CROSSINGS A Journal of English Studies Special Volume on Marx 200 | March 2020 | ISSN 2071–1107 CROSSINGS: A Journal of English Studies Department of English and Humanities University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB) [email protected] Special Volume on Marx 200 | March 2020 | ISSN 2071–1107 Copyright Statement Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal’s published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository, in a journal or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in this journal. 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Design Maksudul Islam Senior Graphic Designer, ULAB Cover Portrait of Marx Abritty Abdullah Published by Registrar, ULAB Price BDT 300; USD 20 University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh, House #56, Road #4A, Dhanmondi R/A, Dhaka–1209, Bangladesh sah.ulab.edu.bd/crossings | ulab.edu.bd Editor Prof. Shamsad Mortuza, PhD Pro-Vice Chancellor and Head, Department of English and Humanities, ULAB, Bangladesh [email protected] Executive Editor Arifa Ghani Rahman Associate Professor, Department of English and Humanities, ULAB, Bangladesh [email protected] Editorial Board Prof. Kaiser Haq, PhD Dean, School of Arts and Humanities, and Professor, Department of English and Humanities, ULAB, Bangladesh [email protected] Prof. Syed Manzoorul Islam, PhD Professor, Department of English and Humanities, ULAB, Bangladesh [email protected] Dr. Mahmud Hasan Khan Associate Professor, Department of English and Humanities, ULAB, Bangladesh [email protected] Advisory Board Prof. Fakrul Alam, PhD UGC Professor, Department of English, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh [email protected] Prof. Ian Almond, PhD Professor of World Literature, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University in Qatar [email protected] Prof. Malashri Lal, PhD Professor, Department of English, University of Delhi, India [email protected] Prof. Azirah Hashim, PhD Professor, English Language Department, Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, University of Malaya, Malaysia [email protected] CROSSINGS: Special Volume on Marx 200 | 2020 CONTENTS Editorial Note .............................................................................................................. 4 From the Conference Convener: Marx at 200 ............................................................. 6 Karl Marx on India: A Postcolonial Perspective Fakrul Alam ................................................................................................................... 9 Living Amidst the Catastrophes of “the Living Contradiction”: Theses on Marx at 200 Bret Benjamin .............................................................................................................. 23 Not Winnin’ Anymore: Boys from The Blackstuff and the Literature of Recession Joseph Brooker ............................................................................................................. 40 Naxalgia and “Madhu Chakra” in Meghnadbodh Rohoshya: A Critical Review Shamsad Mortuza ......................................................................................................... 54 The Slow versus the Spectacular: Environment, Violence and Representation in China Miéville’s “Polynia” and “Covehithe” Khanh Nguyen ............................................................................................................. 67 The Law of Diminishing Returns: Precarity and Nonreproduction inThe Fall Sean O’Brien ................................................................................................................ 82 “Out of the death of slavery”: A Return to Marx’s Civil War Writings Joel Wendland-Liu ........................................................................................................98 Allegorizing Neoliberalism: Contemporary South Asian Fictions and the Critique of Capitalism Sarker Hasan Al Zayed ................................................................................................ 117 Note to Contributors ................................................................................................ 137 CROSSINGS: Special Volume on Marx 200 | 2020 Editorial Note The Special Volume of Crossings: A Journal of English Studies on Marx is indeed special. Some of the papers were presented at the two-day international conference that ULAB organized to celebrate Karl Marx’s bicentenary on November 30-December 1, 2018. This issue of Crossings did not, however, limit itself only to the sixty odd papers that were presented at the conference; but solicited articles from some renowned Marxist critics at home and abroad. The volume surveys a Marxist tradition of critical thinking by incorporating issues such as political economy, ideology, value theory, crisis theory, systemic analysis of capitalism, eco- criticism, neoliberalism, and aesthetic theory. These articles show how a realistic alternative to the current global marketplace can be deemed through reorganizing our sensibility. The special issue on Marx begins with Fakrul Alam’s paper in which he discusses the German revolutionary’s writings on India, originally published in the New York Tribune. Alam draws attention to the historical precision and rhetorical force of Marx’s essays and his powerful critique of British imperialism. As he argues in his essay, postcolonial critics, especially those whose works pivot on British rule in India, will immensely benefit from Marx’s rich prognosis of British imperialism. Alam’s reading, on the one hand, draws attention to the astonishing depth of Marx’s knowledge about India, and, on the other, locates the history and origin of these ideas, showing how his insights developed and matured with time. He also offers his viewpoints on the controversy created by Edward Said’s comments on Marx’s views in the Palestinian-American’s book Orientalism. Bret Benjamin’s essay revisits Grundrisse and Capital to understand Marx’s critique of capitalism’s “economic law of motion.” In particular, Benjamin highlights how Marx frames capital as the living contradiction to overcome the inherent barriers that capital posits. One such example involves devaluation; that is, the movement of money to commodity. Benjamin recognizes that the globalization and monetization of our time is different from the industrial age that Marx studied. However, that does not exhaust Marx’s relevance today. For Benjamin, Marx has offered us a blueprint to negotiate with the new set of social rules that we are experiencing. In “Not Winnin’ Anymore: Boys from the Blackstuff and the Literature of Recession,” Joseph Brooker examines the reversal of social thought or ideological domain under Thatcherism. Economic recession, unemployment, North/South divide are some of the attributes of Thatcherism. Citing examples from different period dramas and regional dramas featured on British TV, Brooker discusses how deindustrialization has become a reality for contemporary Britain, and how it has atrophied the working class. Shamsad Mortuza’s review of a 2017 Bangla movie marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Naxalite Movement shows the “lapsed Marxism” and Maoist ideologies that led a group of progressive students to use a tribal village in India as the epicenter of a political tremor 4 CROSSINGS: Special Volume on Marx 200 | 2020 that divided the communist party. The movie’s leitmotif betrayal is elaborated through a multiplicity of exchanges between the past and the present to highlight the stalemate of left politics. Khanh Nguyen offers a reading of two short stories by contemporary British sci-fi writer China Miéville. Terming the setting of the stories as the New Weird, Nguyen unpacks the spectacles of violence that Miéville has to offer. For this Marxist academic author, the slow horror of global warming and other environmental threats constitute our dystopian existence. Miéville uses cinematic language to blur the boundary between genres as if to question the sites of production. Using recent theories on eco-criticism and posthumanism, Nguyen shows how the new weirds are becoming the new normal. Sean O’Brien scrutinizes BBC 2 series The Fall to address several questions involving precarity, representation, gender, labor, affect, value, reproduction, and the figure of the child. O’Brien points out several failings of capitalist class relation. For instance, citing the links to reproductive work with the construction of self-identity, O’Brien observes, “in the series, institutions of social reproduction are revealed to be sclerotic, exemplified not only in the austerity policies of fiscally insolvent national governments but also in the family and the couple, social forms integral to a system of crisis management that depends upon feminized reproductive work.” Joel Wendland-Liu’s essay employs Aijaz Ahmed’s understanding of materialist conception of history to revisit Marx’s Writings on the US Civil War. Wendland-Liu reads the slave exploitation as a prototype of exploitation in global capitalism. The US Civil War for him offers