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Papers by soumyadeep chakraborty

Worldview, 2022

Beyond (Re)Claiming the Child: Power and Resistance in Toni Morrison’s Beloved Soumyadeep Chakrab... more Beyond (Re)Claiming the Child: Power and Resistance in Toni Morrison’s Beloved
Soumyadeep Chakraborty
Abstract
A text with multiple interpretative threads, Toni Morrison’s Beloved unveils Sethe’s story and unleashes how she risks her life, turns into a slave fugitive, kills her daughter to nullify the slave owner’s claim on her and posits resistance against the American slave tradition. American Property Law (that pronounces that only the owner of the property has the right to destroy it) justifies Sethe’s action and establishes her ownership and subsequent claim over the child, Beloved while erasing the slave owner’s. The vigorous act of killing Beloved as means of resistance and the tussling equation in claiming the child echo the problematics of power relationship as theorised by Michael Foucault. In “The Subject and Power” Foucault argues that slavery transfigures into a problematic power relationship through the slave’s possible ‘mobility’ or ‘escape’ or ‘resistance’ in any means (342) and in Power/Knowledge he traces the problematics of power relationship in the inevitable reciprocity between the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic subject positions (140-142). Sethe’s mobility, her escape with her daughter and, finally, her act of resistance problematise the power relationship in the text. The conflict between Sethe and the slave owner signals the concomitant reciprocity between the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic subject positions. But Sethe’s act of resistance, on the contrary, could be interpreted as her means of exercising power on Beloved that results in destroying the very object of power exercise and turns her traumatic. Beloved’s spectral presence in the narrative could be seen as Sethe’s traumatic response to the catastrophic event that takes away from her the very object of power exercise. My paper, at this juncture, aims at analysing the nature and prospect of the complex power relations embedded in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. It also seeks to investigate how the protagonist’s traumatic responses act as the resonance of intrusive phenomena in the power relations in the narrative.
Keywords: resistance, claim, child, power relationship, hegemonic, counter-hegemonic, trauma.

The Commonwealth Review (ISCS)

Book Reviews by soumyadeep chakraborty

Green Letters Studies in Ecocriticism, 2021

This is a review of the book, Global Perspectives on Eco-Aesthetics and Eco-Ethics: A Green Crit... more This is a review of the book, Global Perspectives on Eco-Aesthetics and Eco-Ethics: A Green Critique (Lexington Books, Rowman and Littlefield, 2020) edited by Krishanu Maiti and Soumyadeep Chakraborty. The book review is done by Tarn MacArthur, School of English, University of St Andrews and published in the journal, Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism (Routledge, Taylor and Francis).

Worldview, 2022

Beyond (Re)Claiming the Child: Power and Resistance in Toni Morrison’s Beloved Soumyadeep Chakrab... more Beyond (Re)Claiming the Child: Power and Resistance in Toni Morrison’s Beloved
Soumyadeep Chakraborty
Abstract
A text with multiple interpretative threads, Toni Morrison’s Beloved unveils Sethe’s story and unleashes how she risks her life, turns into a slave fugitive, kills her daughter to nullify the slave owner’s claim on her and posits resistance against the American slave tradition. American Property Law (that pronounces that only the owner of the property has the right to destroy it) justifies Sethe’s action and establishes her ownership and subsequent claim over the child, Beloved while erasing the slave owner’s. The vigorous act of killing Beloved as means of resistance and the tussling equation in claiming the child echo the problematics of power relationship as theorised by Michael Foucault. In “The Subject and Power” Foucault argues that slavery transfigures into a problematic power relationship through the slave’s possible ‘mobility’ or ‘escape’ or ‘resistance’ in any means (342) and in Power/Knowledge he traces the problematics of power relationship in the inevitable reciprocity between the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic subject positions (140-142). Sethe’s mobility, her escape with her daughter and, finally, her act of resistance problematise the power relationship in the text. The conflict between Sethe and the slave owner signals the concomitant reciprocity between the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic subject positions. But Sethe’s act of resistance, on the contrary, could be interpreted as her means of exercising power on Beloved that results in destroying the very object of power exercise and turns her traumatic. Beloved’s spectral presence in the narrative could be seen as Sethe’s traumatic response to the catastrophic event that takes away from her the very object of power exercise. My paper, at this juncture, aims at analysing the nature and prospect of the complex power relations embedded in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. It also seeks to investigate how the protagonist’s traumatic responses act as the resonance of intrusive phenomena in the power relations in the narrative.
Keywords: resistance, claim, child, power relationship, hegemonic, counter-hegemonic, trauma.

The Commonwealth Review (ISCS)

Green Letters Studies in Ecocriticism, 2021

This is a review of the book, Global Perspectives on Eco-Aesthetics and Eco-Ethics: A Green Crit... more This is a review of the book, Global Perspectives on Eco-Aesthetics and Eco-Ethics: A Green Critique (Lexington Books, Rowman and Littlefield, 2020) edited by Krishanu Maiti and Soumyadeep Chakraborty. The book review is done by Tarn MacArthur, School of English, University of St Andrews and published in the journal, Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism (Routledge, Taylor and Francis).