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ESTERINO ADAMI
Challenging the Language of Liminality:
Voicing/devoicing in Contemporary Indian Writing
Contemporary India is a very complex cultural scenario in which the fixed ‘categories’ of tradition, casteism and religion are juxtaposed with, and necessarily affected by, the emergence of new globalising social and economic forces that aim to implement modernity and welfare (Krishnaswamy 2005). However, the presence and related question of (self)representation of marginal communities still constitute a significant cultural arena as it oscillates between voicing and devoicing practices (Kothari 2013). Here I intend to offer a preliminary discussion of how English-language texts and discourses contribute to this debate and I aim to tease out the efforts of some present-day Indian authors to shed light on ‘minority’ groups such as Tribals, Adivasi and Dalit (Nayar 2014). Specifically I shall examine three case studies that constitute different narrative and rhetorical renditions of the idea of liminality and its perception across the wide social context (Dawson Varughese 2013) . My research questions will concern the linguistic construction of identity in texts, the stylistic peculiarities of new Indian English writing and the reception and reader-response of such provocative works.
The three case studies that will be under consideration are: 1) the novel We Need a Revolution (2016), through which writer and publisher Sachin Garg touches upon the raw nerve of Tribals segregation and marginalisation 2) the short stories collected in The Adivasi Will not Dance (2015) that allow Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar to controversially depict and expose his own community 3) the essay Dalit Worship English Goddess by TKhalliGopalKrishna (2012), built upon the utilitarian conceptualisation of English metamorphosed into a new benign Goddess for peripheral subjects. My analysis will be explicitly interdisciplinary by combining the tools, theories and frames of different disciplines, in particular drawing upon postcolonial critique, critical stylistics, cultural and linguistic studies.
Bio
Esterino Adami is associate professor of English language and translation at the University of Turin, Department of Humanities. His main research interests include postcolonial writing, stylistics, sociolinguistics and cultural studies. He has written extensively on lexical aspects of Indian English, diasporic literatures and ELT in postcolonial settings. He has recently authored Railway Discourse. Linguistic and Stylistic Representations of the Train in the Anglophone World (2018) and edited Other Worlds and the Narrative Construction of Otherness (2017, with F. Bellino and A. Mengozzi). Currently, he is working on the conceptualisation and commodification of English and its metaphors in India.
CARLOTTA BERETTA
Zoomorphism and Dehumanisation in Neel Mukherjee’s A State of Freedom
Neel Mukherjee’s latest novel, A State of Freedom (2017), is a collection of five interconnected short-stories which revolve around the themes of poverty, violence and migration. Many of these short stories feature characters that strive for a better life, “a state of freedom” from hunger. In the novel, “the poor” appear stuck in an endless samsara of poverty and need, embodying what Johan Galtung calls “structural violence” (1969) and Rob Nixon “slow violence” (2011). Indeed, as both Galtung and Nixon emphasise, invisible and subtle forms of violence mostly affect invisible and “disposable” people. Always interested in the issues of violence and social alienation, which feature extensively in his previous novels as well, in A State of Freedom Neel Mukherjee explores the condition of these “wretched of the Earth” through the use of grotesque, surreal and zoomorphic images. Grotesque realism is nothing new in Indian English fiction, as its founding father Salman Rushdie frequently employs it. Mukherjee follows in this tradition and uses metaphorical human-animal metamorphosis to describe violence, oppression and wretchedness. In this respect, the third short story in the novel is particularly interesting, as it deals with the descent into “bare life” (Agamben 1995) of a qalandar, the owner of a dancing bear. In this short story, the device of zoomorphism intersects with the theme of the relationship between humans and animals, and with the issue of their ethical status. Thus, zoomorphism paves the way for a discussion of what it means to be human or animal, and how violence affects all living beings.
Bio
Carlotta Beretta is a PhD candidate at the Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna. Her PhD dissertation examines the representation of Calcutta /Kolkata in the works of Amitav Ghosh, Neel Mukherjee, Amit Chaudhuri. She has published reviews and articles on both Amitav Ghosh and Neel Mukherjee. Her latest article is “Righting the Subalterns? Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others and the Naxalite Movement” (Indialogs 2019, forthcoming).
MIRKO CASAGRANDA
From the “Chutnification” of English to Multilingualism in Deepa Mehta’s Film Adaptation of Midnight’s Children
In the article “The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance”, written for The Times in July 1982, Salman Rushdie defined the language he used in Midnight’s Children as a sort of “chutnification”, i.e. the incorporation of elements of Indian languages and dialects into English as a literary device to convey the sociolinguistic background of the novel (Mendes and Kuortti 2017).
An example itself of linguistic hybridisation, “chutnification” – which combines the Hindi word chaṭnī (adapted in the West as chutney) and the English complex morpheme -fication – includes inflection and derivation, borrowings, compounds, neologisms and Indian expressions. Hence, one may say that the literary language of Midnight’s Children has the “flavour” of chutney, and its spiciness questions and challenges the monolithic representations of English. In the homonymous film directed by Deepa Mehta in 2012, some parts of the novel have been adapted and “translated” into other languages, namely Hindi and Urdu, in order to present the audience with a more realistic social milieu. Thus, the film relies mainly on multilingualism and codeswitching to convey the plurality of languages spoken in India. In other words, whereas the supposed homogeneity of English is subverted in the novel from within the language employed by the author, in the film this takes place from without English, i.e. thanks to the juxtaposition of several codes.
This paper aims at analysing the parts of the novel and the film where this occurs and at assessing to which extent such linguistic phenomena are related to the cultural contexts in which the two texts were produced and to the discourses on Indianness at the turn of the new millennium.
Bio
Mirko Casagranda (PhD) is Associate Professor of English Linguistics and Translation Studies at the University of Calabria. His areas of interest include onomastics, postcolonial Englishes, ecolinguistics, gender studies and translation studies. He has published articles on gender and translation, ecocritical discourse analysis, multiculturalism and mulitilingualism in Canada, toponyms and trade names. He is the author of the books Traduzione e codeswitching come strategie discorsive del plurlinguismo canadese (2010) and Strategie di naming nel paesaggio linguistico canadese (2013).
ROSSELLA CIOCCA
Mothering the Horror. Rhetoric of Survival in Arundhati Roy’s
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
If, in general, there has been a move away from the huge ambition of the average monumental postcolonial novel of the 80s and 90s (Armadeep Singh), Arundhati Roy’s much-waited-for second novel still indexes a large number of important historical events in the interest of broad, but also deep, representation. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), weaving together the stories of a whole universe of people, and following in particular the intersecting destinies of some queer mothers and some discarded daughters, spans across decades and locations, touching a number of the gloomiest and murkiest episodes of modern Indian history, from Bhopal gas leak disaster to Kashmir’s insurgency, from Adivasis’ displacement and dispossession on the backdrop of the Government-Maoist confrontation in Central India, to the Godhra train burning and subsequent mob killings in Gujarat. Continuing in fictional terms her life-long commitment against neo-liberal depredation of Indian ecological resources and her unrelenting critique against the threats the rise of Hindu nationalism poses to democracy, Roy confirms nonetheless a gift for storytelling which is genuinely, and almost daringly, literary. Aim of this paper is to assess not only the breadth of this novel’s capacity to tackle thorny political issues, giving voice to traditionally silenced social actors, but also to account for its quintessentially artistic devotion to stylistic expertise and original rhetorical proficiency.
Bio
Rossella Ciocca is professor of English and Anglophone Literatures at the University of Naples, “L’Orientale”. She has published volumes on Shakespeare (Il cerchio d'oro. I re sacri nel teatro shakespeariano, Officina, 1987, La musica dei sensi. Amore e pulsione nello Shakespeare comico-romantico, Bulzoni, 1999; and has edited and translated some Shakespearean plays (The Taming of the Shrew, Bompiani, 2015; Life and Death of King John, Bompiani, 2017). Other fields of research are the representations of alterity in the novel (I volti dell’altro. Saggio sulla diversità, Unior Press, 1990), postcolonial literatures and the contemporary novel in particular the Indian novel in English (Indian Literature and the World. Multilingualism, Translation and the Public Sphere, with Neelam Srivastava, Palgrave Mcmillan, 2017).
ALESSANDRA CONSOLARO
Rescuing from In/visibility? Issues in Translating Hindi Adivasi Literature.
The so-called Tribal or Adivasi people represent one of the most marginalized groups in Indian society. Literature has become for them a field of struggle and Adivasi writers are now entering the literary field in major regional languages. Jacinta Kerketta is a journalist and poet from Jharkhand who succeeded in becoming acclaimed in the Hindi literary world and abroad. In my paper I will discuss the English, German and Italian translations of her first poetry collection, Angor, addressing issues of visibility, indigeneity and citizenship.
Bio
Alessandra Consolaro is Associate Professor of Hindi Language and Literature at the University of Torino (Italy). She completed her M.A. in Sankrit (University of Milan 1986) and Hindi (University of Torino 2000). She got a Fulbright scholarship in 1991 and studied at the Jackson School of International Studies (South Asia) of the University of Washington (Seattle, USA). She obtained her Ph.D. in History, Institutions and International Relationships at the University of Pisa, Italy (1997). She was visiting researcher at the University of Uppsala (Sweden) in 2010. Her field of interest and research is marked by interdisciplinarity and is based on feminist and gender critique; history of the Hindi language ; colonial and postcolonial theory; contemporary Hindi literature: critical study and translation. Recent publications : Jacinta Kerketta, Angor, Italian translation from Hindi, Torino: Miraggi 2018; “Theorizing Dalit Literature.” In Dalit Assertion and its Space in Literature, edited by Santosh Kumar Sonker, pp. 25- 52. Delhi: Yash Publishers 2018. ISBN: 978-93-84633-67-7; “For Her Eyes Only: Embodiment in Prabhā Khetān’s Autobiography.” Archiv Orientální 85(2017), pp. 47-65. ISSN:0044-8699; "Barking at Heaven’s Door: Pluto Mehra in the Hindi Film Dil Dhadakne Do." Humanities 2017, 6, 16.
LUCIO DE CAPITANI
Framing Queer Indian Narratives: Strategies of Representation in R. Raj Rao’s The Boyfriend, Neel Mukherjee’s Past Continuous and Amruta Patil’s Kari
Since the early 2000s, queer representations have become increasingly frequent in the Indian literary scene. The extent and the ways in which authors can forefront their engagement with queer presences, however, vary considerably, ranging from texts that are explicitly focused on queer experiences and politics to works that treat queerness as simply another element in a larger human tapestry. This paper tries to explore this variability by comparing three works of the 2000s and their strategies of representation of queer characters and themes. R. Raj Rao’s novel The Boyfriend (2003) is written with an activist’s mindset: a love story between a middle-class, middle-aged Brahmin journalist and a young Dalit boy, it employs a style and a narrative that prioritize the reader’s sociological understanding of Bombay’s gay subculture of the early 1990s, including its class and caste complications. Neel Mukherjee’s novel Past Continuous (2008) is less straightforward, juxtaposing the story of Ritwick, an orphaned Bengali youth who moves to England to study at Oxford, and a retelling of Tagore’s classic The Home and the World. Hardly concerned with identity politics, Mukherjee’s novel nevertheless employs the language and the psychological insights of a (racialized, migrant) queer experience to reframe the 19th century colonial encounter between Anglo-Indians and Bengali Bhadraloks. Amruta Patil’s graphic novel Kari (2008) takes yet another approach, seemingly representing the life of her eponymous lesbian protagonist as a “normally dysfunctional” look at present-day Mumbai. However, a few passages – most notably, the double suicide attempt that opens the novel – powerfully and unequivocally root the narrative within the history of a specific gender subjectivity.
Bio
Lucio De Capitani holds a Ph.D. in Modern Languages, Cultures and Societies from the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. His interests include colonial, postcolonial and world literatures (especially Indian writing in English), the connections between anthropology and literary studies, activist writing and literary journalism. He has published papers on Amitav Ghosh, Anita Desai and Robert Louis Stevenson.
GIUSEPPE DE RISO
Laying the Specters of Narration: Discursive Absences in Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje
This paper proposes an analysis of Anil’s Ghost (2000) by Michael Ondaatje in the attempt to overcome what Ruvani Ranasinha (2016) has defined a marginalisation of Sri Lankan literary production, both in the canon of contemporary South Asian novel, and post-colonial criticism or (more generally) academic inquiry. Set in a Sri Lanka ravaged by civil war, the novel deals with the investigations of Anil, a forensic anthropologist, returned from the United States to her native country in order to recover the identity of a forlorn skeleton abandoned in a zone protected by the government. In her surveys to solve the mystery behind the identity of the nameless victim and uncover the truth about the mass killings plaguing the region, not only does Anil’s quest represents a new generation’s attempt to give voice to the voiceless victims of wars and national conflicts, but also provides her author a narrative space where voids and gaps make room for what Bachtin saw as the ghostly, terrifying and, ultimately, unaccountable truths which, in the novel, make visible those processes through which social authorities, national or local, affirmed their symbolic formations at a post-transitional time, such as the Sri Lankan Civil War at its climax, when an old millennium had just given way to the new.
Bio
Giuseppe De Riso is researchher in English Literature at the University of Naples “L'Orientale”, where he also completed his Ph.D. in Cultural and Postcolonial Studies of the Anglophone World with a dissertation entitled “The Body Expanded: Agency, Representation and Affect in Tridimensional Videogames”. He is also editorial assistant and webmaster for Anglistica AION, an interdisciplinary journal of the Department of Literary, Linguistic, and Comparative Studies of the University of Naples “L'Orientale”. He published two books: Affect and the Performative Dimension of Fear in the Indian English Novel: Tumults of the Imagination (Cambridge Scholars, 2018), and Affective Maps and Bio-mediated Bodies in Tridimensional Videogames of the Anglophone World (Tangram Edizioni Scientifiche, 2013). He also published different treatises on post-colonial literature and digital media, such as “Bodily Remediations in Geetanjali Shree’s The Empty Space”, “Of Smoke and Mirrors: Tribal Women in Postcolonial India” and “Gaming Gender: Virtual Embodiment as a Synaesthetic Experience”. He is currently researching on the fictional and theoretical writings of Salman Rushdie.
DAVID LANDAU
The Nano Story and New Expression of Love in Delhi
The last few years have seen the entrance of a new genre of Hindi fiction called “Laprek”, short for laghu prem katha (short love stories). Published under a newly created subsidiary of Rajkamal Prakashan, one of Hindi literatures dominant publishers, books are priced at 99 rupees and are pocket size. These books are also alternatively called “facebook fiction” or “nano stories” as they originate from facebook posts and blogs. My paper will focus on two books from the series, the first by Ravish Kumar, a famous Hindi language TV journalist who published Iśq mein śahar honā, इशक मेँ शहर होना,( A City Happens in Love) in 2015 (also available in English translation). Within one year it sold thousands of copies going into four print runs, an amazing commercial success for Hindi language fiction. Kumar’s stories focus on young lovers meeting across Delhi trying to find a quiet moment together. In these short vignettes which are also a love story about Delhi, such as young couples learning to hold hands in the metro by hiding their hands under a backpack while seated. The second book is Girindra Nath Jha’s Iśq mein māṭī sonā, इशक मेँ माटी सोना (Gold Dust in the City). Jha, a journalist like Kumar, runs a popular blog and some of his stories focus on migrants in Delhi.
In the presentation I will show how these “nano stories” are also shaped by the shared experience of moving to, and through the city of Delhi. I will also engage with the question of how this form of the “nano stories” has arisen. More specifically, my reading of these two books and the new genre they represent will discuss the disappearing boundaries between medias, namely self publishing online and the move to print. Rather than being threatened by the burgeoning online Hindi scene, the “Laprek” series shows how publishers can profit and expand their readership by incorporating new voices and genres developed online.
Bio
David Landau submitted his PhD at SOAS, University of London in 2018. At the moment he is preparing his PhD titled: “Writing from the Margins: Muslim Authors in Hindi and ‘Minor Literature’” for publication. David's forthcoming research project focuses on the influences of Hindutva on Hindi literature published since the 1992 demolition of the Babri mosque and the changing portrayal of social relations in North India.
MARIA LAUDANDO
The Remains of the Millennium: Intimations of Obsolescence in Anita Desai’s and Salman Rushdie’s Late Short Fiction
The paper focuses on the theme of obsolescence as the secret and relentless counterpart of ‘newness’ which pervades both Anita Desai’s triptych of novellas The Artist of Disappearance (2011) and Salman Rushdie’s short story “In the South” (2009). The three stories beautifully crafted by Desai interweave the urge and failure of creative aspirations both with the residual but oppressive spell of the British imperial past and the deafening pressures of the digital post-millennial world. Places and characters are mostly relegated at the margins of modernity (a remote rural village, a peripheral college, an abandoned house in the mountains) and deeply haunted by a sense of dislocation and disappointment which deflagrates with the accumulation of wasted opportunities. In Rushdie’s tale a similar entanglement of memory and oblivion is contrapuntally refracted through the eyes of two octogenarians who play the part of each other’s alter ego and thus foreground the mutual interrelatedness of success and failure, hope and defeat, engagement and detachment. The story, set in the very ‘south’ of the city of Chennai, on the eve of those fateful tides which were to swallow so many lives and places on 26 December 2004, amplifies the theme of individual loss with the stubborn resignation of apocalyptic expectations which ‒ from the very beginning ‒ unfold their relentless plotline with the wistful echoes of ‘an ancient tale’.
Bio
C. Maria Laudando (PhD University of Manchester, 1994) is Professor of English and Anglophones Literatures at the University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’. Her privileged areas cover eighteenth-century studies, with a monograph on Sterne’s narrative (Parody, Paratext, Palimpsest, 1995) and the Italian translation of Hogarth’s treatise (L’analisi della Bellezza, 1999); female writing; intertextuality and comparative literature; Shakespeare; translation and postcolonial studies (she coedited a thematic issue on Indiascapes with R. Ciocca for Anglistica – AION 14.1, 2008) and, more recently, the relationships between literary, visual and performing arts, on which she has edited two volumes (Reti performative, 2015; Del Performativo/On Performativity, 2017) and co-edited two issues: Attention, Agency, Affect: In the Flow of Performing Audience (with A. Notaro for Anglistica – AION 18.1, 2014) and Performing Narrative across Media (with M. Minier for Textus 18.2.2018). Her recent publications also include a monograph, La lettura entra in scena. Between the Acts di Virginia Woolf (2012), and the volume Transnational Subjects: Cultural and Literary Encounters. Proceedings of the XXVII AIA Conference (2017), coedited with R. Ciocca and A. Lamarra.
AAKRITI MANDHWANI
Reading the Hindi Bestseller List
In 2017, the Dainik Jagran Prakashan Group, best known for publishing Dainik Jagran, the newspaper with the largest circulation in India, partnered with Nielsen Bookscan to release the first Dainik Jagran Nielsen Bookscan Hindi Bestseller list. Comprising the top ten selling books of Hindi fiction, Hindi non-fiction, and translations, this was the first initiative of its kind to systematically numerate the relative success of bestsellers in Hindi. The list was unveiled as part of the 2017 campaign of the Dainik Jagran Prakashan Group called “Hindi Hain Ham,” or “We are Hindi.” To mark the campaign and the occasion, the publishers stressed that they were starting this quarterly survey list in order to give “Hindi literature the respect and credit that it deserved”. This aim shall be measured against the trends that the list unearths. In the proposed presentation, I shall focus on unpacking the Dainik Jagran Nielsen Bookscan Hindi fiction list from 2017 to 2019 to present trends of publishing that have facilitated the boom of certain genres in Hindi fiction. For instance, of the ten fiction bestsellers in the first quarterly list of the period of April to June 2017, six were published by a single Delhi-based publishing house called Hind Yugm, which primarily publishes novels and short stories written in Hinglish, a mix of Hindi and English in which Hindi is the matrix language.
I will focus on the Hinglish popular short stories and novels published by Hind Yugm in order to comment specifically on the production house’s instrumentalisation of “Hinglish” as an aesthetic as well as commercial category. Another trend that finds reflection in the list is the appearance of Hindi crime pulp fiction. The crime fiction king Surendra Mohan Pathak frequently appears on the list. Here, I shall briefly engage with the history of Pathak’s writing and reception as a pulp fiction writer, and the terms of his “promotion” in a Bestseller list. Is this appearance the result of the fact that Pathak is now published by Harper Hindi? Would he appear if he were still published by Raja Pocket Books, his previous, popular but not reputed, publisher? In this context, I shall unpack the terms of selection and quantification of what constitutes a “Bestseller” by Dainik Jagran and Nielsen Bookscan, and if these terms of selection actually manufacture the list.
Bio
Aakriti Mandhwani is Assistant Professor, Department of English, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Shiv Nadar University. Her PhD research focused on North Indian middle class reading practices through the archive of the post-1947 commercial magazine and paperback in Hindi. She has published on North Indian middlebrow reading practices, Hindi pulp fiction and contemporary Hinglish fiction. She is the co-editor, Indian Genre Fiction: Pasts and Future Histories (Routledge).
SABITA MANIAN, BRAD BULLOCK
Exit West: Novel Narratives Of Migration, Identity & “The Right to Be”
Abstract: This paper will primarily examine Mohsin Hamid’s novel, Exit West (2017), through the lenses of politics and sociology in order to contextualize and humanize refugee imaginaries that navigate race, hate, and nationalism across borders, such as the Christchurch New Zealand massacre. The imagined country (in the novel), wrecked by civil war and terror, forces the key protagonists (Nadia and Saeed), to negotiate across state borders and the intersections of gender, race and ethnicity. The novel’s plot foregrounds the investigation of the following: What challenges does the female protagonist (Nadia) pose to the male protagonist’s (Saeed) masculinity that is reshaped in the context of women’s agency, as well as the crosscurrents of tradition and modernity? How does Nadia break Western stereotypes of Muslim women as a voiceless, powerless monolithic entity? How do politics of family and society shape the bifurcated roles of migrant narratives through the voices of Nadia and Saeed? How are rhetoric and realities of geopolitics – which underscore security politics, counter-terrorism, and human rights – juxtaposed against refugee struggles and the shaping of diaspora identity? Exit West is the key focus of the paper; however, other writings such as Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, Viet Than Nguyen's Refugees and James Baldwin’s Another Country (from which the section of the paper title “A Right to Be” is borrowed) serve as critical comparative touchstones. This paper thus interrogates Hamid’s work, as a Pakistani Anglophone writer who interprets, humanizes, and memorializes migrant survivor discourse, in the context of cataclysmic violence that often tends to reduce humans to mere statistics.
Bio
Dr. Sabita Manian, PhD, is Associate Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences and Professor of International Relations & Security Studies at the University of Lynchburg, Virginia. She is the recipient of the Commonwealth of Virginia’s State Council for Higher Education’s (SCHEV’s) Outstanding Faculty Award, the Shirley Rosser Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Thomas Allen Award for Excellence in Advising. Dr. Manian has authored over a dozen works including Sex Trafficking: A Global Perspective (coauthored, Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), journal articles, book chapters, academic papers and public lectures on security and gender politics, ethnic and immigration politics in Asia, the Mideast, and the Americas. She has presented academic papers nationally and internationally in Belize, Belgium, China, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, France, Grenada, Guadeloupe, India, Morocco, and the UK.
Dr. Brad Bullock is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology at Randolph College, in Virginia. His wide academic travels to places such as Barbados, Cuba, Guatemala, Panama, Curacao, Guyana, Belize, St. Lucia and India inform his teaching and research about social and cultural development and ethnic identity. His wide interests and publications include globalization, international development, political economy, ethnologies of immigration, sex-trafficking, the Caribbean Basin and South Asia. He has received numerous awards, both to facilitate his research and in recognition of distinguished teaching.
MARA MATTA
Utopian Tibet and Dystopian Rome in the Novels by Assamese Writer Kaushik Barua
This paper examines the authorial debut of the Assamese writer Kaushik Barua, whose first two novels Windhorse (2013) and No Direction Rome (2015) have revealed him as one of the most original and interesting voices of the Indian diaspora. Brilliantly written and accurately researched, Barua’s first novel Windhorse (2013) is a historical biographical fiction based on the real lives of the Tibetans who fought against the Chinese in the 1960s. His second book, a dystopian novel on a paranoid Indian who spends his time walking through the Eternal City of Rome, was written while he was based in Rome, a city that he loves. Kaushik Barua experiments with the novel as a site for narrating disenfranchisement and rebellion, alienation and dissent, nostalgia and hope. Either delving into the depths of a hypochondriac and cynical Indian nomad, or scrutinizing the forgotten lives and the secreted archives of the Tibetan violent struggle against Mao’s army, Barua combines history, memory and delusional fantasy to convey powerful life histories that cut across space and time. His novels escape the ethnic frame and nuancedly add to the rich tapestry of contemporary ‘world literature’: they zoom inside individual stories and collective histories but never acquire the label of a distinctive – linguistically or regionally defined – literature, being it Assamese, Tibetan or Indian. Forcing the reader to address the reality of a transnational writer whose works travel across borders, Barua’s novels convey the disquiet realization of being no-where and every-where at the same time, a post-modern condition that the writer and his characters seem to share.
Bio
Mara Matta is assistant professor in South Asian Studies at Sapienza University of Rome, where she teaches courses on languages and cultures of Tibet and the Indian Subcontinent. Her researches focus on religious and ethnic minorities, migrations and diasporas across Asian borders and in Europe, subaltern literatures, indigenous cinemas and performing arts. She also works on writings and cultural productions by South Asian migrants in Italy and is currently conducting a research on religion and cultural practices among Bangladeshi youth in Rome. She is a member of the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema (NETPAC, Colombo and Delhi) and of the Archive of Migrant Memories (AMM, Rome). She is currently working towards the publication of two monographs: Bidrohinis: Writings of Adivasi Women of Bangladesh. The Diary of Kalpana Chakma and Other Literary Dimensions of Dissent and I Can Still Hear the Voice of the Snow: The Memoir of a Bangladeshi Migrant in Rome. Together with Prof. Habibul Haque Khondker (Zayed University, Abu Dhabi) she is co-editing a book on Memory, Migration and Nostalgia (AUP). Among her recent publications is a monograph on social and political theatre in Nepal: Nepal: A Theatre for Better Reasons (Fuorilinea Ed., Rome 2015).
MARYAM MIRZA
The Resistance of Queer Bodies in Anglophone Fiction by Indian Women Writers
My proposed paper will grapple with literary representations of queer characters in contemporary Anglophone fiction by Indian women writers to evaluate the ways in which, as well as the extent to which, these characters are constructed as figures of resistance within the texts under discussion. Resistance will be taken to mean both ‘contending with, and not exclusively or fundamentally as contending against’ heteropatriarchy and other intersecting forms of social power (Medina 2013, 16; italics in the original). My analysis will be carried out through the lens of the following three novels: Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), Abha Dawesar’s Babyji (2005) and Manju Kapur’s A Married Woman (2002). For the purposes of this paper, the term ‘queer’ refers not only to same-sex desiring characters, but also to intersex characters whose bodies deviate from ‘norms of embodiment’ (Morland 2009, 289). I am particularly interested in exploring how the characters’ experiences of non- normative gender, sexual and/or sexed identities complicate the personal/political dichotomy in the context of the social upheavals that serve as a backdrop for each of the three texts. These upheavals include the demolition of the Babri Mosque in 1992, the 1990 protests against the Mandal Commission, and the anti-Muslim riots that took place in the state of Gujarat in 2002. Finally, I will consider the representation of the geographical and spatial contours of resistance in the three texts, and evaluate how it informs our understanding of the body as a site of political struggle.
Bio
Maryam Mirza is Assistant Professor in World Literatures in English at Durham University, and is the author of Intimate Class Acts: Friendship and Desire in Indian and Pakistani Women’s Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2016) . Her essays have been published in journals such as The Journal of Commonwealth Literature and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, as well as in anthologies.
TEHEZEEB MOITRA
Hybrid Bodies and Re-written Narratives:
The Multiplicity of the Female in Tales of Amnesia
Art and literature combine in an essay that explores the simultaneous horror and attraction at encountering the exotic, the other, the outsider, and in this case Amnesia — the jungalee protagonist of artist Chitra Ganesh’s twenty-one part tableaux, Tales of Amnesia. While Ganesh’s work references the popular Indian Amar Chitra Katha comic book series, her storyboards show a marked preoccupation and unease with regards to the conventional portrayal of the female essence. Through a denial to conform to normative structures and gender constructs, the artist’s work takes on a subversive texture, which utterly disrupts the locus of discourse as seen in the original. The essay acknowledges the exigency of embracing the multiplicity of hybridity and examines how, through a meticulous combination of images and words, Ganesh constructs a feminist junglee narrative that references a host of varied cultural signifiers in order to narrate “sexual pleasure, so as to bring down phallogocentric discourse and, ultimately, change the world.” Ganesh’s junglee, much like Cixous’ Medusa, stands as a symbol of rebellious female power that challenges and indeed redefines traditional models. Ultimately, this essay argues that Tales of Amnesia uses a comic mired in the indigenous familiarity of collective memory as a means to create a hybrid cultural artefact, which seeks to re-write, rather than adhere to, the hegemonic dynamics perpetuated by the once immortal picture stories.
Bio
Tehezeeb Moitra holds a Ph.D. from Università degli Studi di Napoli "L'Orientale", in Studi Letterari, Linguistici e Comparatiat the L'Universitàdegli Studi di NapoliL'Orientale(UNIOR) where she has also taught English language and literature. She has Masters degrees in English Literature from Saint Louis University, Madrid Campus and Contemporary Art from theSotheby’s Institute of Artin London. Her research interests include Postcolonial Studies, Linguistics, Gender Studies and Contemporary Art Theory and Criticism; she has published several articles and essays on the same.
ANGELO MONACO
Postcolonial Realism and Dystopia in Bangladeshi Post-Millennial Writing
According to Fakrum Alam (2007), contemporary South Asian literature in English exposes a “trans-Indian and subcontinental phenomenon” in which the several voices of the Indian subcontinent tend to be unified through the use of the same language. Alam’s investigation inevitably leads to the question of those writers who might have influenced the emergence of new authors within the subcontinent, an issue that Mervyn Rothstein (2000) well illustrates with the label “Midnight Grandchildren.” Whereas it is true that Rushdie has had a significant impact on many South Asian writers, when we deal with Canadian-Bangladeshi novelist Neamat Imam one cannot but think of Rohinton Misty’s A Fine Balance (1995). Imam’s debut novel, The Black Coat (2013), is a dystopian portrayal of the problematic Bangladeshi post-independence. The first-person narrator, Khaleque Biswas, zooms in on the traumatic aftermath of the 1971 Liberation War and the catastrophe experienced during the 1974 famine. What Imam’s novel shares with Mistry’s work is its delving into history: by transforming the novel into a social document, the story charts the nationalist rhetoric of Prime Minister Sheikh Mujibur Rehman and the devastating consequences of the socio-economic crisis of the new-born country.
The Black Coat, however, juxtaposes satirical depiction of nationalism with psychological insights, by privileging the narrator’s self-reflexive interior monologues and by staging secondary characters that offer a choric dramatic perspective. This paper tries then to read Imam’s narrative as a critical revision of postcolonial Bangladesh. One the one hand, it contends that the dystopian imagination provides a counter-narrative of Bangladesh nationalism. On the other, it argues that social and psychological realism contribute to shed light on a neglected history in a country still beset by contradictions, as the 2018 elections, won by Mujibur’s daughter, have testified.
Bio
Angelo Monaco graduated from the University of Naples “L’Orientale” and completed his PhD in English Literature at the University of Pisa. His research interests revolve around the Indian diaspora, ecocriticism and trauma studies. He has written extensively on such issues as melancholia, nostalgia, globalization, migration and vulnerability in contemporary fiction and his papers have appeared in international journals and edited volumes. He is the author of Jhumpa Lahiri. Vulnerabilità e resilienza (ETS Edizioni).
ORIANA PALUSCI
New Vistas, New Eyes: Gendering Anglophone Science Fiction in Postcolonial India
Anglophone Science Fiction in Postcolonial India has received little critical attention, although it has given birth to a great number of novels and short stories which basically tackle two main issues: on the one hand the deep roots that delve into Indian mythology and, on the other hand, the rapid ongoing technological revolution affecting the whole country.
After a brief introduction on the topic, and on the relation with famous Western authors in the field of Anglo-American Science Fiction, my paper will deal with Indian Science Fiction Women Writers in English, showing how the genre is used as an ‘adaptable’ mode of narration in the exploration of alternative worlds. My case study will focus on some short stories of scientist and SF writer Vandana Singh, collected in The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet (2008) and in Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories (2018). As Singh claims: “Thankfully, science fiction offers the experience of playfully trying to decolonize my mind—shaking free of hitherto unexamined paradigms, trying to look at new vistas through new eyes”.
Bio
Oriana Palusci is Full Professor of English at the University of Naples “L’Orientale”. She has published extensively on contemporary Women writers, Utopia and Science Fiction, Travel Writing, Postcolonial Studies, Transaltion Studies, Gender Studies and on Ecocriticism. She has recently edited: Wastelands. Eco-narratives in Contemporary Cultures in English (2015, with H. Ventura), Green Canada (2016), Alice Munro and the Anatomy of the Short Story (2017), Miss Man? Languaging Gendered Bodies (2018, with G. Balirano). She is the President of the Italian Association for the Study of Science Fiction and the Fantastic.
GIULIANA REGNOLI
Renegotiating Ethnicity and Identity in the Indian Student Diaspora:
Amit Chaudhury’s Odysseus Abroad
Current perspectives on contemporary Indian literary production have envisaged the transnational dimension of the diasporic experience by challenging and subverting any easy celebration of the diaspora as the nomadic and post-modern condition, finally reminding that it is an uneasy place and that issues of displacement and (un)belonging are more forceful than ever (Clini 2017). In light of these considerations, the present work aims to delve into the concept of ‘diaspora consciousness’ (Vertovec 1999) as proposed to represent a ‘multi-locality’ (Friesen/Kearns 2008) involving dual or multiple identities in the Indian student diaspora. Specifically, it will deal with the renegotiation of the problem of ethnicity (Jayaram 2004) in Amit Chaudhury’s Odysseus Abroad, ultimately investigating the way in which the main character struggles with rootlessness, nostalgia and identity development in multiethnic London. In order to shed new light on the literary production concerning the genre of the Indian student diaspora, the paper will address the relational affiliations occurring on the level of tradition and its appropriation. In making Homer and Joyce speak in Bengali and Educated Bengali English, Chaudhury appropriates a literary tradition which is party his and party not, positioning the third space of the diaspora on the map of modernism.
Bio
Giuliana Regnoli is a third-year Ph.D. student in English linguistics at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” and the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Her research interests include sociophonetics, language attitudes, dialectal variation, second language awareness, World Englishes (in particular Indian English) and intercultural communication. She is the author of "Rhythmic Contrast in Marathi English and Telugu English" in Speech Rhythm in L1, L2 and learner varieties of English for the Springer's Prosody, Phonology and Phonetics series (forthcoming). Giuliana Regnoli è una dottoranda in Linguistica Inglese presso l'Università degli Studi di Napoli "L'Orientale", in cotutela con l'Università tedesca di Heidelberg. I suoi interessi di ricerca includono la sociofonetica, gli atteggiamenti linguistici, la meta-consapevolezza linguistica, i World Englishes (in particolare l'inglese indiano) e la comunicazione interculturale. E' autrice di due saggi in corso di stampa: "Rhythmic Contrast in Marathi English and Telugu English" per la collana Prosody, Phonology and Phonetics edita dalla Springer e di " Attitudinal Alignment and Meta-linguistic Awareness in Indian English Migrant Varieties" per Textus.
JAYDEEP SARANGI
Bangla Dalit Literary Movement: Texts and Contexts
Bangla Dalit Literary Movement is a progressive movement for social change. The Dalit Literary Movement in Bengal, inspired and propelled by the one in Maharashtra, was initiated in 1976 through the establishment of ‘Navayug Sahitya and Sanskriti Parishad’. Their mouthpiece of the movement was the journal ‘Otoeb’. Nareshchandra Das, Sharat Baruri and Nakul Mallik were its earliest leaders. Later, under the motivation of Kiranchandra Brahma, acknowledgement of Ranendralal Biswas, the organizational strength of Nakul Mallik—the cooperation from Harendranath Bhakta and Pramodbaran Biswas brought about first Dalit literary gathering in Machlandpur (North 24 Paraganas) in 1987. ‘Bangiya Dalit Lekhak Parishad’ came into existence. In 1989, the second gathering was also held in Machlandpur. Back then, the movement revolved primarily around Literature. The movement to propagate the idea of social change among the masses was initiated in 1992, after the birth of ‘Bangla Dalit Sahitya Sangstha’. Starting from 1992 in Bhaina (Nadia), prominent cultural meets like ‘Sangiti’ were organized annually in various parts of Bengal. This is where the attempt to tie together the entire Dalit populace began its course. Demonstrations ,discussions and publications were carried out to explain the importance of the establishment of a society that was free from superstitions as well as the tyrannical Brahmanic social codes. This is how the Dalit Literary Movement made sure its ideas reached the grass-root level. The publication of Nakul Mallik’s ‘Dalit Kantha’ began in 1994 along with Bangla Dalit Sahitya Sangstha’s mouthpiece ‘Chaturtha Duniya’. Publication of Arjun Dangle’s Poison Bread in 1992 was historical. Namashudra culture in Bengal got impetus from the book. It broke stereotypes at several levels.
Bio
Jaydeep Sarangi is an author, editor, translator and critic of multiple works and publications on Australian literature, Indian writing in English, postcolonial studies and the Dalit literary movement in India. He has also travelled to several universities as a resource person (and a poet) on postcolonial studies, poetry, and Indian literature in the context of world literature. He has delivered keynote, plenary address and invited talks at different Indian and foreign universities and read poems including University of Udine, University of New South Wales, Wollongong University,Rezeszow University, Pedagogical University,Flinders University, University of South Australia, Adelaide University and East Anglia University. He is currently the principal of New Alipore College, Kolkata. He is the Vice President of Guild of Indian English Writers Editors and Critics(GIEWEC) and the Secretary of Intercultural Poetry and Performance Library, ICCR,Kolkata. He guest edited four issues for the Muse India.
ALESSANDRO VESCOVI
Adolescent and Homosexual Identities:
Fighting the Last Bastions of Colonialism in India
My paper will look comparatively at three different novels published between 2008 and 2016, namely A Life Apart by Neel Mukherjee (2008), Saraswati Park by Anjali Joseph (2010), Selection Day by Aravind Adiga. All these three novels feature teenagers as protagonists, whose sexuality is either yet uncertain, as in Saraswati Park, or markedly gay. These are certainly not the first novels that deal with either young men or homosexuality, but the combination of the two is to my knowledge unprecedented in India and it is a coincidence worth investigating that three such novels have seen the light within eight years of one another.
What strikes a new note in these novels is not so much the age of the protagonists, but rather the choice of their points of view and the prominence given to their different psychologies. Indeed several Indian novels in the past generations dealt with children, beginning with Narayan’s famous Dickensian debut, Swami and Friends till the more recent Q & A by Vikas Swarup — from which Danny Boyle took inspiration for the fortunate movie Slumdog Millionaire. However the point of view of those novels is not really that of the protagonist, but of a more mature narrator who views the adolescent with an ironic detachment that may verge on condescension. Another classical way of portraying adolescents is by inscribing them into Bildungsroman, as in The Shadow Lines or Nectar in a Sieve, but even in this case the point of view is only briefly that of the teenager, who is just going through a passing phase. The three novels that I am considering, on the contrary, focus entirely on the condition of the adolescent and offer no view into what the future holds for them (in one case the protagonist dies), which makes them more similar to Catcher in the Rye than to any other Indian novel.
The coincidence of homosexuality and adolescence in these novels also raises questions. It may be a matter of straightforward realism, as adolescence is the time of one’s life when one understands one’s position in matters of sexuality. However this is not the only way to read them. I believe that homosexuality and adolescence are similar in that the rising Indian middle-class has long refused to acknowledge their existance. This is one of the last Victorian colonial strongholds from which no decolonisation has taken place yet. Homosexuality has notoriously ceased to be a crime in India only very recently and this happened not through a kind of popular movement, but through a pronouncement of the supreme court, which does not really testify to an open-minded attitude of the population, especially the middle class. On the whole, any gay culture is in fact submerged in India. Likewise adolescence is often considered by the Indian rising middle class as the time when one must work hardest to build one’s future and possibly a future to one’s parents. There is no psychological recognition of the specificity of adolescence, nor has Indian literature of the past decades worked on it. For this reason foregrounding adolescence and homosexuality as contemporary issues becomes a way of fighting old (colonial) stereotypes and help the Indian middle class to move beyond false stereotypes.
Bio
Alessandro Vescovi, Ph.D. (1998), Genoa University, is Associate Professor at the Department of modern languages, University of Milano, where he teaches Anglophone Literatures. He is part if the advisory boards of literature and Indology journals and series, he has published monographs, including one on Amitav Ghosh (Firenze, Le lettere, 2012) and articles on Indian writing in English (Narayan, Naipaul, Ghosh, Desai, Lahiri, Mukherjee) in several international journals. He is currently working on a monograph on post-secularism in Indian fiction.
DANIELA VITOLO
The City and the Nation: Lahore in the Anglophone Novel
One of the beating hearts of South Asia for many centuries, after the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent Lahore has maintained its centrality in the newly formed state of Pakistan. Located a few miles from the border separating Pakistan from India, the city has witnessed the violence that characterised the partition and is regarded as the Pakistani urban area that is affected the most by the volatile relationships between Pakistan and India. As the economic and cultural capital of Pakistan Lahore tends to be regarded as representative of the whole country, notwithstanding the fact that the city is affected by global dynamics unknown to the majority of a country characterised by a varied social, cultural and political landscape. In contemporary Anglophone fiction Lahore emerges as a space where some of the major social and political events affecting Pakistan at a local and a global level unfold. Novels like Sorayya Khan’s Five Queen’s Road (2009) and Ali Sethi’s The Wish Maker (2009) engage with social, political and historical issues setting individual and familial stories between the private spaces of the house and the public spaces of the city. The local and global variously manifest in the urban environment depicted by Mohsin Hamid in novels as Moth Smoke (2000) and The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007).
The paper discusses the representation of the relationship between city and nation that emerges from contemporary Anglophone novels. It points out that in fiction Lahore appears as a dynamic and relational space where, while dealing with diverse issues affecting the nation, like the clashes between religious groups during Partition or the effects of the war against Islamist terrorism, citizens define their sense of belonging to the city and the nation.
Bio
Daniela Vitolo holds a PhD in Literary, Linguistic and Comparative Studies from the University of Naples “L’Orientale”. During her PhD her research focus has been the representation of national identity in the Pakistani Anglophone literature. Among her publications are the essays “Relocating the Memory of the Partition in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Defend Yourself Against Me” (2018) and “History, Borders, and Identity: Dealing with Silenced Memories of 1971 (2018).