation of ‘man’ and masculinity in the Banglad... more This paper gives a cultural reading of the representation of ‘man’ and masculinity in the Bangladeshi haute couture visual discourses to understand if and how the re-conceptualizing of masculinity feeds capitalist, consumerist concerns. The paper views ‘masculinity’ as a cultural construct, always being negotiated with the notions of patriarchy and heterosexuality that have been fashioning masculinities and masculinizing fashion. Giving compositional and critical readings of some select visuals, the paper observes that contemporary men’s clothing has cashed in on a new use of sexuality and gendering to ensure good sales. Promulgated and popularized through beauty salons, beauty contests, muscular celebrities, body and hair care products, and fashion magazines, the concept of “attractiveness” has been added to the image of masculinity: this attractiveness is a combination of, for example, gym-toned body curves (e.g. the Ecstasy ‘dudes’), glowing cleanliness (e.g. the Artisti ‘men’), styled hair (e.g. the BANG! ‘boys’) and trendy accessories (e.g. the Soul Dance ‘guys’). This invocation of ‘metrosexuality’ blurs gendered binaries as well as leaves men sexualized and queered. On the other hand, the comparison standards set by the well-groomed, well-bodied models and their cool and osthir outfit have every possibility to lower the consuming men’s self-confidence and generate anxiety and depression. The present paper intends to come to terms with three problematics: first, if the metrosexual masculinity culture is overtaking the retrosexual one; second, if and how metrosexual culture affects consumer behaviour; and third, if and to what extent it has generated ‘masculine stress.’
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Select Papers by Mashrur S Hossain
DESIGN AUTHOR: Zaki Rezwan Rahin
DESIGN AUTHOR: Zaki Rezwan Rahin
This Talk intends to formulate Critical Health Theory or CHT as a critical-affective intervention in the relationship and inter-animation of literature and health, health care and medicine across culture and history. The 20th century witnessed the emergence of influential critical theories, from Feminism and Psychoanalysis to Postcolonialism and Gender Studies. Consequently, when these days we interpret or represent an individual or a community, we tend to address the issues of class, race, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, gender and psychology. What we tend to ignore is the issue of health; e.g. aging and medicinal practice. In English Studies, too, in our bid to go beyond the surface, we tend to ignore the surface, e.g. the physiological nature of wellness and unhealth. Even the body studies and disability studies tend to eschew the issues of health, disease, and ageing on the one hand, and medication, surgery and health humanities on the other. Back in 1993, Anne M. Wyatt-Brown wrote that “Ageing is a missing category in current literary theory”. The scenario has not changed substantially. It is in this context as well as apropos of the corona pandemic that I am exploring the exigency of a health-oriented critical theory.
My Talk unfolds in four sections.
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The first part, “From Lovesickness to Narrative Medicine: Exploring Critical Health Theory”, sets the background. Taking resources yet deviating from Psychoanalysis, Critical Health Humanities and Medical Humanities, this section outlines the nature and function of CHT – its 3 premises, 6 approaches and 21 major issues, ranging from birth/ing and gerontology to caregiving and nonhuman illness.
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The second section, “‘Stay, let me take breath’: Rethinking Disease” takes its title from Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground to foreground how this utterance not only betrays the narrator’s exhaustion but also conditions the flow of the narration. Addressing in brief the literary representation of disease and narrativizing as a healing mechanism, this section isolates two areas that CHT may explore. First, the compositional dimension: it includes critical surveys of the ways a narrator’s illness affects the narrative tone and point of a view of a novel. A more intriguing area is the way an illness, say fever, structures a narrative as we witness in the Abbasid Arab poet Al-Mutanabbī’s Qasida al-humma (The Fever Poem). Second, the hermeneutic dimension: it covers, on the one hand, how the reading of ‘suffering narratives’ may offer readers ‘psychic immunity’ and, on the other, how narratives facilitate healing practices, e.g. ‘narrative medicine’.
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The third section, “What ‘we are going to be’: Rethinking Ageing”, with its title taken from Simon de Beauvoir’s 1972 study on Old Age, explores how our adulation of youth and “সবুজ” and the corresponding regressive rhetoric of ageism has reduced old age to an unwelcome phase of life and endangered the living of the aged people. Offering a short survey of the representation of senescence in literature, this section concentrates on two gerontological areas that CHT may explore. First, the compositional dimension: it includes critical surveys of the contemporary novels of ageing, ranging from the “literature of senescence” (Loughman) to Vollendungsroman, or the ‘novel of winding up’ (Rooke). Second, the hermeneutic dimension: it includes the use of literature by the caregivers and physicians who take care of old people as well as what I termed ‘Gerontologic Reading’ – an age-oriented reading, which focuses on the ways in which non-young and old people interpret and respond to the representations of, say, old age and youth in literature.
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In the concluding section, “A Health Turn?: Disease and Ageing in the Time of Corona”, I foreground the necessity of critical-cultural reading of health, health care and medicine with regard to literature. That we, when we are young or middle-aged, tend to ignore and ridicule ageing and reduce it into something that we are happy to avoid, is a testimony to our confirmed knowing that all of us, apart from some accidents, today or tomorrow will eventually land in that foreign country, that another country. That another is simply ‘an other’ of us.
My Talk ends with the appearance of my mother, Mahmuda Begum Pauly, who I dedicate my Talk to. With this gesture, I would like to celebrate the spirit of continuity and renewal that physical ageing can affect but never stop.
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The paper unfolds in three sections. The first section, “‘Come, tell me what it is that I have gained’: Farsi Literature vis-à-vis Bangla Literature” offers in two sub-sections a short survey of the presence of Persian literature and language in South Asian Bangla language poetry. The first sub-section traces the influence of Persian literature, especially that of Jami, on medieval Bangla poetry, e.g. Shah Muhammad Sagir’s Yusuf Zulaikha, Daulat Uzir Bahram Khan’s Lailee-Majnu, and Alaol’s Padmavati. The second sub-section notes how several Muslim Bangalee poets including Farrukh Ahmed, the Poet of the Muslim Renaissance during British Raj, have made efficient use of Persian words and images. The second section, “‘So that their drunkenness was mine’: Farsi Poetics and Kazi Nazrul Islam” samples Farsi words as well as ‘sense’ imageries and metaphors, chiefly culled from Khayyam, Sa‘di, and Hafez (his Muse), that are abound in Nazrul’s poetry. On one hand, Nazrul shared the Farsi poets’ proclivity for visual imagery; on the other, in a bid to foreground acoustic pleasure, he risked transgressing poetic decorum and interspersing Farsi words that help enhance rhyme and rhythm. Taking cues from the preceding sections, the third section, “‘I will be the bulbul of dawn’: The Political Aesthetics of Farsi Imagery in Nazrul’s Poetry” demonstrates how Nazrul’s use of Farsi in Bangla poetry during Anglophone British colonization endorses ‘trialogic’ pluralism. The paper situates Nazrul in between the medieval Bangla poets who invested sufistic spiritualism with humanistic concerns and several modern Muslim poets who made use of Persian imagery to destabilize British colonization and to endorse Islamist nationhood with a view to underscoring how Nazrul in his deft use of Farsi words, images and metaphors promotes a poetics and a worldview that are both rooted and inclusive and globalectic also.
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Gathering insights from Chaos Theory, the paper re-views Nazrul’s use of Farsi literary figures in Bangla poetry – frowned upon by many including Rabindranath Tagore – as a venture of chaotic imagination. Invested with inspired originality and monstrous spontaneity, Nazrul emerged as at once a gate-crasher and a town-founder who dared the ‘edge of chaos.’
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The paper concentrates on the ways the Anglophone literatures of Ireland, Scotland and Wales have been uncritically crammed under the umbrella term ‘English Literature’ in Bangladesh. Such ‘Raj’-infested homogenization has led to two hegemonic pedagogic approaches: first, naturalization of the ubiquity and superiority of the literatures produced in England, and, second, invisibilization of the different, often oppositional, histories and trajectories of the Anglophone and non-Anglophone literatures of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. In response, this paper samples a strategy of delinking the ‘English’ Literature pedagogy in Bangladesh.
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The paper unfolds in three sections. The first section taps the emancipatory potential of delinking the study of the literatures of the British and Irish Isles in Bangladesh and proposes that the term ‘Anglophone Literatures of the British and Irish Isles’ replace the existing one (‘English Literature’) in designating the Anglophone literatures of England, the Irelands, Scotland, and Wales. The second section discusses what the phrase ‘critical archipelagic approach’ designates. Addressing the epistemological and geopolitical dimensions of the British and Irish Isles, the paper conceives of the archipelagic as a site of diatopical struggle for meaning, not between the centre and periphery, rather between the entities that have antagonistic yet inter-animating relation with each other. Endorsing critical archipelagic approach as a befitting delinking mechanism, the section explores the problems and potential of archipelagic curriculum in the departments of English at the Bangladeshi universities. The third section outlines a critical archipelagic mode of teaching literatures of the British and Irish Isles in Bangladesh. The paper contends that crafting and practising critical archipelagic mode in teaching ‘English’ literature in Bangladesh has every potential to offset cognitive colonization and activate a nuanced yet emotive and politically aware approach to the social, historical, cultural, and political factors that intervene in the production, distribution, and consumption of the literatures of the British and Irish Isles.
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Ekphrasis, or verbal representation of graphic representation, is a curious conversation between two genres of art – plastic art (painting, sculpture) and written literature. The paper conceives of ekphrasis as a dialogic interaction between two works of art that communicate through different sign-systems, thus “thirding” an/other meaning. In his enumeration of Lefebvre’s tripartite model of space, Edward Soja conceptualized “critical thirding-as-othering” as a strategy that rejects the imposed and closed “either/or” and generates “a third alternative, one that builds on a different logic, that of the both/and also.” Thus, thirding an ekphrastic poem is letting two works of art at play, so that a disordering – not simply an alternative – an/other meaning may appear with the conviction that the new meaning is not the last one.
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Sampling a number of ‘male’ ekphrastic poems including Randall Jarrell’s poem, “The Bronze David of Donatello” (1957) that re-gaze at the representation of men in painting and sculptures, the presentation offers an elaborate reading of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem, “Archaic Torso of Apollo” (1918), based on a marble statue of a youth’s torso (currently on display in the Louvre Museum). The thirding involves re-viewing of the gazes that the poem invokes, namely the extra-diegetic (the torso’s eye-contact with the audience) gaze and the viewer-reader’s gaze. Tracing how ‘male’ ekphrastic poems about spectacle of men ‘third’ the aesthetic and ethical moments enacted in the originary plastic art, my paper contends that ekphrastic poems have the potential to queer the look (visual representation or appearance of men in artwork) and the gaze (the consumption of those representations) invoked by the originary works of art. This thirding of viewing – i.e. complicating gendered dimensions of viewing – leaves the notions of aesthetics and beauty contingent and destabilizes the heteropatriarchal power/pleasure schema.
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Premised upon Aníbal Quijano’s contention that colonialidad (coloniality) has survived cartographic colonization, “de-linking” in Walter Mignolo’s conceptualization is a means of breaking off “from the coloniality of knowledge controlled and managed by the theo-, ego- and organo-logical principles of knowledge and its consequences.” Taking cues from Samir Amin’s desconnection (politico-economic de-linking), Quijano’s desprendimiento (epistemological de-linking), Guy Jucquois’ décentration (self-interrogation) and Mignolo’s dewesternization, the present paper conceptualizes de-linking as a politico-affective strategy that aggressively comes to terms with – recognizing, interrogating, appropriating, rejecting, replacing – the economical, epistemological and ideological domination and arrogance of Global North, especially in what we term Literature and World Literature.
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The paper unfolds in three sections. The first section isolates six areas that determine the reception (and lack thereof) of Global South literatures, namely linguistic imperialism, TNMC’s corporatization of publishing and worldwide circulation of books, notions of fame, the prize culture, de/westernized pedagogy, and what Roanne Kantor dubbed Booms in Literature of the Global South. The second section proposes three inter-locking phases of de-linking that the emergence and existence of Global South literatures in and outside of the ambit of Comparative Literature and World Literature testify. The first phase, chiefly devoted to self-representation, is dubbed ‘preliminary de-linking’; the second one, with its focus on strategic marketing and reception of Global South literatures, is dubbed ‘active de-linking’; and the third, with its projection of aggressive penetration of world market economy and critical-affective intervention in the Global North imaginary, is dubbed ‘pro-active de-linking.’ The third section combines Raimundo Panikkar’s “diatopical hermeneutics” and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s “poor theory” to assert that the phase of damage control and self-representation has reached considerable fruition. Re-viewing anger as a performative and transformative force, the paper contends that what is now required is a strategic yet aggressive form of de-linking the concept and operation of the contentious yet depoliticized phenomenon called ‘world’ and re-Orienting the world literature market vis-à-vis modern ethnic, national and world literatures. The paper wonders if the moment is ripe for Global South to re-loot the literary-critical touchstones and philosopher’s stones, an act that is long overdue.
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The paper unfolds in two core chapters. The first chapter, “The Poetics and Politics of Life Narrative,” offers in two sections a formalist reading of the two said narratives. Referencing the generic differences between autobiography and memoir and that between diary and chronicle, the first section explores if and how Sheikh Mujib’s life narratives accommodate the aspects of relational autobiography (Smith and Watson) and political memoir (Egerton). The second section addresses the questions of fact and fictionality, of the mythic-mermorializing operations of forgetting and remembering that a life narrative attends to. It explores the ways the said life narratives accommodate ‘lived’ memory (re-experiencing by writing) and ‘artificial’ memory (recalling insights, not simply raw information), a combination that helps one give voice to the clandestine and offer a chronicle of contemporary history. The second chapter, “The Ethics of Life Narrative,” offers an ethical reading of the two narratives. Differentiating morality (restrictive) from ethics (responsible), the paper conceives of ethics as a set of decision-making tools that are other-oriented. Gathering insights from ‘alterity’ (Levinas) and ‘ethicity’ (Harpham) of Ethical Criticism, this chapter in two sections concentrates on one’s response to and response-ability for the ‘internal’ and the ‘external’ others. The title of the first section, “‘As a man, what concerns mankind concerns me’: Intertextuality and Interpersonality,” alludes to the first sentence of Sheikh Mujib’s famous statement (3 May 1973) that has its resonance in, say, Terence’s Heauton Timorumenos and Bhagat Singh’s Jail Notebook. The section isolates in the two life narratives the elements of intertextuality that are tantamount to interpersonality as interpretive tools to read the narrator’s selving of one’s own vis-à-vis the other. Referencing the second sentence of the said statement, the second section is entitled, “‘As a Bengalee, I am deeply involved in all that concerns Bengalees’: The Self-Other Interanimation.” It explores how personalized memory employs both ‘retention’ and ‘invention’ mechanisms to form personal, collective, national, and human identities and histories.
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The title of the paper commingles the two selves – “a man” and “a Bengalee” – with a view to foregrounding its emancipatory potential apropos of Tagore’s conceptualization of nationalism and that of vishva (worlding). The paper thus explores how a life narrative charts the multiple personae of the observing subject and enables the subject to reconstruct and reconnect with others without conceding individual agency.
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The paper, on one hand, offers a short survey of the praxis of ecological and biological colonization of the Hill Tracts during the British Raj and Pakistan regime as well as in Bangladesh that has affected the range and nature of the river. A most glaring example of such domination is the installment of Kaptai hydroelectric dam that flooded homes and farmlands of numerous Chakmas, a non-Bangla-speaking ethnic community in Bangladesh, forcing many of them migrate. On the other, against the context of this internal and ecological imperialism, the paper samples the representation of Karnaphuli in medieval and modern Banglophone literature, e.g. ভেলুয়া সুন্দরীর পুঁথি (Ballad of Beautiful Bhelua), নছর মালুম পালা (Ballad of Nasar Malum), Daulat Qazi’s epic, সতী ময়না ও লোর চন্দ্রাণী (Sati Maina and Lor Chandrani), Kazi Nazrul Islam’s poem, “কর্ণফুলী” (Karnaphuli), Alauddin Al Azad’s novel, কর্ণফুলী, and Rashed Rouf’s poem, “কর্ণফুলীর নিজের কথা” (Autobiography of Karnaphuli) and in the folk songs in the dialects of Chittagong, e.g. Malay Ghosh Dastidar’s “ছোড ছোড ঢেউ তুলি” (In Wavelets) and Sanjit Acharya’s phenomenal “ওরে কর্ণফুলী রে, সাক্ষী রাখিলাম তোরে” (O dear Karnaphuli, be my witness) vis-à-vis the representation of Karnaphuli in Chakma Chakmophone literature (e.g. Pandit Karmadhan Chakma’s ballad, Baramasi of Sandavi, Krishna Chandra Chakma’s poem, “বরগাঙ তরে” (To You, Grand River), Mrittika Chakma’s play, Baan, and numerous popular songs including “তর আর মর দেগা ওয়ে ইদোত আগে মারিশ্যা লঞ্চানত” (Once we met on Marishya Launch) and “স্ববনত দেক্কোং বরগাঙও পার” (I dreamt of Grand River) and Chakma Banglophone literature (e.g. Saran Jyoti Chakma’s poem, “মানবেন্দ্র নারায়ণ লার্মা তুমি একবার এসে দেখে যাও” (Manabendra Narayan Larma, please visit our hardships), Shishir Chakma’s poem “আমার প্রাণের বর্ণমালা” (My alphabets, my life), Sabyasachi Chakma’s graphic novel, জুম (Joom), and Madal Band’s song, “কর্ণফুলীর কান্না” (Cry of Karnaphuli)).
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The paper explores if and how the politically-mobilized passionate representation of River Karnaphuli in Chakma Chakmophone and Banglophone literatures interacts with the largely romanticized representation of Karnaphuli in Bangla literature. Appropriating Dionýz Ďurišin’s “interliterary process” that situates world literature apropos of ‘national’ literature and modern ‘ethnic’ literatures, the paper contends that both the alleged ethno-linguistic domination evident in the ‘dominant’ discourses and the politics of resistance and survival manifested in the ‘minority’ discourses affiliate the issue to the planetary ideological nexus of domination and resistance, of oblivion and memory, of emplacement and translocation, recently foregrounded in the experiences of the migrants and the refuges throughout the world.
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The panel has three dimensions, which both explain what this panel meant by ‘Bangladeshi Banglophone Literature’ and the three modes of comparative reading that this panel employs.
1. Geographical dimension of “Bangladeshi”: Each paper addresses writings composed by the Bangladesh-born writers including the ones who settled in Bangladesh and the diaspora. The panel broaches the complicated mix of nationalism, ethnicity, and linguistic identity that the term ‘Bangladeshi’ invokes.
2. Linguistic dimension of “Banglophone”: In each paper, one of the ‘comparanda’ is composed in Bangla while the other (originally or in translation) in another language: Chakma (the language of a ‘minority’ ethic community in Bangladesh), English, and French. It is pertinent to mention here that this panel delimits its focus on the literary writings originally composed in Bangla. Therefore, it does not include the Bangladeshi Anglophone writings that have recently gained considerable space and currency throughout the world. The reason of this delimitation and exclusion is clear: acknowledging the severely limited recognition of Bangladeshi Banglophone literature in comparison with Bangladeshi Anglophone literature, we intend to explore, first, whether increasing translation into different languages may help Banglophone literature attain the substantial planetary recognition it deserves, and, second, whether Bangladeshi Banglophone literatures, with or without any genetic relation with other literatures, share the transcultural planetary nexus of ideas and praxis.
3. Thematic dimension of “Literature”: The panel approaches Bangladeshi Banglophone writers through three disciplinary paradigms of comparative literature: comparative poetics, comparative criticism, and comparative translation. Thus, it includes Banglophone literary criticism and theories, Banglophone writings ranging from poetry to fiction, and literary translation of Banglophone writings.
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Being small in magnitude, this panel does not claim to be representational nor does it intend to reduce Bangladeshi Literature into any homogenous rubric. Its chief aim is to initiate the necessary task of situating Bangladeshi Literature against a planetary scenario. Therefore, the panel has two broad objectives.
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First, it is premised upon a conviction that it is pertinent in this globalized world with increasing trans-cultural and inter-lingual exchange that we inquire and evaluate the paradigms that affect the recognition and reception of Bangladeshi Banglophone writings as World Literature. The evaluation takes into account two questions: the first question, ‘Is Bangladeshi Banglophone Literature a World Literature’ invites the second, rather unsettling question, ‘What motivations underlie this desire to be a World Literature’?
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Second, the panel explores the status of Bangladeshi Banglophone Literature on a planetary scale by reading its relation to the world and world literature on three fulcrums: invisibility (e.g. the range or lack of reception and recognition in the world of Bangladeshi Literature composed in Bangla), inter-animation (e.g. if and how Bangladeshi ideas and writings interact with the ideas and writings of the writers from the other parts of the world either through genetic relations or through polygenetic parallelism),and affinity (e.g. if and how Bangladeshi writings, even ‘minority’ literatures, share any planetary ideology nexus).
The panel wishes to initiate a dialogue on the potential and problem of situating Bangladeshi Banglophone Literature in the wider ambit of World Literature.
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Critical of capitalism, bureaucracy, and (neo)colonialism and dismissive of the bourgeois-mobilized 1905 and 1947 Partition of Bengal and that of India, Elias in Khowabnama posits his emancipatory vision not by recounting nationalistic jargon nor by chanting big names but by exploring human existence in people’s lived experiences. The novel has thus become an aesthetic-imaginative counterpart of history and a charged chronicle of the subaltern. Through a fantastic exposition of the dreams, myths, and memories of the rural and underclass folk, Khowabnama exposes the camouflaged discrepancy between the dreams-myths-aspirations and the facts-histories-politics of revolution and emancipation, manifested in the failure of the Tebhaga Movement (an agrarian peasant rebellion in 1946-47) and the success of the Partition (backed by Two-Nation Theory). However, Elias’ novel does not end in existential angst or unqualified frustration, rather it recognizes every failure or betrayal as inevitable yet surmountable block that defers but never destroys the success of anti-exploitative struggles.
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The present paper situates Khowabnama on two axes. On one hand, it evaluates the reception of Elias and Khowabnama in the contemporary world against the increasing recognition of Anglophone writings by Bangladeshi (diasporic) writers. On the other, the paper refers to several established and proposes several potential critical comparative readings of Khowabnama vis-à-vis, for example, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Anandamath (in representing Fakir-Sanyasi Movement), Ritwik Ghatak’s Subarnarekha (in representing the 1947 Partition), James Joyce’s Ulysses (in archiving indigenous spatiality), and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (in rewriting history through magic realism). The paper contends that Elias’ style, narrativity, thematic and vision not only invite inter-cultural comparison but also, rather chiefly, offer an ideological planetary nexus.
Jayasi’s allegorical Padmavat endorses dialogic pluralism. On one hand, the epic was composed in Awadhi-Hindi, a major Hindi dialect, but written in the Persian Nasta‘līq script. On the other, it is a tale of an arguably Sinhala-born converted Hindu Queen of Chittor told by an UP-born Sufi poet. What is more important for this presentation is to locate the time this tale appeared: it was the time when two Muslim invading forces – the Mughal and the Turk-Afghan – were in direct conflict in the then Indian subcontinent. It is, therefore, pertinent to consider Padmavat, as argued by critics like Momtazur Rahaman Tarafdar, as an attempt to uphold and encourage the increasing spirit of synthesis needed for the country. For example, the arguably sufistic lore syncretizes Sufist Wahdat al-Wujud (oneness of all entities) and Vaishnavite Paramatman.
Alaol’s Padmavati was a creative rewriting of Padmavat, emerged almost 90 years after the source text. That a Bangladesh-born Muslim poet landed in Arakan (now Rakhine in Myanmar), became a court poet there, and rewrote an Awadhi-Hindi sufistic tale in medieval Bangla is crucially significant to address. What made Alaol’s maha-kavya different from Jayasi’s is Arakan’s socio-political context. Padmavati is a piece of court entertainment, made at a time when Bangla-speaking medieval writers were switching from religious writing to corporeal romance. Arguably less metaphysical and more worldly than the source text, Padmavati still accommodates the spirit of dialogic coexistence; e.g. it morphs the Jayasian tragic existential ending into a melodramatic humanitarian one, and it deftly juxtaposes “anga” (body) and “ananga” (without body) in a verse describing the beauty of Padmavati, an image innovated by Alaol.
The present paper, in its contrapuntally comparative reading of Padmavat and Padmavati, is premised upon “ananga” (অনঙ্গ) – an ambivalent dvaitadvaita trope, meaning both “incorporeal” and Kama, “God of love,” thus connoting both-spiritual-and-corporeal, both-distant-and-engaged, both-either-and-or. The paper explores how two South Asian narratives framed “ananga” in different ways, yet they inter-illuminate each other and exemplify the South Asian “both-and” paradigm.
By isolating two trends in Comparative Translation Studies (CTS) – the ‘postcolonial’ and the ‘imaginarian’ – and locating its three major tenets of, the paper adopts comparative methods in addressing three issues related to comparative translation. The first section demonstrates how Comparative Translation Studies can offer useful insight into the ways different translations/interpretations of the same audio or audiovisual Source Text – e.g. interpreting, subtitles in a film, voiceover in a TV series – communicate differently to the audience, causing differing, even dangerous consequences.
The second section addresses the major thrust of Comparative Translation – i.e. comparing different modes or types of translation, and comparing translations of a single text, preferably a classic. It also samples how creative translations of the classics, say, Don Quixote and Hamlet, differ from the textbook translations and mass-market translations of the same text.
The third section, divided into three subsections, broaches the politico-lingual domination evident in translation and Translation Studies. First, it explores how “nativizing” and “foreigninzing” of a single text, translated from a non-European language to a European language, by two translators involve more than the relevance issue: it may implicate racist and colonial perspectives. Second, it locates the domination of European theories of translation in Translation Studies and explores if exposure to non-European (e.g. Arabic and Chinese) translation theories can be proved beneficial. Third, it investigates the Anglocentric and Eurocentric epistemological, linguistic, and market hierarchy in translation activities and studies. For example, a 2009 UNESCO repot on cultural diversity claims that 75% of total books in the world are translated from three languages; English, being the language of 55% of all books translated, tops the chart.
Addressing these issues, the paper contends that Comparative Translation Studies advocates rebabelization of the world. What is needed un this age of globalization and multiculturalism is making the Eurocentric translation flow balanced and participatory – no absolute dominance of one or two languages, no deletion of the ‘minority’ languages. It is a rebabelized world – a world of many yet communicative and understanding.
ABSTRACT
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The endorsement or critique of cosmopolitanism is often premised upon two issues: national or ethnic or cultural identities, and movement across the time-space continuum. What has remained relatively less attended is the role of cognitive-affective negotiation between sensoria and sensibility in one’s conceptualization and performance of cosmopolitanism. The present paper concentrates on the gustatory, one of the five human senses, in its exploration of gastronomic cosmopolitanism. Culinary culture, i.e. the perception, preparation, and consumption of food, is often determined by and determines the alleged uniqueness of a culture or a nation and informs the solidarity of the people in that culture or nation. It is, therefore, understandable that both breaking away with and letting the other intervene in one’s own culinary culture are deemed troublesome, even transgressive and threatening. Since cosmopolitanism involves coming to terms with the O/other, i.e. communicating with and learning from the O/other, discussions on cosmopolitanism must address the culture-bound gastronomic dimension of the self-other interaction, of what bell hooks dubbed “eating the other.”
For the present concern, let me isolate three psycho-somatic problematics of eating the other: first, the mental, e.g. the yuck feeling for the apparently inedible food in an exotic restaurant; second, the physiological, e.g. anxiety over the hygiene and the fear of indigestion; and, third, the ritualistic, e.g. the halal (permissible) and the “veg” issues. The question that this paper addresses is: do cosmopolitan individuals – from cosmopoliticians to culinary tourists – consider eating the other as a reasonable, desirable, and necessary condition for cosmopolitanism? The answer that available literatures provided is ambivalent. On the one hand, there are arguments that the practice of ‘exploratory eating’ is more than eating differences; it is also a move towards openness to other cultures. On the other, some consider it as a superficial or elite phenomenon, generating nothing more than ‘boutique cosmopolitanism.’ A more recent approach to dietary diversity is Bonding over Food, a popular practice of sharing reviews and photos of local and foreign cuisines, which helps both knowing about other culinary cultures and sharing one’s own culinary specialties with others. The present paper acknowledges the potential of such sharing of information and affect, but it wonders if such activities are enabling enough to mobilize one towards an inclusive sense of cosmopolitanism.
Exploring the potential of “eating the other,” “eating each other,” and “eating into the other” (as it is put in the title), this paper critiques the commodification of Otherness. It wonders if eating the other reduces diversities into fake homogeneities and if eating the other is a must for being a cosmopolitan. By gathering evidences and examples from culinary case studies, online travel narratives, personal experiences, and diasporic literary works ranging from Salman Rushdie’s _Midnight’s Children_ to Monica Ali’s _Brick Lane_, this paper intends to explore whether intercultural and transnational culinary exchange opens up a dialogic site for putting into test one’s adaptability and openness to other cultures. The paper contends that gastronomic cosmopolitanism, i.e. unprejudiced and critical-affective interaction with and openness to O/other culinary cultures, is an inter-illuminating essential condition for becoming a cosmopolitan who is able, referencing Butler’s stance on participatory ethics, to make an account of oneself.
ABSTRACT: Apparently automatic and independent, our perception and the operation of each of the five senses are shaped and conditioned by culture. This is particularly true of odour, a distinctive, usually unpleasant, kind of smell. While the sense of disgust related to odour (e.g. of pus and putrid meat) has derived partly from human " s behavioral immune system, a protection mechanism against contamination, it has often been a constructed affect, spatiotemporally contingent and ideologically loaded. Human sciences have evidenced that our experience of smell is less physiological and more perceptual. History has witnessed how reductionist olfactory practices and metaphors have been deployed to construct, stigmatize, and delimit the inferiorized " other " – woman smelling between her legs, stinking Black, or malodorous adivasi.
The paper is divided into three core parts: Rohingya orature, Rohingya poetry, and Rohingya painting. Adopting a critical-affective perspective, each chapter explores how Rohingya popular narratives approach three thematics: displacement/the past, emplacement/the present, and mobilization/the future. The first chapter reads Rohingya songs, collected from the Kutupalong Camp in Ukhia, Cox’z Bazar, which pitch both trauma and fortitude. The second chapter concentrates on select Rohingya poems including the ones written and translated by Haikal Mansor, a Dublin-based Rohigya activist. The title of this article is quoted from his poem, “Oh My Identity. And the third chapter re-views Rohingya paintings, chiefly the ones in “The Refugee Art Project” by Mohammad, who was held in Villawood Detention Centre for years.
On the basis of its reading of Rohingya ‘popular’ narratives, the paper proposes two modes of reading. The first one, i.e. spatiotemporal reading would place Rohignya art and literature in a broader, historical and nationalist arenas including Alaol’s Padmvati (পদ্মাবতী), the National Anthem of Myanmar, and Aung San Suu Kyi’s “Nobel Lecture.” The second mode, i.e. critical-affective reading would help us re-formulate our understanding of refugeehood in general and the exclusive features of Rohingya refugeehood. Taking thread from the re-conceptualizing of place and movement, the paper proposes that ‘translocation’ offers a better alternative than ‘dislocation’ and ‘displacement’ to accommodate the dialogic and empowering potential of refugeehood.
The paper develops through three interlocking sections. The first, “The Aquatic Wave” is on what Steve Mentz dubbed “Blue Humanities.” Concentrating on literature departments, this section divides this rich ambit into two broad categories: Ocean Literature and Ocean Cultural Studies. While the former would study “swimmer poetics” and world literature, from Homer’s Odyssey to Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan, from Melville’s Moby-Dick to Walcott’s Omeros, the latter would address a wide range of phenomena, from extreme-tourism to ocean-pollution, from the glorification of colonial poet-pirates to the subalternization of fishermen.
The second section, “The Hilly Turn” develops what we may call “Rock Humanities” and, following the pattern of the previous section, reads the prospect of this study in two categories: Mountain Literature and Mountain Cultural Studies. The former would study “riprap poetics” and world literature, from the Olympians to Cold Mountain, from Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” to Bibhutibhushan’s Chander Pahar while the latter would address a wide range of phenomena, from sublime meditation to hill-erosion, from Appalachian Bluegrass music to Chakma revolutionary aesthetics.
The third section, “To limbo: both too high and too deep,” broaches the thematics, ecocritical concerns, and political economy – to reason why it is important that we integrate “Blue Humanities” and “Rock Humanities” in literary studies. Mobilized towards two different extremes (the Deep and the High), oceans and mountains are contradictory yet complementary natural (embodied) and philosophical (abstract) phenomena. The present paper contends that, first, human intellectual and imaginative scaling of the oceans and mountains reflects human aspirations for scaling the Immanence and the Transcendence. Second, the evolution of human’s and humanities’ dealing with these “sublime” phenomena exposes and updates human’s ever-changing modes and frequency of interaction with nature, which have been proved to be increasingly detrimental to oceans and mountains. Third, literary representations (and the lack thereof) of oceans and mountains often endorse a poetics of otherizing that exoticizes, subalternizes, even invisibilizes the ‘folks’ whose livelihood and culture are embedded in oceans or mountains.
Touching upon the re-organization of structure and materealization of style performed by readers, the paper is divided into two major sections. The first one concentrates on ‘tactile poetry,’ i.e. poems that ‘mobilize’ tactile reading. On the one hand, there are Braille-inflected poems; on the other hand, there are ‘thing’ poems, such as Farhad Fozouni’s three-dimensional Blades Poetry (2009-2010) and Tehran [0002] Poetry, Tegel (2012). The second sections samples three types of ‘liberature,’ or what Aarseth called ‘ergodic literature’ that ‘enforce’ tactile reading. For example, Raymond Quemeau’s Hundred Thousand Billion Poems (1061), Marc Saporta’s “book in the box,” Composition No. 1 (1962), and Eric Loyer’s touchscreen poem, Strange Rain (2010).
The paper contends that tactile reading, though demanding, even elitist in some cases, has the potential of re-forming our perceptions and praxis of reading. On the one hand, the readers’ agency in re-formulating words/phrase/sentences destabilizes, even alters, the destructive contamination of ‘word virus’ (Burroughs), the discursive hegemony through which the establishment scripts and normalizes ideologies and controls cognitive and visceral movements. On the other hand, the readers’ active, or ‘authentic’ participation (or intervention) in re-structuring a plot (e.g. re-arranging pages, and scrolling) dismantles monolithic omnipresence of any figure of authority, providing readers, or ‘narratees’ (Todorov) renewed insights into the problematic nature of representation. The thingness of a book or a reading thus re-forms subject-object relations. More importantly, tactile reading frees touch from mere utilitarianism, and resumes “a certain ‘primitive’ connection with the world” (Švankmajer 2). All these may lead us to a culture of touch – i.e. an affective and vibrant culture which attests and caters to the diversities and pluralities of human senses.
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In South Asia, to be precise, the Anglophone literatures of Ireland, Scotland and Wales are uncritically crammed under a ubiquitous umbrella term ‘English Literature’ that refers to the literatures produced in the UK or Great Britain. The present talk explores, first, how geographical divisions and metageographical entities are culturally constructed, and, second, how terms like ‘English Literature’ disregard the distinct literatures of Ireland, Scotland and Wales – three countries of the Anglo-Celtic Isles. The popular categorizing of England and Ireland as some homogenous ‘West’ eschews the imperializing politics that operates between different European countries: thus, one imperializing category (West, British) conceals or confuses other imperializing/imperialized/regional categories (England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales).
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Taking cues from John Brannigan’s “archipelagic” mode of reading and Walter Mignolo’s conception of delinking, my talk outlines ‘critical archipelagic approach’ as an effective methodology to read and teach the Anglophone literatures of Ireland, Scotland and Wales in the English departments of South Asia. I contend that the ‘both-and’ paradigm (instead of ‘either/one’) is an accommodative yet dialogical approach to conceptualize and communicate with the geopolitically ‘different’ entities.
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Sampling a number of film adaptations and literary adaptations (novelization), my talk offers critical reading of three inter-artistic mechanisms at which books and films differ and complement – narration, production, and consumption. Thus it shows how a film adapts – mutes, mutates, accentuates – the representational technologies of a novel.
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It is important that the departments of Literature and of Film Studies concentrate on film and literary adaptations, but it is equally necessary that the studies are critical, informed and responsible: the teachers and the students must command the basic understanding of the different ways in which films and literature communicate, especially when they are appreciating and evaluating an adapted work of art.
The discussion unfolds in three parts. The first part conceptualizes tactile literary texts as objects that are meant to be seen and heard and touched and manipulated as well. My talk samples two major types of “tactile literature”: tactile poetry (e.g. tactual poems, thing poems, and touched poems) and liberature (e.g. mobile books, poemobile, and touchscreen poetry).
The second part outlines two major types of creative tactile reading: mobilizing tactility (e.g. Farhad Fozouni’s three-dimensional thing poems, Blades Poetry (20009-2010)) and enforcing tactility (e.g. Marc Saporta’s book-in-a-box, Composition No. 1 (1962) and Erik Loyer’s touchscreen-poem “Strange Rain” (2010)).
The third part takes cues from the negotiation between touch taboos and the emergence of touchability in art and literature. It contends that creative tactile reading has the potential to re-form our perceptions and praxis of reading: it re-accentuates readers’ agency in re-formulating words/phrase/sentences and it dismantles the monolithic omnipresence of any figure of authority. The thingness of a book or a reading thus re-formulates the assumed subject-object relations as well as frees touch from mere utilitarianism.
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The present reading is premised upon three questions: first, if and how violence constructs and preserves national identity and self-identity; second, if the invocation of 'violence' (e.g. "May the tyrant"s foul blood water our furrows" in France"s _La Marseillaise_) in a song that may have fit the turmoil of the emergence of a nation suits the same way when that song is adopted as a national anthem and being sung by, say, the school children every day; and, third, how a national anthem takes into account the 'other.' The paper unfolds in two core sections. The first one, on the poetics and politics of 'violent' national anthems, locates and interprets violent words and images in 17 national anthems. The second section addresses the problematics of 'violent' national anthems: it locates and critiques the negotiation between violence and revolution and that between violence and nation-formation. Reviewing Tagores' conceptualization of the 'visva,' Fanonian constructive violence, Levinas' alterity, Butler's grievability, and Appiah's rooted cosmopolitanism, the paper explores the tension between a country's 'chauvinistic' national anthem and projected cosmopolitanism. It demonstrates how a national anthem often foregrounds the hierarchies of the other: while it upholds the ethnic and spatial identities of the 'internal' others and finds the loss of their rights and lives as grievable, it tends to discount the existence of the 'external' others and consider the violation of their rights and lives as non-grievable. Such biased if not entirely unethical propositions jeopardize the questions of humanity, of cosmopolitanism, and of 'visva.'
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Apropos of the contemporary rise in ethno-chauvinism and refugee crisis, the paper reasons that increasing critical ethical-empathic understanding of the contingency of nationalist discourses is likely to generate culture of critical tolerance and environment of conciliation.
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The paper unfolds in three chapters. The chapter, entitled "Archipelagic Histories: The History of the British Isles," offers a short critical survey of the political, literary, and linguistic histories of Ireland, Scotland and Wales that are inextricably related to British and English imperialism. The next chapter, "Archipelagic Narratives: Approaching Literatures of the Irelands, Scotland, and Wales," is divided into two sections: the first section offers a critical inventory of major Irish, Scottish, and Welsh writers while the second one outlines an "archipelagic curriculum" for the departments of English and that of Comparative Literature in Bangladesh. It explores the problems and potential of incorporating Irish, Scottish and Welsh writers as Irish, Scottish and Welsh, not simply as British or English, at the tertiary level in Bangladesh. The chapter entitled "Archipelagic Mode: Teaching Literatures of the British Isles in Bangladesh" formulates an "archipelagic approach" that is likely to render the study of Anglophone literatures (composed in English and translated into English) of the "British" Isles in Bangladesh culturally and socio-politically nuanced.
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The project contends that crafting and practising an archipelagic mode in teaching "English" literature in Bangladesh has every potential to offset cognitive colonization and activate a nuanced yet emotive and politically aware approach to the social, historical, cultural, and political factors that intervene in the production, distribution, and consumption of the literatures of the British (and Irish) Isles.
The seminar moves in three phases.
• The first phase, “Appearance/Arrival,” addresses the ‘spatial turn’ in critical theory, and the development of Geocriticism as a critical tool to study how place is produced, named, used, and re-written in the contestory history of culture.
• The second phase, “Venture/Discovery,” accommodates a short survey of geocritics, Geopoetics, and Nissology or Island Studies. Concentrating chiefly on Robert Tally’s “literary cartography” and Bertrand Westphal’s enumeration of ‘real’ and ‘fictional’ spaces, this section explores how place and (literary) texts interact.
• The final phase, “Wisdom/Extortion,” demonstrates how Geocriticism can be applied in literary writing and criticism. For example, place in a novel is no longer deemed ‘setting’ only, meant to foreground the characters, nor is it viewed simply as a fixed, objective reality; place is a construct, a process, and a force as well.
The seminar seeks to reiterate the necessity of attempting “a new multi-perspectival view of ... exchanges and flows” (Wegner) in our ‘mapping’ of geopolitical space at a time when it is both open and entrapped.
Images are collected from the Net (for educational purpose only)
Images are collected from the Net (for educational purpose only)
Images are collected from the Net for learning purpose only.
Images are collected from the Net for learning purpose only.
Images are collected from the Net (for educational purpose only)
Images are collected from the Net for educational purpose only.