The Embodied Reader and Experiential Death: Emerging Readership for ‘Brooksian’ Fiction

Narratives being the cornerstone of societal development will never go out of fashion. The act of reading will naturally be a part of highly developed cognitive beings. In this paper, the ideal reader is replaced by the embodied reader. The neurocognitive implications of the narratee will be analysed to uncover the fact that reading is quite similar to using a VR headset to play video games. The reason behind a good book being a favourite pastime for many is due to the ability of fiction to be experiential. Understanding fiction as a catalyst for neural engagement and triggering sensory-motor neural movement will be used to understand the true nature of the reading community. In addition to this close-up analysis of the embodied reader, the psychological response of such a reader when coming across a text that highlights the theme of death will also be analysed using the findings of terror management theory (TMT).&nbsp

In Search of the Fragments of Recollection: Cultural Memory and Identity in Select Travel Narratives of Tahir Shah

Culture, memory, and identity are intricately connected terms. Memory is not just an individual experience but plays a prominent role in the establishment of both individual and cultural identity. Jan Assmann, in his essay “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity”, has defined cultural memory as “the characteristic store of repeatedly used texts, images, and rituals in the cultivation of which each society and epoch stabilizes and imports its self-image; a collectively shared knowledge of preferably (yet not exclusively) the past, on which a group bases its awareness of unity and character” (15). Storytelling is a universal act of preserving the cultural aspects of a community. The works selected for the present study are The Caliph’s House and In Arabian Nights written by the travel-writer Tahir Shah. This paper intends to analyze the connection between cultural memory and cultural identity as presented in the selected works from two levels. Firstly, it studies how the author reaffirms the cultural identity of Morocco by exploring the cultural elements and the art of storytelling, and secondly, how he ascertains his personal identity through his explorations and experiences as a traveller

The Popular Tale : A Study on Retention and Deconstruction of Collective Memory in Duffer Brothers\u27 Stranger Things and Bisha Ali\u27s Miss Marvel

In On Media Memory; Collective Memory in New Media Age, cultural memory is described as “a version of past, defined and negotiated through changing socio-political power circumstances and agendas" (qtd. in Bosh TE 3). The popular entertainment of every age is obliged to incorporate elements of cultural memory in it to remain popular. The paper seeks to interrogate the role played by the integration of cultural memory in the popular American science fiction web series, Stranger Things, and the latest production of Marvel Cinematic Universe, Miss Marvel. The Stranger Things series, written and directed by the Duffer brothers is set in the mid-1980s. The age is recreated through certain elements that constitute cultural memory. They are placed within the context of the Ukraine crisis which urgently necessitates anti-Russian narratives in American popular entertainment. Miss Marvel appeared as a fresh wind in MCU, questioning the collective mistrust towards the Pakistani Muslim community and addressing the scars of partition as well as migration in third-generation Pakistani-Americans. The two web series featured on Netflix and Disney Hotstar are compared and contrasted to elucidate how popular entertainment can act as a soft power for the retention and deconstruction of cultural memory

Ghiñn: A Reading of Disgust as a Literary Device in Subimal Mishra’s Short Fiction

Disgust is universal to humans across the globe in its broader aspects and localised and individualistic in its specific locus and formations. In general, the emotion of disgust is that it works as an anchor against existential dread, the anxiety of death (angst), and the fear of loss of meaning (abject). It is disgusting to look at rotting bodies or slimy, sticky, throbbing, odorous things because it reminds us of the insignificance of life itself. Objects of disgust are rude organic and cosmic reminders of our very anthropocentric and vainglorious conceptions of the self as Being-in-the-World (In-der-Welt-sein). However, disgust is also deeply embedded with networks of social and political power and is used as a tool in encounters with the other. The other target of this disgust could be from the categories of other gender, race, caste, class, and sexualities. This paper tries to engage with a few of those categories in order to understand how disgust as an emotion has both an existential and socio-political charge in-itself. It then tries to analyse Subimal Mishra’s works through the lens and posits the possibility of using disgust as a literary device

Art as Storyteller: Scroll Paintings of Naya Village as Mnemonics of Cultural Memory and the Changing Modes in Digital Proliferation

Scroll painting and narrating tradition has been present in India from ancient times. The picture showman tradition consisted of displaying painted scrolls and narrating the story in the form of singing. For centuries, patachitras have dispersed mythical oral narratives in villages and towns of Bengal and have played an essential part in creating Bengal’s cultural identity. Just like other Indian knowledge systems, the narration as a part of the performance is retained in memory and passed over generations. Patachitra of Pingla had chronicled the religious as well as the political and social happenings throughout the history and thus occasioned the remembrance of cultural memories. Pingla patachitra has survived the Western cultural invasion and has been carried to future as symbolic of cultural identity through digital proliferation. In the digital age, devoid of performance, patachitras have got new meanings as standalone painting pieces, yet they function as agents of cultural memory that represents the culture itself. The paper aims at a holistic understanding of the modes of storytelling and cultural preservation by Naya village patachitra through the lens of Memory Studies

Writing Orality as a Postcolonial Strategy: A Reading of Janice Pariat’s Boats on Land

Like other tribal communities, the oral tradition forms an integral part of the communities of North East India. With the advent of the English missionaries and the introduction of the written script, the oral form was generally identified with the illiterate and even the uncivilized. However, orality is now perceived as an important link between the past and the present and a form of preserving community values through writing. Interestingly, for many writers of North East India, written literature introduced by colonialism has become an effective tool for reviving the oral tradition, thus further preserving the authenticity of tribal communities. Hence, writings from this region in recent years often engage with themes of orality in their narratives in order to reclaim their ethnic identity and retrieve their pre-colonial history and values. ‘Writing orality’, then, becomes an effective strategy in rebuilding tribal practices and values in the midst of westernization, advancement in digital technology, and capitalism in contemporary society. The paper aims to examine the interaction between orality and writing in Janice Pariat’s short story collection, Boats on Land (2013). It looks at how the stories in this collection disrupt the hierarchy of the textual over the spoken, a binary that Pariat believes is a colonial construct. The paper aims to show how the valorization of the Khasi oral tradition in the text challenges the pre-established dominance of written literature.&nbsp

Of Being and Belonging: Contextualising ‘Cosubjectivity’ in Easterine Kire’s When the River Sleeps

Easterine Kire, a Naga writer from Northeast India, foregrounds a reconstituted community space where both the individual and the collective meet at a vantage point and non-human forms an integral part of human existence. Such strategic ways of representing the art of inhabiting in terms of valorising ‘cosubjectivity’ and blurring of the visible and invisible worlds continue to be a part of conceptualising and reclaiming ethnic boundaries as she integrates human and non-human in the space of the home. The representation of territoriality and community in her works challenges the conventional idea of the self and anthropomorphism as contextualised in her novel When the River Sleeps. What sets Kire apart is her deep engagement with the world of spirits and non-humans and her constant effort to widen and broaden the conceptualisation of ‘community’ to highlight the practices of collective identity in an inclusive space where mutual solidarity is constantly mediated, and ruptures and discontinuities are celebrated. The paper aims to address the complex nuances of Kire’s poetics of representation and contest the definitive conclusions about boundary formation and boundary spanning, thereby representing a fluid space of social and cultural encounter. As I proceed to argue, Kire’s representation of the idea and space of community is purely deconstructive in nature as she upholds an alternate spatial-cultural ethics, liminal to the core in When the River Sleeps

Travel Culture, Travel Writing and Bengali Women, 1870-1940. Jayati Gupta. Routledge, India, 2020, 290 pages, Hardcover, Rs. 995: Reviewed by Arindam Goswami

Travel Culture, Travel Writing and Bengali Women, 1870-1940 by Jayati Gupta focuses onthe travel writings by Bengali women from the undivided Bengal province during the colonialperiod. The book is one of its kind as it forwards the unheard voices of these women, mostof whom have never gained prominence in the field of travel writing study. One of the centralreasons for such oblivion is the male predominance over the genre of travel writing, astravelling was often considered a male prerogative. Patriarchy has always imposed differentrestrictions upon the movement of women. The allocated space for women, according to thepatriarchal notion, is the home, and henceforth women have always been associated withimmobility and domesticity. On the contrary, freedom, recklessness, and a fondness foradventure have always been the best and ideal attributes of a man. Then there is no wonderthat the earlier travel narratives that survived through the ages were predominantly malenarratives where women had little or almost no role. But they were not completely absentfrom the texts either. In each period, numerous women travellers travelled as companions totheir husbands or father, but the accounts of their experience of the journey have often beendismissed as “quotidian and self-congratulatory” (Gupta xviii). It was only after the lateeighteenth century, as observed by Carl Thompson, when tourism flourished and becamemore widespread, that the opportunity for women to travel for pleasure and recreationalpurposes increased (169). Women started to travel and publish their travel accounts. Butmost of these accounts are predominantly Western travel accounts. As Mary Morrisobserved, “[E]arly women travel writers were women of the upper class in European society,invariably white and privileged” (Morris, quoted in Siegel 2)

‘Stories To Stay, Stories To Subvert’: The Role of Collective Communal Memory in the Native-Canadian Struggle for Resistance against Colonization

The indigenous communities of Canada have transmitted their traditional knowledge of survival from one generation to another through oral storytelling sessions since the pre-colonial times. This knowledge has remained encapsulated within their collective communal memory in the form of stories of ancestors, tales of tricksters, dream-vision narratives, ceremonial songs, and ritualistic recitals. But forces of Euro-Canadian colonization have encroached upon their right to autonomy through a coercive imposition of the colonizers\u27 language (English) and the colonizers\u27 medium of expression (writing) upon them. The starkly different consciousness of ‘history’ that governs the worldviews of the dominant and the dominated have only served to aggravate the imbalance of power even more. The late twentieth century has seen the literary productions of these communities’ strife to reclaim their cultural and thereby political autonomy by inscribing the ‘oral’ within the ‘written’ and reworking the semiotics of the foreign tongue, imposed upon them to incorporate the specific nuances of their traditional language-culture within it. By looking into Ravensong (1993) and Whispering in Shadows (2000) penned by writer-activists Lee Maracle (Salish) and Jeannette Armstrong (Okanagan) respectively, this paper aims to explore the subversive potential of this collective cultural memory in resisting the colonial atrocities, the erosion of identity and the political disempowerment that has plagued the Native-Canadian existence for centuries.&nbsp

Analysing the Role of Memory in Oral History with respect to Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence

Partition historiography of India based on oral narratives has tried to break the silence of affirmation created by the History of India. By adding plurality to the voices of the narrator, Urvashi Butalia through her book The Other Side of Silence (1998) shatters the authoritarian voice of a single historian. Memory of the survivors and the witnesses of the ‘great’ partition of 1947 is used as the sole defense to prove that history is a dialogue between the past and the progressively emerging future. Butalia’s work of non-fiction is therefore an account of the experiences narrated orally by survivors, who are now caught between the two national identities- one created by the memories they cherish before partition and the other stamped on them after the trauma of partition. The essay aims to present the challenges faced by this oral account of history, narrated through the faculty of individual memories with all its fallacies. It therefore eliminates the elevated status enjoyed by History as a branch of literature. It further discusses in detail the reliability of memory as a source of information. Ironically, the essay also helps to prove that historiography is just another method of storytelling embedding within itself opinions, individual interests and preferences