This article revisits the Marxist anticolonial feminist writings of Urdu author Ismat Chughtai th... more This article revisits the Marxist anticolonial feminist writings of Urdu author Ismat Chughtai through a materialist exploration into how the female body—with its erotic curvatures and grotesque protuberances, its sticky and viscous textures and fluids—becomes the focalized object of what the author terms the erotics of disgust. Chughtai is perhaps most famous for her being tried for obscenity in 1942 for her most famous short story, “The Quilt” (“Lihaaf”), which narrates a young girl’s encounter with the erotic relationship of a middle-class Muslim woman and her female servant. As Chughtai herself recounts, however, she was acquitted because the prosecution could never point to the exact words that were to be considered obscene. The author argues that we read Chughtai’s extraordinary inquiries into the imbrication of desire and disgust as the visceral sites of gender discipline, as the question of the “modern” Muslim female citizen subject hangs in the balance of an emergent Indian nationhood. The author offers a queer feminist critique of the traditional phenomenology of disgust by analyzing the codes of erotic texture produced out of histories of colonial hygiene and bourgeois sexual discipline in late colonial India.
California 'I didn't think it would turn out this way' is the secret epitaph of intimacy. To inti... more California 'I didn't think it would turn out this way' is the secret epitaph of intimacy. To intimate is to communicate with the sparest of signs and gestures, and at its root intimacy has the quality of eloquence and brevity. But intimacy also involves an aspiration for a narrative about something shared, a story about both oneself and others that will turn out in a particular way.-Lauren Berlant
Mulk Raj Anand is perhaps best known for his pioneering roles in the development of the Indian En... more Mulk Raj Anand is perhaps best known for his pioneering roles in the development of the Indian English novel, and as a founding member of the Marxist anti-colonial movement, the All-India Progressive Writers’ Association, in the 1930s. Via an examination of an obscure and largely forgotten experimental Anand short story, Lament on a Death of A Master of Arts, this article revisits his most famous novel, Untouchable, through an emphasis on the poetics of touch and sensation. It argues that there lies, latent in Anand’s realist engagements with the emergent national consciousness, a particular aesthetic investment in the visceral sensibilities of the colonized subject. Foregrounding his participation in the Progressive Writers’ movement, it contends that the question of what would define realist literature as “progressive” for Anand and the Progressive Writers in a decolonizing India brings to light the group’s dynamic aesthetic grapplings with revolutionary feelings and the revolution of feeling.
This paper centers the Marxist artistic experiments of anti-colonial activist and playwright, Ras... more This paper centers the Marxist artistic experiments of anti-colonial activist and playwright, Rashid Jahan, for her phenomenological approaches to feminist decolonial practices in India. I argue that Jahan’s experiments in literature and theater provide a far more incisive mobilization of the “subaltern” consciousness than previously understood within postcolonial debates. This paper is thus a renewed engagement with articulations of the subaltern consciousness that were so central to the anti-colonial literatures of this era. I seek to challenge the field of postcolonial studies to shift a traditional focus on the discursive and ideological contours of colonial violence and power to account for how habits of mind are secured in the habituated responses of the body. Simultaneously, I seek to attend to a gap in affect studies by making available new modes of reading racialized affective forms through the historical materialities that produce its expressive forms.
This article revisits the Marxist anticolonial feminist writings of Urdu author Ismat Chughtai th... more This article revisits the Marxist anticolonial feminist writings of Urdu author Ismat Chughtai through a materialist exploration into how the female body—with its erotic curvatures and grotesque protuberances, its sticky and viscous textures and fluids—becomes the focalized object of what the author terms the erotics of disgust. Chughtai is perhaps most famous for her being tried for obscenity in 1942 for her most famous short story, “The Quilt” (“Lihaaf”), which narrates a young girl’s encounter with the erotic relationship of a middle-class Muslim woman and her female servant. As Chughtai herself recounts, however, she was acquitted because the prosecution could never point to the exact words that were to be considered obscene. The author argues that we read Chughtai’s extraordinary inquiries into the imbrication of desire and disgust as the visceral sites of gender discipline, as the question of the “modern” Muslim female citizen subject hangs in the balance of an emergent Indian...
This article revisits the Marxist anticolonial feminist writings of Urdu author Ismat Chughtai th... more This article revisits the Marxist anticolonial feminist writings of Urdu author Ismat Chughtai through a materialist exploration into how the female body—with its erotic curvatures and grotesque protuberances, its sticky and viscous textures and fluids—becomes the focalized object of what the author terms the erotics of disgust. Chughtai is perhaps most famous for her being tried for obscenity in 1942 for her most famous short story, “The Quilt” (“Lihaaf”), which narrates a young girl’s encounter with the erotic relationship of a middle-class Muslim woman and her female servant. As Chughtai herself recounts, however, she was acquitted because the prosecution could never point to the exact words that were to be considered obscene. The author argues that we read Chughtai’s extraordinary inquiries into the imbrication of desire and disgust as the visceral sites of gender discipline, as the question of the “modern” Muslim female citizen subject hangs in the balance of an emergent Indian nationhood. The author offers a queer feminist critique of the traditional phenomenology of disgust by analyzing the codes of erotic texture produced out of histories of colonial hygiene and bourgeois sexual discipline in late colonial India.
California 'I didn't think it would turn out this way' is the secret epitaph of intimacy. To inti... more California 'I didn't think it would turn out this way' is the secret epitaph of intimacy. To intimate is to communicate with the sparest of signs and gestures, and at its root intimacy has the quality of eloquence and brevity. But intimacy also involves an aspiration for a narrative about something shared, a story about both oneself and others that will turn out in a particular way.-Lauren Berlant
Mulk Raj Anand is perhaps best known for his pioneering roles in the development of the Indian En... more Mulk Raj Anand is perhaps best known for his pioneering roles in the development of the Indian English novel, and as a founding member of the Marxist anti-colonial movement, the All-India Progressive Writers’ Association, in the 1930s. Via an examination of an obscure and largely forgotten experimental Anand short story, Lament on a Death of A Master of Arts, this article revisits his most famous novel, Untouchable, through an emphasis on the poetics of touch and sensation. It argues that there lies, latent in Anand’s realist engagements with the emergent national consciousness, a particular aesthetic investment in the visceral sensibilities of the colonized subject. Foregrounding his participation in the Progressive Writers’ movement, it contends that the question of what would define realist literature as “progressive” for Anand and the Progressive Writers in a decolonizing India brings to light the group’s dynamic aesthetic grapplings with revolutionary feelings and the revolution of feeling.
This paper centers the Marxist artistic experiments of anti-colonial activist and playwright, Ras... more This paper centers the Marxist artistic experiments of anti-colonial activist and playwright, Rashid Jahan, for her phenomenological approaches to feminist decolonial practices in India. I argue that Jahan’s experiments in literature and theater provide a far more incisive mobilization of the “subaltern” consciousness than previously understood within postcolonial debates. This paper is thus a renewed engagement with articulations of the subaltern consciousness that were so central to the anti-colonial literatures of this era. I seek to challenge the field of postcolonial studies to shift a traditional focus on the discursive and ideological contours of colonial violence and power to account for how habits of mind are secured in the habituated responses of the body. Simultaneously, I seek to attend to a gap in affect studies by making available new modes of reading racialized affective forms through the historical materialities that produce its expressive forms.
This article revisits the Marxist anticolonial feminist writings of Urdu author Ismat Chughtai th... more This article revisits the Marxist anticolonial feminist writings of Urdu author Ismat Chughtai through a materialist exploration into how the female body—with its erotic curvatures and grotesque protuberances, its sticky and viscous textures and fluids—becomes the focalized object of what the author terms the erotics of disgust. Chughtai is perhaps most famous for her being tried for obscenity in 1942 for her most famous short story, “The Quilt” (“Lihaaf”), which narrates a young girl’s encounter with the erotic relationship of a middle-class Muslim woman and her female servant. As Chughtai herself recounts, however, she was acquitted because the prosecution could never point to the exact words that were to be considered obscene. The author argues that we read Chughtai’s extraordinary inquiries into the imbrication of desire and disgust as the visceral sites of gender discipline, as the question of the “modern” Muslim female citizen subject hangs in the balance of an emergent Indian...
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