Deterritorialisations of Desire: “Transgressive” Sexuality as Filipino Anti-Imperialist Resistance in Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters

In The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (first published in 1987), Franco Moretti cites the bildungsroman genre of “development” and/ or “coming of age” narrative as a specifically European literary phenomenon that constitutes “the ‘symbolic form’ of modernity” 1. According to Moretti, the bildungsroman is the emblematic literary form that embodies a moment in Western development, prompting him to open his book with “Youth is, so to speak, modernity’s ‘essence,’ the sign of a world that seeks its meaning in the future rather than in the past” 2. Offering a list of Western texts to push the notion that modernity and forwards-movement are specifically European traits immortalized in the bildungsroman, Moretti names his protagonists: Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, Austin’s Elizabeth Bennet, Stendhal’s Julien Sorel, Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Balzac’s Rastignac, etc

Android matters: Apocalyptic technology and hegelian dystopia in Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner (1982).

This essay critically evaluates the present moment of representation in social media of various subjects by looking back and interrogating past representations of technology and otherness in Hollywood cinema. Specifically, I argue that Ridley Scott’s cult classic film Bladerunner (1982) offers us a window into thinking about technology -as-other as portrayed in a historical moment that charted out the rise of neoliberalism under Ronald Reagan in the USA and Margaret Thatcher in the UK. I draw on G.W.F. Hegel’s theorization of human subjectivity and power relations in his master -slave dialectic to analyze the relationship between humans and synthetic androids, also known as replicants, in the film. In engaging Hegel’s analysis of power and servitude, I reveal myriad discourses of gazing that structure power not only within the narrative of the science fiction film, but moreover between the audience and the images. I conclude that the network of gazes between androids and humans highlight the ways in which human consciousness too is fabricated as well as mediated in and through the other(s)

Book Review: Shyam Selvadurai. The Hungry Ghosts. New Delhi: Penguin/ Viking Books, 2013. (Hardcover) 373 pp. INR 599.

Shyam Selvadurai's literary work has had a tremendous impact on the cultural and social visibility of queer South Asians at home, and in the diaspora..

From Material Girl to Veronica Electronica: Skating the Edge of Music in Madonna's Ray of Light, or Madonna as Postmodern Signifier

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“British (Di)visions: Transreligious alliances in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day and Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan.”

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Technology for Surveillance/ Technology for Sustenance

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Caliban's Verses and Curses: The Dialect(ic)s of Subordination in Shakespeare's The Tempest, from Text to Film

In the 2017 popular action film Logan, director James Mangold features the character Caliban (Stephen Merchant), an albino mutant, alongside the more popular Wolverine (Hugh Jackman). As one of the X-Men, Caliban is far from handsome or heroic; indeed, his bloodhound powers to detect and track other mutants seem to be magnified by his animalistic appearance

Migrations in Absentia: Partition, trauma, and digital marketing in the 21st Century

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Western Experiences: Hegemony and 'Third World' women in Tsitsi Dangaremba's Nervous Conditions and Meena Alexander's Manhattan Music

Perhaps one of the most ironic elements of postcolonial literary analysis is the fact that readers and critics alike must access and interact with the English language, the imperial tongue of many postcolonial nations, to write about its hegemonizing force on a global level..

South Asian Diasporas and Digital Humanities

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