Pavithra Tantrigoda | University of Central Florida (original) (raw)
Papers by Pavithra Tantrigoda
A hallmark of (post)modern warfare is its excessive mediatization. Noting the propensity in conte... more A hallmark of (post)modern warfare is its excessive mediatization. Noting the propensity in contemporary media culture to reduce even war and violence to a spectacle, Baudrillard (1995) has famously claimed that the Gulf War actually did not take place, but was a carefully " simulated " media event. The very proliferation of the images of war has come to reveal the limits of visual data from conflict scenarios, eroding the epistemological privilege assigned to the visual as a reflection of the truth/ real. A controversy over a video footage 2 from the recently concluded conflict between the state military of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), fueling allegations of war crimes against both sides, attests to the power of the visual image, as well as its tenuousness in an era saturated with images. This chapter examines the visual (re)presentations of the conflict between the separatist Tamil Tigers and the government of Sri Lanka as a site that reveals the limits, cracks, and unreliability of visual data. However, it also contends that as the only remaining visual testimonies to the " War PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 18
Future of Food: Journal on Food, Agriculture and Society, 2019
Interventions, 2017
This essay meets the spatial turn in postcolonial studies in examining the representations of the... more This essay meets the spatial turn in postcolonial studies in examining the representations of the contested space of the nation during and after the war in Sri Lanka in the work of Ambalavaner Sivanandan and Romesh Gunesekera. In their realist novels that portray the ethnic conflict and its ramifications, these writers approach the topography of Sri Lanka as the overlapping material and discursive sites of meaning shaped by the overdetermined forces of colonialism, class and ethnic strife, and postcolonial nation-building projects, postwar reconstruction and neoliberal policies. Their novels represent the erasure and recalibration of the contested space of the nation during and after the war – the dialectical effects of which can be seen in the discursive production of the North as “dangerous geographies”, an inhospitable terrain of death, disease, scarcity and violence, enabling both the erasure of landscape by war and its reconstitution after “peace”. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s discussion of the influential role colonial and postcolonial rule have played in the co-production of space and ethnic identity, and Aihwa Ong’s theorization of “neoliberalism as exception” in Asian contexts, this essay explores the ways in which these novelists represent postcolonial space as an anomaly riven with contradictions between the fixity of territorial discourse and the dislocations of war and neoliberal forces.
... environment in order to initiate Rosie's career as a classical dancer provides a telling... more ... environment in order to initiate Rosie's career as a classical dancer provides a telling indication of ... 6 Laila's desire for classical dancing stems from not so much a passion for exotica (as displayed by Krishna's patron in Venice, Senora Durante) but, rather, as a result of an innate ...
In the last decade, the field of postcolonial ecocriticism has offered important insights into ho... more In the last decade, the field of postcolonial ecocriticism has offered important insights into how ecological transformations are intertwined with histories, narratives, and the material practices of colonialism and globalization. Contesting 'Green Imperialism': Ecology and Rights in South Asian Literature contributes to critical conversations on how the history of imperialism is pivotal to understanding contemporary environmental trajectories in South Asia. It is the first sustained interdisciplinary inquiry that brings together law, literature and postcolonial ecocriticism to gain a multifaceted understanding of the co-constitution of legal, cultural, political and ecological formations in South Asia.<br>Contesting 'Green Imperialism' examines the onto-epistemic effects of imperial environmental legislation on environmental cultures in South Asia from the 16th century to the present. It focuses on the establishment and diffusion of legal<br>norms, parti...
This paper examines the centrality of an ontological discourse to attempts at reparation by white... more This paper examines the centrality of an ontological discourse to attempts at reparation by white characters in J.M.Coetzee’s fiction: Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Age of Iron (1990), and Disgrace (1999). These novels address the issues of justice and expiation in relation to a set of racialized, gendered, and sexualized encounters between the colonizer and the colonized, whites and non-whites, or self and other. As means of making amends for the political violence that seems to be inherent in these (uneven) encounters, Coetzee’s novels deploy a discourse of justice that hints at the potentialities of reparation (to a large extent, at a personal level) located in the body, but, at the same time, complicates such a possibility.
A hallmark of (post)modern warfare is its excessive mediatization. Noting the propensity in conte... more A hallmark of (post)modern warfare is its excessive mediatization. Noting the propensity in contemporary media culture to reduce even war and violence to a spectacle, Baudrillard (1995) has famously claimed that the Gulf War actually did not take place, but was a carefully " simulated " media event. The very proliferation of the images of war has come to reveal the limits of visual data from conflict scenarios, eroding the epistemological privilege assigned to the visual as a reflection of the truth/ real. A controversy over a video footage 2 from the recently concluded conflict between the state military of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), fueling allegations of war crimes against both sides, attests to the power of the visual image, as well as its tenuousness in an era saturated with images. This chapter examines the visual (re)presentations of the conflict between the separatist Tamil Tigers and the government of Sri Lanka as a site that reveals the limits, cracks, and unreliability of visual data. However, it also contends that as the only remaining visual testimonies to the " War PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 18
As classical dancers and popular singers who occupy the public domain, the female protagonists in... more As classical dancers and popular singers who occupy the public domain, the female protagonists in Narayan's The Guide (1958), Anita Desai's Journey to Ithaca (1995), and Salman Rushdie's The Ground beneath Her Feet (1999) appear to be empowered and liberated women in their own right. However, this does not preclude them from being subjected to various constraints imposed upon their subjectivities by the discursive operations of nationalism, patriarchy and capitalism. In both The Guide and Journey to Ithaca, the female practitioners of classical dancing, regardless of the fact that they occupy a public space, are made to conform to and represent the traditional identity of the Indian woman, while Vina in The Ground beneath Her Feet is made to embody a 'radical' sexual identity that is situated outside and in opposition to the conservative politics of the nationalist discourse as a 'radical' feminist subject. All three novels insist on foregrounding the ambivalences and nuances inherent within their subject positions by bringing into view the objectification and intense commodification of these female artists within the capitalist culture.
This essay meets the spatial turn in postcolonial studies in examining the representations of the... more This essay meets the spatial turn in postcolonial studies in examining the representations of the contested space of the nation during and after the war in Sri Lanka in the work of Ambalavaner Sivanandan and Romesh Gunesekera. In their realist novels that portray the ethnic conict and its ramications, these writers approach the topography of Sri Lanka as the overlapping material and discursive sites of meaning shaped by the overdetermined forces of colonialism, class and ethnic strife, and postcolonial nation-building projects, postwar reconstruction and neoliberal policies. Their novels represent the erasure and recalibration of the contested space of the nation during and after the war – the dialectical eects of which can be seen in the discursive production of the North as " dangerous geographies " , an inhospitable terrain of death, disease, scarcity and violence, enabling both the erasure of landscape by war and its reconstitution after " peace ". Drawing on Achille Mbembe's discussion of the inuential role colonial and postcolonial rule have played in the co-production of space and ethnic identity, and Aihwa Ong's theorization of " neoliberalism as exception " in Asian contexts, this essay explores the ways in which these novelists represent postcolonial space as an anomaly riven with contradictions between the fixity of territorial discourse and the dislocations of war and neoliberal forces.
Interdisciplinary scholarship in law and literature is commonly theorized as a relationship of su... more Interdisciplinary scholarship in law and literature is commonly theorized as a relationship of supplementarity, where each discipline’s capacity to offer what the other lacks is regarded as a sign of value. The most common configuration of this relationship accords humanizing attributes to literature and rational, mechanistic truth to law. While each discipline is considered to enhance the other in a positive, cumulative manner in this discourse, literature is characterized as a subaltern, yet necessary additive for law to attain wholeness. Although the above view has shifted with the development of law and literature movement to embrace more nuanced readings, the tendency to posit law and literature in a supplemental configuration persists, projecting a ‘humanist real’ onto literature and a ‘political real’ onto law. This chapter undertakes an analysis of the ways in which this discourse is deployed in law and literature scholarship, suggesting that the supplement can never be regarded simply as an additive that offers plenitude as often presupposed in the theorizing of law and literature scholarship. The more nuanced and “undecidable” meaning of the term as an ‘inferior substitute’ or that which marks an absence in a Derridian sense points to the ways in which the myth of plenitude in reading law in literature can be destabilized. Although both these interrelated significations of the term are employed in theorizing the relationship between law and literature, its second meaning remains under erasure by the first, largely shaping the discourse thus far. This chapter further suggests that the discourse of supplementarity remains particularly inadequate in theorizing the relationship between law and postcolonial literatures.
R.K. Narayan’s The Guide (1958) and Anita Desai’s Journey to Ithaca (1995) can be regarded as rea... more R.K. Narayan’s The Guide (1958) and Anita Desai’s Journey to Ithaca (1995) can be regarded as realist texts that reify and affirm the connection between Indian nationalist discourse and the Anglo-Indian realist novel in decolonizing India. The depiction of classical Indian dancing in these texts appears to be framed within the nationalist ideology and its quest for ‘authentic’ cultural practices that signify the ‘spiritual’ identity of the nation. Both texts seem to reify the nationalist imaginings of a homogenous ‘national culture’ that is predominantly encoded in the texts as the
Hindu culture. Further, in the representation of cultural identities of the practitioners, both The Guide and Journey to Ithaca appear to construe an essentialist version of identity in conformity with the nationalist discourse. Whilst the character of Rosie, a devadasi, in The Guide is ambivalently constituted within the exigencies of narrating the nation, Laila in Journey to Ithaca, by becoming a vessel of ‘spirituality’ in India and, thus, embodying what is regarded as an ‘authentic’ Indian identity, reifies the monolithic and essentialist constructions of identities in nationalist discourse. Nevertheless, both texts also profess a degree of critical distance from the nationalist ideology by registering the tensions, instabilities and ambivalences that underlie the formation of a ‘national culture’.
This paper examines the centrality of an ontological discourse to attempts at reparation by white... more This paper examines the centrality of an ontological discourse to attempts at reparation by white characters in J.M.Coetzee’s fiction: Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Age of Iron (1990), and Disgrace (1999). These novels address the issues of justice and expiation in relation to a set of racialized, gendered, and sexualized encounters between the colonizer and the colonized, whites and non-whites, or self and other. As means of making amends for the political violence that seems to be inherent in these (uneven) encounters, Coetzee’s novels deploy a discourse of justice that hints at the potentialities of reparation (to a large extent, at a personal level) located in the body, but, at the same time, complicates such a possibility.
Keywords
JM Coetzee, Apartheid, Reconciliation, Body, Language, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, South Africa
A hallmark of (post)modern warfare is its excessive mediatization. Noting the propensity in conte... more A hallmark of (post)modern warfare is its excessive mediatization. Noting the propensity in contemporary media culture to reduce even war and violence to a spectacle, Baudrillard (1995) has famously claimed that the Gulf War actually did not take place, but was a carefully " simulated " media event. The very proliferation of the images of war has come to reveal the limits of visual data from conflict scenarios, eroding the epistemological privilege assigned to the visual as a reflection of the truth/ real. A controversy over a video footage 2 from the recently concluded conflict between the state military of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), fueling allegations of war crimes against both sides, attests to the power of the visual image, as well as its tenuousness in an era saturated with images. This chapter examines the visual (re)presentations of the conflict between the separatist Tamil Tigers and the government of Sri Lanka as a site that reveals the limits, cracks, and unreliability of visual data. However, it also contends that as the only remaining visual testimonies to the " War PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 18
Future of Food: Journal on Food, Agriculture and Society, 2019
Interventions, 2017
This essay meets the spatial turn in postcolonial studies in examining the representations of the... more This essay meets the spatial turn in postcolonial studies in examining the representations of the contested space of the nation during and after the war in Sri Lanka in the work of Ambalavaner Sivanandan and Romesh Gunesekera. In their realist novels that portray the ethnic conflict and its ramifications, these writers approach the topography of Sri Lanka as the overlapping material and discursive sites of meaning shaped by the overdetermined forces of colonialism, class and ethnic strife, and postcolonial nation-building projects, postwar reconstruction and neoliberal policies. Their novels represent the erasure and recalibration of the contested space of the nation during and after the war – the dialectical effects of which can be seen in the discursive production of the North as “dangerous geographies”, an inhospitable terrain of death, disease, scarcity and violence, enabling both the erasure of landscape by war and its reconstitution after “peace”. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s discussion of the influential role colonial and postcolonial rule have played in the co-production of space and ethnic identity, and Aihwa Ong’s theorization of “neoliberalism as exception” in Asian contexts, this essay explores the ways in which these novelists represent postcolonial space as an anomaly riven with contradictions between the fixity of territorial discourse and the dislocations of war and neoliberal forces.
... environment in order to initiate Rosie's career as a classical dancer provides a telling... more ... environment in order to initiate Rosie's career as a classical dancer provides a telling indication of ... 6 Laila's desire for classical dancing stems from not so much a passion for exotica (as displayed by Krishna's patron in Venice, Senora Durante) but, rather, as a result of an innate ...
In the last decade, the field of postcolonial ecocriticism has offered important insights into ho... more In the last decade, the field of postcolonial ecocriticism has offered important insights into how ecological transformations are intertwined with histories, narratives, and the material practices of colonialism and globalization. Contesting 'Green Imperialism': Ecology and Rights in South Asian Literature contributes to critical conversations on how the history of imperialism is pivotal to understanding contemporary environmental trajectories in South Asia. It is the first sustained interdisciplinary inquiry that brings together law, literature and postcolonial ecocriticism to gain a multifaceted understanding of the co-constitution of legal, cultural, political and ecological formations in South Asia.<br>Contesting 'Green Imperialism' examines the onto-epistemic effects of imperial environmental legislation on environmental cultures in South Asia from the 16th century to the present. It focuses on the establishment and diffusion of legal<br>norms, parti...
This paper examines the centrality of an ontological discourse to attempts at reparation by white... more This paper examines the centrality of an ontological discourse to attempts at reparation by white characters in J.M.Coetzee’s fiction: Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Age of Iron (1990), and Disgrace (1999). These novels address the issues of justice and expiation in relation to a set of racialized, gendered, and sexualized encounters between the colonizer and the colonized, whites and non-whites, or self and other. As means of making amends for the political violence that seems to be inherent in these (uneven) encounters, Coetzee’s novels deploy a discourse of justice that hints at the potentialities of reparation (to a large extent, at a personal level) located in the body, but, at the same time, complicates such a possibility.
A hallmark of (post)modern warfare is its excessive mediatization. Noting the propensity in conte... more A hallmark of (post)modern warfare is its excessive mediatization. Noting the propensity in contemporary media culture to reduce even war and violence to a spectacle, Baudrillard (1995) has famously claimed that the Gulf War actually did not take place, but was a carefully " simulated " media event. The very proliferation of the images of war has come to reveal the limits of visual data from conflict scenarios, eroding the epistemological privilege assigned to the visual as a reflection of the truth/ real. A controversy over a video footage 2 from the recently concluded conflict between the state military of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), fueling allegations of war crimes against both sides, attests to the power of the visual image, as well as its tenuousness in an era saturated with images. This chapter examines the visual (re)presentations of the conflict between the separatist Tamil Tigers and the government of Sri Lanka as a site that reveals the limits, cracks, and unreliability of visual data. However, it also contends that as the only remaining visual testimonies to the " War PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 18
As classical dancers and popular singers who occupy the public domain, the female protagonists in... more As classical dancers and popular singers who occupy the public domain, the female protagonists in Narayan's The Guide (1958), Anita Desai's Journey to Ithaca (1995), and Salman Rushdie's The Ground beneath Her Feet (1999) appear to be empowered and liberated women in their own right. However, this does not preclude them from being subjected to various constraints imposed upon their subjectivities by the discursive operations of nationalism, patriarchy and capitalism. In both The Guide and Journey to Ithaca, the female practitioners of classical dancing, regardless of the fact that they occupy a public space, are made to conform to and represent the traditional identity of the Indian woman, while Vina in The Ground beneath Her Feet is made to embody a 'radical' sexual identity that is situated outside and in opposition to the conservative politics of the nationalist discourse as a 'radical' feminist subject. All three novels insist on foregrounding the ambivalences and nuances inherent within their subject positions by bringing into view the objectification and intense commodification of these female artists within the capitalist culture.
This essay meets the spatial turn in postcolonial studies in examining the representations of the... more This essay meets the spatial turn in postcolonial studies in examining the representations of the contested space of the nation during and after the war in Sri Lanka in the work of Ambalavaner Sivanandan and Romesh Gunesekera. In their realist novels that portray the ethnic conict and its ramications, these writers approach the topography of Sri Lanka as the overlapping material and discursive sites of meaning shaped by the overdetermined forces of colonialism, class and ethnic strife, and postcolonial nation-building projects, postwar reconstruction and neoliberal policies. Their novels represent the erasure and recalibration of the contested space of the nation during and after the war – the dialectical eects of which can be seen in the discursive production of the North as " dangerous geographies " , an inhospitable terrain of death, disease, scarcity and violence, enabling both the erasure of landscape by war and its reconstitution after " peace ". Drawing on Achille Mbembe's discussion of the inuential role colonial and postcolonial rule have played in the co-production of space and ethnic identity, and Aihwa Ong's theorization of " neoliberalism as exception " in Asian contexts, this essay explores the ways in which these novelists represent postcolonial space as an anomaly riven with contradictions between the fixity of territorial discourse and the dislocations of war and neoliberal forces.
Interdisciplinary scholarship in law and literature is commonly theorized as a relationship of su... more Interdisciplinary scholarship in law and literature is commonly theorized as a relationship of supplementarity, where each discipline’s capacity to offer what the other lacks is regarded as a sign of value. The most common configuration of this relationship accords humanizing attributes to literature and rational, mechanistic truth to law. While each discipline is considered to enhance the other in a positive, cumulative manner in this discourse, literature is characterized as a subaltern, yet necessary additive for law to attain wholeness. Although the above view has shifted with the development of law and literature movement to embrace more nuanced readings, the tendency to posit law and literature in a supplemental configuration persists, projecting a ‘humanist real’ onto literature and a ‘political real’ onto law. This chapter undertakes an analysis of the ways in which this discourse is deployed in law and literature scholarship, suggesting that the supplement can never be regarded simply as an additive that offers plenitude as often presupposed in the theorizing of law and literature scholarship. The more nuanced and “undecidable” meaning of the term as an ‘inferior substitute’ or that which marks an absence in a Derridian sense points to the ways in which the myth of plenitude in reading law in literature can be destabilized. Although both these interrelated significations of the term are employed in theorizing the relationship between law and literature, its second meaning remains under erasure by the first, largely shaping the discourse thus far. This chapter further suggests that the discourse of supplementarity remains particularly inadequate in theorizing the relationship between law and postcolonial literatures.
R.K. Narayan’s The Guide (1958) and Anita Desai’s Journey to Ithaca (1995) can be regarded as rea... more R.K. Narayan’s The Guide (1958) and Anita Desai’s Journey to Ithaca (1995) can be regarded as realist texts that reify and affirm the connection between Indian nationalist discourse and the Anglo-Indian realist novel in decolonizing India. The depiction of classical Indian dancing in these texts appears to be framed within the nationalist ideology and its quest for ‘authentic’ cultural practices that signify the ‘spiritual’ identity of the nation. Both texts seem to reify the nationalist imaginings of a homogenous ‘national culture’ that is predominantly encoded in the texts as the
Hindu culture. Further, in the representation of cultural identities of the practitioners, both The Guide and Journey to Ithaca appear to construe an essentialist version of identity in conformity with the nationalist discourse. Whilst the character of Rosie, a devadasi, in The Guide is ambivalently constituted within the exigencies of narrating the nation, Laila in Journey to Ithaca, by becoming a vessel of ‘spirituality’ in India and, thus, embodying what is regarded as an ‘authentic’ Indian identity, reifies the monolithic and essentialist constructions of identities in nationalist discourse. Nevertheless, both texts also profess a degree of critical distance from the nationalist ideology by registering the tensions, instabilities and ambivalences that underlie the formation of a ‘national culture’.
This paper examines the centrality of an ontological discourse to attempts at reparation by white... more This paper examines the centrality of an ontological discourse to attempts at reparation by white characters in J.M.Coetzee’s fiction: Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Age of Iron (1990), and Disgrace (1999). These novels address the issues of justice and expiation in relation to a set of racialized, gendered, and sexualized encounters between the colonizer and the colonized, whites and non-whites, or self and other. As means of making amends for the political violence that seems to be inherent in these (uneven) encounters, Coetzee’s novels deploy a discourse of justice that hints at the potentialities of reparation (to a large extent, at a personal level) located in the body, but, at the same time, complicates such a possibility.
Keywords
JM Coetzee, Apartheid, Reconciliation, Body, Language, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, South Africa