FAHSS Minority Identities: Rights and Representation Research Theme
Research Seminar :
Signifying Corporeality: The Body as bearer of Neocolonial trauma, pain and suffering in Anita Desai’s Postcolonial Fictions
– Bhawana Jain, Visiting Research Fellow, School of Literature and Languages
Wednesday 5th December, 4pm, HUMSS 126, Whiteknights Campus
In the postcolonial world, where verbal testimony is sometimes an impossibility, body offers voice and lends meaning to the untold, the silent, the non-representable historical realities and the immaterial world of emotions, psychology and traumatic experiences.
The analysis of Anita Desai’s novels elucidates a repetitive desire of the author, from one novel to another, to represent the subaltern’s marginalized body as a bearer of individual and collective past baggage. Desai circumscribes physicality i.e. scarred, fractured and destroyed body as the potential testimony of traumatic memories and ongoing experiences that otherwise cannot be wholly grasped.
Oriental local myths, rituals and beliefs have long been undermined by hegemonic Eurocentric trauma paradigm. It will be the contention of this paper that Indian literary, philosophical and cultural concepts cannot be overlooked to understand the processes of healing and recuperation of the suffering postcolonial subjects in the chaos of globalization.
Do join us for this illuminating talk and a glass of wine.