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Postcolonial Interventions Vol Ii Issue 2 POSTCOLONIAL INTERVENTIONS VOL II ISSUE 2 1 POSTCOLONIAL INTERVENTIONS VOL II ISSUE 2 POSTCOLONIAL INTERVENTIONS VOL II ISSUE 2 POSTCOLONIAL INTERVENTIONS AN INTERDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL OF POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES STRUGGLES — SUTURES — SELVES [THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK] ISSN 2455 6564 VOLUME II ISSUE 2 JUNE 2017 2 3 POSTCOLONIAL INTERVENTIONS VOL II ISSUE 2 POSTCOLONIAL INTERVENTIONS VOL II ISSUE 2 CONTENTS POSTCOLONIAL INTERVENTIONS An Interdisciplinary Journal of Postcolonial Studies EDITOR’S NOTE VII Volume 1I, Issue 2 1. PROVINCIALIZING ENGLAND : 1 VICTORIAN DOMESTICITY AND THE Copyright of individual articles rests with the authors. Any COLONIAL GAZE reproduction would require the prior permission of Postcolonial KRISHNA SEN Interventions and an acknowledgement of its first publication in Postcolonial Interventions. 2. ARBOREAL ARTICULATIONS: 36 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons TREES, PLANTS AND THE Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. POSSIBILITY OF LANGUAGE IN MAHASWETA DEVI’S FICTION EDITORS ASSOCIATE EDITORS Dr. Abin Chakraborty Souraj Dutta PUSPA DAMAI Sayan Aich Bhowmik Pritha Mukherjee 3. LOVING SOMEONE YOU DON’T 71 ASSISTANT EDITORS Somrita Misra KNOW: TRANSCULTURATION, SEX Deblina Hazra AND MARRIAGE IN THE FICTION OF JHUMPA LAHIRI AND BHARATI MUKHERJEE Cover image and design: Souraj Dutta SANDRA COX Published Online June, 2017 4 5 POSTCOLONIAL INTERVENTIONS VOL II ISSUE 2 POSTCOLONIAL INTERVENTIONS VOL II ISSUE 2 4. THE COSMOPOLITAN CITY AND 103 ITS GESTURE OF REFUGE SONI WADHWA 5. “LIKE HIS FATHER BEFORE 129 HIM”: PATRILINEALITY AND NATIONALISM IN THE WORK OF HISHAM MATAR, JAMAL TMAHJOUB AND ROBIN YASSIN-KASSAB TASNIM QUTAIT 6. DE-STEREOTYPING AFRICAN 161 REALITIES THROUGH SOCIAL EDITOR’S NOTE MEDIA IN CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE’S AMERICANAH AND ABIN CHAKRABORTY BELKACEM MEGHZOUCHENE’S SOPHIA IN THE WHITE CITY FOUAD MAMI 7. MATERIAL FOR STORIES: THE 198 EMBODYING RURAL WOMAN IN THE FICTION OF DING LING MENGYAO LIU 6 7 POSTCOLONIAL INTERVENTIONS VOL II ISSUE 2 POSTCOLONIAL INTERVENTIONS VOL II ISSUE 2 Bhutto’s remarks and her anguished response to the film signify the abiding relevance of postcolonialism and the need to generate effective counter-discourses which are as much applicable to people in the West as they are to the people of the formerly colonised countries. We find ourselves at a particular historical juncture where racial hatred against non-white com- munities, particularly Muslims and migrants, rages in various parts of the West, even as other parts of Asia or Africa plunge into different forms of sectarian vio- lence. India, in particular, is witnessing a rabid surge of majoritarian fanaticism which is principally fuelled by the typically Eurocentric notion of a nation consisting In a review of Gurinder Chadha’s 2017 release, Vice- of one race, one culture, one language and one religion. roy’s House, Fatima Bhutto remarks, It is almost as if the experiment of forging for ourselves a nation-state that could harmoniously integrate dif- Viceroy’s House betrays the profound inferiority com- ferences is being abandoned in favour of a discredited plex that plagues colonised people, a trauma as severe European model because our imagination and affec- as the physical assaults and violence done to the land and bodies of subjugated people. It is exactly this kind tive solidarities have run dry. As a result, we see the of thinking that infected those who rioted and murdered nation plunging into a widespread network of division, their compatriots—a sense of fully absorbing the colo- hatred and violence where the mere choice of meat can niser’s claims of racial, moral and civilisational superi- lead to the loss of one’s life. If postcolonialism is about ority. How else to explain the damage to the colonised strategic interventions in the name of our future then it psyche, whose imagination is so deeply corroded that it can believe that white skins are superior to brown skins, falls on us to mount discursive and material challenges that the British are greater than Indians, that one reli- against the dominant discourses coloured by seepage gion prevails over another? It is in accepting these tragic from colonial history to override the manifold adversi- untruths that nations are crippled with a paralysing fear ties of the present. of others and sincere loathing of the self. (The Guardian, 03 March 2017) VIII8 9IX POSTCOLONIAL INTERVENTIONS VOL II ISSUE 2 POSTCOLONIAL INTERVENTIONS VOL II ISSUE 2 The current issue ofPostcolonial Interventions decides brought about migratory movements. Her paper fore- to take up this responsibility through its various con- grounds the ways in which fiction offers a challenge to tributions which focus on the diverse avenues through preconceived notions about Bengali and Indian mar- which postcolonial agency manifests itself. Beginning riages and identities even as it analyses the produc- with Krishna Sen’s erudite exploration of travelogues tions of female subjective spaces in a global context. by Rabindranath Tagore and others which subvert the This global context also plays a particularly significant power-relations of colonial travelogues and sketch the role in Soni Wadhwa’s discussions of the city as a site outlines of an alternate modernity, the issue encom- of cosmopolitan negotiations which at times filters or passes within itself a wide range of discussions and entirely bypasses the pressures of the national. Based interventions that include ecocriticism, diasporic ne- on the fictive world of Rushdie and the configura- gotiations, Arab nationalism, representations of wom- tions of several key theorists, the paper explores the en in Chinese literature or notions of cosmopolitan- significance of the cosmopolitan city and the unique ism and refugees. One theme that runs through these values it is capable of generating – values that are par- papers is the idea of resistance, often in acknowledg- ticularly significant in an increasingly xenophobic age ment of adverse material circumstances that provoke where movements across borders of different kind are resistant actions, at time desperate, but also governed viewed with growing suspicion and even hatred. Alter- by emancipatory aspirations. This is particularly true nate values are also proposed through Puspa Damai’s of Mengyao Liu’s paper on the representation of rural analysis of arboreal articulations in Mahashweta Devi’s women in the novels of Ding Ling which explores both fiction where she locates a kind of rhizomatic activ- the adversities to which Chinese women were often ism of grass and plants which interrogates the ideo- subjected, especially in the wake of Japanese coloni- logical assumptions of both colonial discourses and alism and the representational complexities that have hegemonic nationalisms that function by erasing the circumscribed their subjectivities in various contexts. voices and agency of indigenous communities. What emerges in the process is a kind of subaltern utopian- Such gendered considerations are also the subject ism, a term which the author cautiously eschews, that of Sandra Cox’s exploration of the works of Bharati remains strikingly relevant. But utopian gleams are Mukherjee and Jhumpa Lahiri, where she particularly necessarily offset by predicaments of the present and focuses on feminist refashioning of selves and iden- Tasnim Qutait’s analysis of patrilineal nationalism in tities in a global context of transcultural negotiations Arab countries astutely uncovers the various pitfalls 10X 11XI POSTCOLONIAL INTERVENTIONS VOL II ISSUE 2 POSTCOLONIAL INTERVENTIONS VOL II ISSUE 2 and sloughs of disillusionment that bar our path to any promised land. But recognising the pitfalls too is an important critical enterprise which prepares us for the future. this task is also carried on by the paper of Fouad Mami which simultaneously explores the pos- sibilities of agency and critque through the space of digital media. The aim of these intermingled critical explorations is to further enhance our consciousness of the multidi- mensional challenges of the present, both material and discursive. At the same time, such endeavours are also part of a larger network of critical thinking which is PROVINCIALIZING ENGLAND: vital for the cultural, affective and imaginative well-be- ing of humanity as a whole which remains imperilled by the networks of empire, capital and racial and reli- VICTORIAN DOMESTICITY gious fanaticism. As educational systems around the world, especially humanities and social sciences, face AND THE COLONIAL GAZE the onslaught of instrumental rationality and experi- 1 ence an attendant colonisation of lifeworlds, in Haber- KRISHNA SEN mas’ terms, it is all the more essential for us to keep alive the horizons of critical thought which must not be conquered by utilitarian logic of one kind or anoth- er. With the cooperation of our contributors and au- thors, we too hope to keep such horizons visible for the foreseeable future. XII12 13 POSTCOLONIAL INTERVENTIONS VOL II ISSUE 2 POSTCOLONIAL INTERVENTIONS VOL II ISSUE 2 The template of imperial travel was very different from Tagore’s ideal of cultural interchange. Said has famous- ly defined this template –“European culture was able to manage – and even produce – the Orient … during the post-Enlightenment period” (Said 3). Greenblatt (1991) shows how this discursive (and actual) dom- ination in terms of othering and marginalization ex- tended to the whole of the non-West from as far back as the early
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