PULS
Foto: Matthias Friel
This course seeks to comprehend the contours of an Indian modernity through its literary representations over the last century, as viewed from within the shifting framework of the family. Widely recognized as one of the most common ways of conceptualizing the nation, the family metaphor has been sharply critiqued in postcolonial scholarship, where the putative homogeneity of the family is seen to elide the diversity and multiplicity of the nation and normalize its hierarchies. This in turn has prompted calls for models of national belonging that are less invested in affect. What tends to go unnoticed in attempts to rescue the heterogeneity of the nation, however, is the constructedness of families. Postcolonial critiques of ‘the family metaphor’ gloss over the long history of alternative family forms which simultaneously interrogate the presumed stability, normalcy and naturalness of the traditional family as also foreground its many contradictions.
Weekly readings will examine a series of literary texts from the last hundred years of Indian Writing in English and in English translation from other Indian languages, focusing on models of family that resist nationalist appropriation via foregrounding relational patterns and diversities that fall outside of the familiar circuits of heterosexual desire but that nonetheless retain the affective charge characteristic of belongingness to the nation. The discussion of literary texts will alternate weekly with readings drawn from a range of disciplines including history, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, literary theory, politics, sexuality studies, visual cultures, and more, aimed at unpacking a complex history of Indian modernity, paying special attention to questions of subjectivity, citizenship, secularism, mass media, consumption, agency and care.Weeks 8 and 13 are reserved for solo or group presentations on short prescribed texts that invite analysis of the course’s chief concerns.
Wk 1: Introductory and Organizational session
Wk 2: Sreenivas, Mytheli. “Emotion, Identity, and the Female Subject: Tamil Women’s Magazines in Colonial India, 1890-1940”, Journal of Women’s History, vol. 14, no. 4, Winter 2003, pp. 59–81.
Trivedi, Harish. 2012. “Love, Marriage, and Realism: The Novel in Pre- and post-colonial India”, Locating Postcolonial Narrative Genres, edited by Walter Gabel and Saskia Schabio, Routledge, 2013, pp. 13–26.
Wk 3: Family Form: Reading Beyond the Plot in Krupabai Satthianadhan’s Saguna [NOVELLA, 1893]
SEXUALITY
Wk 4: Naipaul, V.S. “An Old Equilibrium”, India: A Wounded Civilization, Penguin, 1977, pp. 13–27.
Srivastava, Sanjay. “The Idea of Lata Mangeshkar: Hindu Sexuality, the Girl-Child, Heterosexual Desire, in the time of
the Five Year Plans.” Passionate Modernity: Sexuality, Class and Consumption in India, Routledge, 2007, pp. 79–110.
Wk 5: The Perils of Consumption in R.K. Narayan’s Mr Sampath:The Printer of Malgudi [NOVEL]
Wk 6: Chatterjee, Partha. “Talking about Our Modernity in Two Languages.” A Possible India: Essays in Political Criticism, Oxford
University Press, 1997, pp. 263–285.
Wk 7: The Partial Agent: ‘The Sweetmeat’ by Bama Charan Mitra and Preetish Acharya’s ‘Order Cancel’ [SHORT STORIES]
Wk 8: Group Presentations: Narendranath Mitra’s ‘A Drop of Milk’ [SHORT STORY]
CITIZENSHIP
Wk. 9: Cabrera, Luis. ‘Gandhiji, I have no Homeland’: Cosmopolitan Insights from B.R. Ambedkar, India’s Anti-caste Campaigner and Constitutional Architect.’, Political Studies, vol. 65, no.3, 2017, pp. 576–593.
Wk 10: The post-familial nation in Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance [NOVEL]
SECULARISM
Wk 11: Menon, Nivedita. ‘Outing Heteronormativity: Nation, Citizen, Feminist Disruptions.’ Sexualities, edited by Nivedita Menon, Women Unlimited, 2007, pp. 3–51.
Wk 12: Reconstructing the family: Manju Kapoor’s A Married Woman [NOVEL]
AGENCY
Wk 13: Group Presentations: Geetanjali Shree’s Mai [NOVEL]
Wk. 14: Kumar, Nita. “The Nature of Reform in Modern India: A Discussion of Mai; a Novel by Geetanjali Shree”, The Politics of Gender, Community and Modernity: Essays on education in India, Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 179–217.
CARE
Wk 15: Autonomy and Care: Akhil Sharma’s Family Life [NOVEL]
Stephens, Julie. “Unmothering.” Confronting Postmaternal Thinking: Feminism, Memory and Care, Columbia University
Press, 2011, pp. 17–42.
SUGGESTED READINGS
Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Acharya, Preetish. “Order Cancel.” [mid to late 1980s], The Table Is Laid: The Oxford Anthology of South Asian Food Writing, edited by John Thieme and Ira Raja, Oxford UP, 2007, pp. 182–188.
Begona, Aretxaga. “Maddening States.” Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 32, 2003, pp. 393–410.
Berlant, Lauren. “Theory of Infantile Citizenship.” Public Culture, vol. 5, 1993, pp. 395–410.
Chatterjee, Partha. “The Politics of the Governed.” Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. Permanent Black, 2004, pp. 53–78.
Chopra, Radhika, et al., editors. South Asian Masculinities: Context of Change, Sites of Continuity. Women Unlimited, 2004.
Clibbens, Patrick. ‘“The destiny of this city is to be the spiritual workshop of the nation”: clearing cities and making citizens during the Indian Emergency, 1975–1977 Contemporary South Asia, vol. 22, no.1, 2014, pp. 51–66.
Conlon, F. F. “Dining Out in Bombay.” Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World, edited by Carol A. Breckenridge, Oxford UP, 1995, 90–127.
de Haan, Arjan. “Calcutta’s Labour Migrants: Encounters with Modernity.” Contributions to Indian Sociology, vol. 37, no. 1–2, Feb. 2003, pp. 189–215.
Dirlik, Arif. ‘Global Modernity? Modernity in an Age of Global Capitalism.’ European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 6, no. 3, 2003, pp. 275–292.
Dwivedi, Divya and Shaj Mohan. “Dynamics: Active and Passive.” Gandhi and Philosophy on Theological Anti-Politics. Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 89–110.
Fuller, C.J. and John Harris, “For an anthropology of the modern Indian state.” edited by C.J. Fuller and Veronique Benei, The Everyday State and Society in Modern India, Social Science Press, 2000, pp. 1–30.
Gupta, Akhil. “Blurred Boundaries: the discourse of corruption, the culture of politics and the imagined state.” American Ethnologist, vol. 22, no. 2, May 1995, pp. 375–402.
Guru, Gopal, editor. Humiliation: Claims and Context, Oxford UP, 2009.
Hansen, Thomas Blom. “Recuperating Masculinity: Hindu nationalism, violence and exorcism of the Muslim ‘Other’.” Critique of Anthropology, vol. 16, no.2, 1996, pp. 137–172.
Hofmeyr, Brenda. “Radical Passivity: Ethical Problem or Solution?.” Radical Passivity: Rethinking Ethical Agency in Levinas, Springer, 2009, pp. 15–30.
Jain, Kajri. “The Efficacious Image and the Sacralization of Modernity.” Gods in the Bazaar: Economies of Indian Calendar Art. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007, pp. 269–314.
Laurie, Timothy and Hannah Stark. “Reconsidering Kinship beyond the Nuclear Family with Deleuze and Guattari.” Cultural Studies Review, vol. 18, no.1, 2012, pp. 19–39.
McClintock, Anne. “Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family.” Feminist Review, no. 44, Sage Publications, Ltd., 1993, pp. 61–80.
Mbembe, Achille, On the Postcolony, University of California Press, 2001.
Mishra, Vijay. “Defining the Self in Indian Literary and Filmic Texts.” Narratives of Agency: Self Making in China, India, and Japan, edited by Wimal Dissanayake, University of Minnesota Press, 1996, pp. 117–150.
Mitra, Bamacharan “Sweetmeat” [late 50s]. The Table is Laid: The Oxford Anthology of South Asian Food Writing, edited by John Thieme and Ira Raja, Oxford UP, 2007. pp. 265–272.
Mitra, Narendranath. “A Drop of Milk” [1953], The Table is Laid: The Oxford Anthology of South Asian Food Writing, edited by John Thieme and Ira Raja, Oxford UP, 2011, pp. 273–281.
Mukhopadhyay, Bhaskar. “Between Elite Hysteria and Subaltern Carnivalesque: The Politics of Street-Food in the City of Calcutta.” South Asia Research, vol. 24, no. 1, May 2004, pp. 37–50.
Nagappan, Ramu. Speaking Havoc: Social Suffering and South Asian Narratives, University of Washington Press, 2005.
Naipaul, V.S. “An Old Equilibrium”, India: A Wounded Civilization, Penguin, 1977.
Narayan, R.K. Mr Sampath: The Printer of Malgudi [1949], Indian Thought Publications,
Parfitt, Trevor. “Are the Third World Poor Homines Sacri? Biopolitics, Sovereignty, and Development.” Alternatives, vol. 34, no. 1, Jan. 2009, pp. 41–58.
Ramamurthy, Priti. ‘The Modern Girl in India in the Interwar Years: Interracial Intimacies, International Competition, and Historical Eclipsing.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 1.2, Spring-Summer 2006, pp. 197–226.
Roy, Parama. “Abstinence: Manifestos on Meat and Masculinity.” Alimentary Tracts:Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial, Duke University Press, 2010, pp. 75–115.
Segal, Lynne. ‘Reluctant Citizens: Between Incorporation and Resistance’, Beyond Citizenship? Feminism and the Transformation of Belonging, edited by Sasha Roseneil, Palgrave, 2013, pp. 66–88.
Sylvester, Christine. “Bare Life as a Development/Postcolonial Problematic.” The Geographical Journal, vol. 172, no. 1, 2006, pp. 66–77.
Tarlo, Emma, Unsettling Memories: Narratives of Emergency in Delhi, University of California Press, 2003.
Uberoi, Patricia. Freedom and Destiny: Gender, Family and Popular Culture in India. Oxford UP, 2006.
Vajpeyi, Ananya. “A History of Caste in South Asia: From Precolonial Polity to Bio-political State.” Selected Works of Ananya Vajpeyi, Center for the Study of Developing Societies, 2009, pp. 299–320.
3 CP Response Paper
© Copyright HISHochschul-Informations-System eG