The Pains of Colonialism: Examining Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novella Nervous Conditions (1988)

The condition of a native is a nervous condition.             (From the introduction to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth)   Tsitsi Dangarembga is an African novelist and filmmaker from Zimbabwe. Nervous Conditions (1988) was her first novella after her 1987 play She No Longer Weeps. Her works usually have a feminist purview. However, the particular work would be scrutinized from a colonial lens.             As a student of comparative literature, I found this text worthy of study. It gave me an insight into a completely different culture from mine. Africa and India share many similarities in relation to tribal culture, orature and community-based living. Also, since we both were co-sufferers in our shared struggle against colonialism, therefore this piece was found apt to be taken up. It is a quest to find out how their colonial experience differed from ours by deeply analyzing the text. The stance taken would be of the twenty-first century post-colonial Indian student. DOI: 10.5958/2347-6869.2018.00001.8 &nbsp

Sarah Kane’s Blasted Through A Psychoanalytic Lens

Psychoanalytic concepts which pervade our daily lives help us better understand human behaviors depicted, for instance, in literary texts; in fact, a psychological approach is an excellent tool for critical analysis and for solving a work’s thematic and symbolic mysteries. Sarah Kane\u27s Blasted, a good deal of the narrative progression deals with Ian and Cate’s psychological behavior and their romantic relationship which has important implications for psychoanalytic criticism. The characters’ behavior, narrative events, and images could be explained in terms of psychoanalytic concepts and different unconscious motives consisting of repressed wounds, fears, unresolved conflicts and guilty desires that operate in the main characters throughout this play. Applying Lacan and Freud’s psychoanalytic techniques and psychological theories one can arrive at an interpretation of the play and of the motives behind the individual behavior. DOI: 10.5958/2347-6869.2018.00007.

E-Governance in the Age of Globalization: Challenges Ahead for India

The study deals with the revolution of information technology in the functioning of government services in the country. Thinking about globalization, we visualize the application of technology and more specifically Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to reduce the differences in different corners of the economy and make the differentiated world into a truly integrated global village. Utilization of technology in government services has gathered endurance called as electronic governance. The old notion of administration seems to become obsolete as the government at central, state and at local levels are facing challenges posed by increased demand for better quality of governance. Electronic-governance has already been acknowledged as indispensable strength to a revolutionary development in standard, coherence, and efficacy of government. With the massive growth in population, low rate of literacy, cultural differences and above all, profound destitution has created difficulties in running the administration by the government of India. So, nothing was left but a centralized strategy driven by ICT as it seems to bring more transparency and increased accountability. Undoubtedly, in the present scenario, the progress of any government relies on the application of electronic governance. In fact, the success of a government can be judged by the reach of electronic governance to its population. Based on secondary data this study enquires into the challenges raised in front of the Government of India (GOI) to implement this system usefully, restrain challenges to implement it successfully, find out the potential opportunities available and examine the challenges encountered by it.           DOI: 10.5958/2347-6869.2017.00025.

Critical Reflections on the Fall Narrative of Communism

The paper critically addresses the fall narrative of the narrative of the failure of the communist experiment. By doing so it makes a conviction that the great fall may have had laid down communism’s burial but had not closed the spirit of revolution and emancipation. More than being loathsome to the violence the fall narrative hangs on to liberal-capitalist-democracy’s hatred for equality and justice. The paper commits to the claim that if the idea of “return to socialism” makes no sense, equally is senseless the triumphalism debate of liberal-capitalism. Saying so the commitment is for “return to the human self” whose even distant possibility lies in socialism only. DOI: 10.5958/2347-6869.2018.00010.

?????????? (epilelesthai) and ???? (lethe): On Plato’s philosophy of forgetting

Scholars H. N. Fowler, R. Waterfield, J. McDowell, D. Davidson and J. M. Cooper translate both ?????????? (epilelesthai) and ???? (lethe) into “forgetting”. Yet it is problematic, as they designate two different meanings of forgetting Only J. C. B. Gosling, in his translation of Philebus, translates ????into “oblivion” and ?????????? into forgetting respectively. However, he does not explain why the difference matters. This paper aims at explaining the ambiguous meaning of forgetting in Meno, Phaedo, Theaetetus and Philebus. The one hand, ?????????? (epilelesthai) means the loss of memory in our ordinary life. On the other hand, ???? (lethe) means the loss of memory before-life or before we are born. I conclude by drawing attention to Paul Ricoeur’s critical examination of Plato’s philosophy of forgetting that he fails to provide an effective resolution to the ordinary forgetting as an attack on the reliability of memory. DOI: 10.5958/2347-6869.2017.00021.

Time in the ontology of Cornelius Castoriadis

We can locate the problematic of time within three philosophical questions, which respectively designate three central areas of philosophical reflection and contemplation. These are: 1) The ontological question, i.e. \u27what is being?\u27 2) The epistemological question, i.e. \u27what can we know with certainty?\u27 3) The existential question, i.e. \u27what is the meaning of existence?\u27 These three questions, which are philosophical, but also scientific and political, as they underline the political and moral question of truth and justice, arising from the phenomenon of time, the irreversible constant flow of phenomena that undermines every claim to absolute knowledge. The purpose of this essay is to illuminate the importance of time for philosophical thought and, more generally, for human social and psychical life, in the context of the ontology of Cornelius Castoriadis. Castoriadis, who asserted that “being is time – and not in the horizon of time”, correlated history to society and being to temporality within the social-historical stratum, the ontological plane created by human existence, where “existence is signification”. Time is interpreted as the creation and destruction of forms in a magmatic, layered with a non-regular stratification, reality, where the social-historical manifests as the creation of collective human activity, in the manner of social imaginary significations. This notion of temporality is accompanied by a profound criticism of traditional rationalistic philosophy, to which Castoriadis assigns the name ‘ensemblistic/identitary’, that highlights the necessity of a new, magmatic ontology, based on the primacy of time. DOI: 10.5958/2347-6869.2017.00023.

Colonialism, Power and Resistance in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth

This essay attempts to analyze the colonial histories depicted in Zadie Smith\u27s White Teeth by considering them alongside Michel Foucault\u27s lectures on biopolitics. It also aims to contextualize some of the historical threads in the text in order to highlight some of the ways that power and resistance are performed in the fictional narrative. This will uncover important themes in White Teeth that help to identify how apparatuses of power and resistance function in the narrative, linking colonial history with contemporary multiculturalism. DOI: 10.5958/2347-6869.2018.00003.1 &nbsp

Is quantum medium a metaphysical continuum?

Quantum medium is a metaphysical continuum fabric full of primal energy. This energy contains information of the existence in all its manifestations, the metaphysical continuum that makes a quantum medium display in the “real” embedded in the First Thinker’s thought. Quantum medium is expressed in a fractal way; that is to say that the information of thoughts is multiplied infinitesimally, and so it makes the manifestation of existence infinite. DOI: 10.5958/2347-6869.2017.00022.

What\u27s Art Got to Do with Happiness in Farabian Utopia

Farabi has put the artists on the second level of his utopia seeing them as ‘the carrier of the task of religion’. The first level, of course, belongs to God’s prophet and his successors. This might seem, at first, as some sort of religious mumbo-jumbo but with some speculation on the age Farabi was living in, one could see that it is a rarity for artists to be such noteworthy entities in a philosopher’s utopia. This philosopher, of course, is deeply influenced by Greek philosophy, as it was the case for Islamic philosophy before Abu-Hamid Al-Ghazali shattered it into pieces. The level of importance that Farabi imagines for the artists is hardly traceable in Greek philosophy or any other philosophy before him. This importance, however, comes at a price. The artist has a task like that of the prophets. In the prophet’s case, the angel of revelation bestows the rational concepts to his rational faculty and then to his imaginative faculty. The majority of people are not able to obtain rational happiness through reasoning because they are not used to implement their rational faculty. So the prophet, who is well aware of the truth, conveys the truth to peoples’ imagination through allegories and examples. The artist too, in Farabi’s eyes, is a person who can transfer rational happiness to the minds of the masses through sensible and imaginative forms. DOI: 10.5958/2347-6869.2018.00009.

Multiculturalism: A Critical Study of Chinua Achebe\u27s Selected Novels

Reclaiming for one’s root doesn’t state that one has no root. As long as one has roots intact, one survives; and if one is uprooted or one’s roots are undiscovered, one dies. But they try their best to grow new roots amidst adverse circumstances to face reality. Cut off from cultural roots, they adopt a quest for self. In the contemporary literary criticism, roots and multiculturalism are the topics, dealt in by many novelists of repute in postcolonial literature. It can be observed that nowadays people are not only conscious of their own culture and tradition but claim superiority of their own over other’s culture. The present paper thus aims to present the cultural ambivalence that Chinua Achebe recorded in his novels Things Fall Apart and No Longer At Ease. When the Europeans came to colonize Africa, they bring with them their own culture. Achebe, in these two novels portrays the plight of the Nigerian people they face due to the mixing of the two different cultures. He draws both the pre colonial and colonial period with their both negative and positive sides. His No Longer at Ease is on corruption, which Achebe believes is brought by the Europeans to Africa. And his Things Fall Apart criticizes Joseph Conrad\u27s Heart of Darkness where Conrad documented that civilization of Africa took place during the time of colonial period. Achebe’s protagonists were able to retain a sense of their pre-colonial glory, history considerably, however affected the culture and heritage in the ancient aroma. But in Africa, the ‘falcon could not hear the falconer and the center could not hold’ and eventually things did fall apart. Hence, the paper is also an attempt to examine the misrecognition of the Nigerian Culture by the dominating Europeans. DOI: 10.5958/2347-6869.2018.00004.3 &nbsp