Papers by Dhritiman Chakraborty
Oxford University Press, 2023
Insurgent Imaginations, 2020
This book argues that contemporary world literature is defined by peripheral internationalism. Ov... more This book argues that contemporary world literature is defined by peripheral internationalism. Over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a range of aesthetic forms beyond the metropolitan West - fiction, memoir, cinema, theater - came to resist cultural nationalism and promote the struggles of subaltern groups. Peripheral internationalism pitted intellectuals and writers not only against the ex-imperial West, but also against their burgeoning national elites. In a sense, these writers marginalized the West and placed the non-Western peripheries in a new center. Through a grounded yet sweeping survey of Bengali, English, and other texts, the book connects India to the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, Latin America, and the United States. Chapters focus on Rabindranath Tagore, M. N. Roy, Mrinal Sen, Mahasweta Devi, Arundhati Roy, and Aravind Adiga. Unlike the Anglo-American emphasis on a post-national globalization, Insurgent Imaginations argues for humanism and revolutionary intern...
Asian Journal of Research in Social Sciences and Humanities, 2013
Folk forms are generally viewed as anachronistic entities in the market driven colossus of cultur... more Folk forms are generally viewed as anachronistic entities in the market driven colossus of cultural uniformity and annihilation of such cultural fossils are legitimised in the name of advancement. But the claims of globalization and cultural hegemony are not uncontested as the fierce dissensus between the civilized/globalised society and the subaltern political society are gaining larger momentum. Can folk forms be defossilised to unpack their ontological and socio political trajectories so that a new grammar of dissent and ingenious forms of neo-subjectivities can be resuscitated? Folk forms derive their sustenance through community bondings and solidarity formations and such integral tropes are gradually losing their currency under the corrosive effect of the market. So a critical folk studies may reclaim the matrix of a renewed counter hegemony of dissidence in this time of capital conformism.
Religion as Critique, 2017
Irfan Ahmad makes the far-reaching argument that potent systems and modes for self-critique as we... more Irfan Ahmad makes the far-reaching argument that potent systems and modes for self-critique as well as critique of others are inherent in Islam—indeed, critique is integral to its fundamental tenets and practices. Challenging common views of Islam as hostile to critical thinking, Ahmad delineates thriving traditions of critique in Islamic culture, focusing in large part on South Asian traditions. Ahmad interrogates Greek and German as well as French Enlightenment notions of reason and critique, and he notes how they are invoked in relation to “others,” including Muslims. To move away from the Enlightenment’s equation with reason and critique, the book turns to the axial age, an “age of criticism.” Like the Prophets Moses and Jesus, Muhammad was a critic-reformer. Drafting an alternative genealogy of critique in Islam, Ahmad reads religious teachings and texts, drawing on sources in Hindi, Urdu, Farsi, and English, and demonstrates how they serve as expressions of critique. Throughou...
Postcolonial Studies, 2016
nialism and cosmopolitanism: imperialism, nationalism, representation, diaspora, displacement and... more nialism and cosmopolitanism: imperialism, nationalism, representation, diaspora, displacement and migratory identities, cultural hybridity, transculturation, translation, exile, geographical and metaphorical borderlands as well as transnational writing. It makes a case for multilingual expansion of the postcolonial imaginary as a necessary imperative. The authors emphasise the languages other than English and their choice to focus on the effect that multiple languages have on the present of the postcolonial studies are in line with the aim of the collection. This collection is a useful contribution to examine and further develop key postcolonial concepts such as Bhabha’s theorisation of postcolonial hybridity. It is a valuable text for students of postcolonial studies to examine the theoretical vocabulary and concepts of the discipline. The book gives a clear understanding of the numerous divergences in narratives of cosmopolitanism and hybridity. It is a well-edited book by Nirmala Menon and Marika Preziuso that research scholars in postcolonial literary studies must read.
The Round Table, 2015
South Africa’s Brave New World (2009), is not good academic practice. In turn, Johnson regularly ... more South Africa’s Brave New World (2009), is not good academic practice. In turn, Johnson regularly slips into personal anecdote about events and meetings, which is hardly the basis for informed historical analysis. Moreover, while I appreciate that many of the events under discussion are very recent, the book’s source material leans almost entirely upon newspaper articles, when a much wider selection of information could have been incorporated into the analysis. Although attendant in many ways, there are a couple of assertions raised in the book which I found unusual, and were left largely unsubstantiated. One of which concerns service delivery protests that have affected South Africa for the last few years; here Johnson asserts that these were due to ANC factional rivalries (p. 57), rather than recognising them as desperate efforts at enacting social change by frustrated communities left behind by the ‘non-governance’ of the country’s leaders. A final point of criticism is that the book suffers from a lack of subtlety, with its argument and conclusions repeated over and over again. This is tiresome, and does not really help the overall narrative flow; one is left with the impression that Johnson feels the reader might have somehow failed to grasp the impending demise of the ANC-led South Africa. In many respects How Long will South Africa Survive? is characteristic of R. W. Johnson’s recent outputs in which he has repeatedly predicted the coming apocalypse, in which South Africa, under ANC rule, is on course for a disastrous ending. As such, this is an outspoken and overwhelmingly pessimistic book, and one which has plainly illustrated the ANC’s and thus South Africa’s decline. It is an interesting assessment of modern South Africa, and it is hard to disagree with the analysis that the country is in serious trouble; the seemingly endless examples of endemic corruption, mismanagement, scandal and political strife tell their own story. Whatever your perspective on the ANC and South Africa, R. W. Johnson’s latest book will certainly stimulate debate.
The Indian subdistrict of Shahabad, located in the dwindling forests of the southeastern tip of R... more The Indian subdistrict of Shahabad, located in the dwindling forests of the southeastern tip of Rajasthan, is an area of extreme poverty. Beset by droughts and food shortages in recent years, it is the home of the Sahariyas, former bonded laborers, officially classified as Rajasthan's only "primitive tribe." From afar, we might consider this the bleakest of the bleak, but in Poverty and the Quest for Life, Bhrigupati Singh asks us to reconsider just what quality of life means. He shows how the Sahariyas conceive of aspiration, advancement, and vitality in both material and spiritual terms, and how such bridging can engender new possibilities of life. Singh organizes his study around two themes: power and ethics, through which he explores a complex terrain of material and spiritual forces. Authority remains contested, whether in divine or human forms; the state is both despised and desired; high and low castes negotiate new ways of living together, in conflict but also cooperation; new gods move across rival social groups; animals and plants leave their tracks on human subjectivity and religiosity; and the potential for vitality persists even as natural resources steadily disappear. Studying this milieu, Singh offers new ways of thinking beyond the religion-secularism and nature-culture dichotomies, juxtaposing questions about quality of life with political theologies of sovereignty, neighborliness, and ethics, in the process painting a rich portrait of perseverance and fragility in contemporary rural India.
Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 2018
Critical engagements like the first autobiography written by a Bengali woman, Rasasundari Devi, a... more Critical engagements like the first autobiography written by a Bengali woman, Rasasundari Devi, and the non-fictions by Kailashbasini Devi, Krishnabhabini Das, and other women writers in the second half of the nineteenth century contested the imagined idealization of the Hindu domesticity and conjugality as spaces of loveableness and spiritual commitment. They criticized coercion in child-marriages and the forceful injunctions of the Hindu scriptures on both married and widowed women. Such rhetoric of quasi empowerment needs to be disaggregated to perpetuate issues of ‘double colonization,’ ‘dual-hold’ in feminism in India. The question is whether there can be any grounds of women’s agency in the Indian tradition. Eurocentric critiques are ill-equipped to politicize all modalities of a culture of social exclusion in Hindu imaginaries. Henceforth, as questions of equality, emancipation, and empowerment are fiercely debated in the public domain in contemporary India, we need to argue ...
State and Subject Formation in South Asia, 2022
This paper is primarily premised on an ethnographic exploration of a contemporary peasant movemen... more This paper is primarily premised on an ethnographic exploration of a contemporary peasant movement at Singur in India. It tries to understand how biopolitical formations are contested or negotiated by ordinary peasants in a decade long movement that successfully defeated the capital-state nexus in refusing to give away their lands for a car factory. Thus it raises the question of whether the Foucauldian paradigm can offer a different reading of political agency in the context of postcolonial India.
The present excursus examines the radical roles of non-normative stake holders in the deepening o... more The present excursus examines the radical roles of non-normative stake holders in the deepening of democracy in India.
Author of two successive books from Sage, “Politics of Post-Civil Society” and “Maoism Democracy ... more Author of two successive books from Sage, “Politics of Post-Civil Society” and “Maoism Democracy and Globalisation”, Ajay Gudavarthy has plugged the much needed gap of formulating new theoretical ideas and optics in an emerging field of social science studies in India. Almost three years back, he was shot to limelight with his provoking rebuttal of Partha Chatterjee’s theorization of Political Society which he found wanting in understanding the non-civil spaces of politics in India. This interview was partly a follow-up of that debate and partly his reflections on the future of Subaltern Studies project, Maoism and the recent spate of Hindutva politics in contemporary India. On behalf of the Kairos Team, Dhritiman Chakraborty took this interview in 2015
Kairos: A Journal of Critical Symposium - http://www.kairostext.in/index.php/kairostext, 2021
Book Forum article on the book, Decolonising Theory by Aditya Nigam.
Critical engagements like the first autobiography written by a Bengali woman, Rasasundari Devi, a... more Critical engagements like the first autobiography written by a Bengali woman, Rasasundari Devi, and the non-fictions by Kailashbasini Devi, Krishnabhabini Das, and other women writers in the second half of the nineteenth century contested the imagined idealization of the Hindu domesticity and conjugality as spaces of loveableness and spiritual commitment. They criticized coercion in child-marriages and the forceful injunctions of the Hindu scriptures on both married and widowed women. Such rhetoric of quasi empowerment needs to be disaggregated to perpetuate issues of 'double colonization,' 'dual-hold' in feminism in India. The question is whether there can be any grounds of women's agency in the Indian tradition. Eurocentric critiques are ill-equipped to politicize all modalities of a culture of social exclusion in Hindu imaginaries. Henceforth, as questions of equality, emancipation, and empowerment are fiercely debated in the public domain in contemporary India, we need to argue how immanent dissenting woman subjectivity can originate to counteract multiple patriarchies formed in Indian immediacies.
Uploads
Papers by Dhritiman Chakraborty