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Driving in the Diaspora Space in Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Mrs. Sen’s”
-- Angshuman Kar
This study focuses upon the handling of contemporary postcolonial texts and cultural
production in the global literary marketplace, through a materialist literary analysis of the recent fiction
of Indian writer and 2008 MAN Booker Prize winner Aravind Adiga. Adiga's texts The White Tiger (2008) and Between the
Assassinations (2009) stage the aesthetic, cultural and commercial
mediations which take place between texts and their publishers, as well as between the latest Indian novel
and its audience. As such, these strategies emphasise broader acts of mediation taking place in
the sphere of a global and globalised production and consumption of texts. By offering a reading
of these two works, I hope to demonstrate how processes of `looking' and consuming, performing
and competing are encoded, metaphorised and satirised in these textual objects, even as these
processes are embedded in their handling and treatment by publishers and book-buyers.
© 2011 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Of Minstrelsy and the Niger-Delta Condition: Tanure Ojaide
as Chronicler and Activist Writer
-- Enajite E Ojaruega
This essay is an explication of Frantz Fanon as a humanist. Through a detailed reading of his
four major works, it proposes that, despite his insistence on violence, Fanon was reaching forward to
a new form of humanism, one that would be more inclusive and which would reject the
European Enlightenment model. It argues that Fanon proposes an ethics of recognition of difference
within the postcolonial paradigm as the first step on the route to the new humanism. Through
mutual recognition, subjectitivities are forged, and from this point a humanist vision is possible.
Once mutual recognition has been accorded, it can lead to a collective ethics, argues Fanon.
Finally, Fanon calls for a shift in national consciousness—which ought not to stay confined to the
`national'. Fanon proposes that `oppressed peoples join up with peoples who are already sovereign if a
humanism that can be considered valid is to be built to the dimensions of the universe' in what is surely
a universalism.
© 2011 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Negotiating Growth: The Self and Nation
in Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come
-- Ogaga Okuyade
The spatial and temporal location of more than half of The Inheritance of Loss (2006) is Kalimpong and the period of Gorkhaland agitation in the 1980s. It is against the backdrop of a
historical momentous event in the Darjeeling hills that the story of the retired Judge, Sai and Gyan
unfolds. However, in the fabric of the story, history seems to serve a marginal purpose, merely providing
the spatio-temporal coordinates for the development and dénouement of a love story. This
paper proposes to critically examine the depiction of history in this novel in order to critique the
author's treatment of a historical event as a function in the story, ignoring its independent importance
in the political history of India and its impact on the everyday lives of the people involved in
it. Also, a selective treatment of history leads to a stereotyping of India, where inane violence
and rabble rousing demagogues lead the country to dogs. This paper argues that history is an
organic entity that needs to be understood and absorbed first, before using it to further the plot of a
novel as Desai does.
© 2011 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Return to Home: In Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family
and Romesh Gunesekera’s The Sandglass
-- V Ranjani and Chitra Krishnan
The spatial and temporal location of more than half of The Inheritance of Loss (2006) is Kalimpong and the period of Gorkhaland agitation in the 1980s. It is against the backdrop of a
historical momentous event in the Darjeeling hills that the story of the retired Judge, Sai and Gyan
unfolds. However, in the fabric of the story, history seems to serve a marginal purpose, merely providing
the spatio-temporal coordinates for the development and dénouement of a love story. This
paper proposes to critically examine the depiction of history in this novel in order to critique the
author's treatment of a historical event as a function in the story, ignoring its independent importance
in the political history of India and its impact on the everyday lives of the people involved in
it. Also, a selective treatment of history leads to a stereotyping of India, where inane violence
and rabble rousing demagogues lead the country to dogs. This paper argues that history is an
organic entity that needs to be understood and absorbed first, before using it to further the plot of a
novel as Desai does.
© 2011 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
SHORT STORIES
The Tourist
-- Jerome Teelucksingh
© 2011 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
SHORT STORIES
-- Volga (Translator GRK Murty)
Vimukta (The Liberated)
© 2011 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
POEMS
-- Cyril Dabydeen
Laughing Lepers (after George Barker);
History’s Moment;
Canecutter’s Mandolin
-- Tanure Ojaide
A Walk in the Rain;
Thank You
© 2011 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
INTERVIEW
-- Baran Farooqi
Stoking the Fire: A Conversation with Urdu Woman Poet
Bilqees Zafirul Hasan
© 2011 Anna Sujatha Mathai. All Rights Reserved.
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