Exploring Space, Excavating Place, Pre-publication text of Postcolonial Literary Geographies, Chapter (original) (raw)
Related papers
Space, Utopia, and Indian Decolonization: Literary Pre-figurations of the Postcolony
2019
This book examines the spatial imaginaries of texts from the colonial Indian literary field of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries across a range of genres, namely, historical romances, novels, travelogues, memoirs, poems, and patriotic lyrics. These imaginaries present different registers of Indian space in a range of colonial or counter-colonial attitudes and are marked by the notion of "spatial desire." The author explores the spatial desire of these texts by charting the various inflections of the "colonial" in British representations of Indian space while also mapping how anti-colonial texts refuse these colonial imaginaries to re-imagine Indian space in a counter-colonial vein. Suggesting that a key outcome of the spatial desire of anti-colonial texts is the re-imagination of British India as a postcolony, that is, a pre-figuration of decolonized Indian space, the author shows that the anti-colonial texts engage in the utopian task of re-imagining the colony as the postcolony, even as they perform the pedagogical task of providing an aesthetic education about it. Through detailed and nuanced textual analyses, the book underlines that while all counter-colonial spatial imaginaries are utopian in their negation of colonialism, they are, nevertheless, radically different from - and at times mutually incompatible with - each other. Reading contemporaneous colonial and anti-colonial texts together, and in a comparative vein, to understand their representations of space, this book provides a holistic understanding of the colonial South Asian literary field. It is the first full-length literary geographical study of South Asian literary texts and will be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience in the fields of Postcolonial and World Literature, South Asian Literature, Victorian Literature, Modern South Asian Historiography, Utopian Studies and Cultural Geography.
Literature as a source material for the understanding of culture, people and belief systems is now realised as one of the basic means of intimate sensing. In fact, “evocative descriptions of geographical places by novelists and poets are of great benefit to both students of literature and students of geography” (Mallory and Simpson-Housley, 1987: xi). Of course, imaginative literature is the creation of an individual’s interaction with the environment, the depth of its exposure depends upon the intensity of intimate sensing, experiences, and finally the art of expression for the larger mass. In the early 20th century it has already been noted that, “…Some novelists have had an even clearer vision for the facts of geography that are of most significance to the average man than do professional writers on geographic thought” (J.K. Wright, 1926: 490). Even before, Wright has strongly emphasised the inherent quality of creative literature, which preserves closely the sense of place and the culture of the inhabitants. He has remarked that “Some men of letters are endowed with a highly developed geographical instinct. As writers they have trained themselves to visualise even more clearly than the professional geographer those regional elements of the earth’s surface most significant to the general run of humanity” (Wright, 1924 b: 659).
Kervan. International Journal of Afro-Asiatic Studies, 2016
This article offers a preliminary investigation of figurative, metaphorical and linguistic aspects of the garden in Indian English fiction. After providing a short introduction to the symbolism of gardens in the colonial and postcolonial periods, and to the image of the garden in Anglophone Indian literature, the focus will be on the novel The Solitude of Emperors by David Davidar (2007), in order to stress the relevance of both specific phytonyms and common names of plants as important linguistic, cultural and textual indicators employed to construct and convey meanings, often in the form of cognitive metaphors. In this light, the postcolonial garden emerges as a cultural site of hybridity and connection with the past. The examination is undertaken through an interdisciplinary approach that follows and adapts the theories and methods of postcolonial studies, stylistics and narratology (e.g. Kovecses 2002; Jeffries and McIntyre 2010; Sorlin 2014).
Jungle and Desert in Postcolonial Texts: Intertextual Ecosystems
This article examines postcolonial representations of the jungle and the desert, focusing on two novels in particular: Étienne Goyémidé’s Le silence de la forêt (1984) and Tahar Djaout’s L’invention du désert (1987). Postcolonial literary representations of these “extreme” landscapes are layered with allusions and almost always engage in an intertextual conversation with the colonial genres that influenced readers’ conception of these spaces. The specificity of jungle and desert serves in contemporary postcolonial literature as a foil to homogenizing forces of both the past and the present, as seen in the stylistic techniques authors employ to depict these spaces. These stylistic techniques often work in two seemingly opposing directions: they “naturalize” landscapes that are often portrayed as inhuman and contrast them to the “unnatural” structures of colonial and postcolonial society, while at the same time embodying and claiming the distortion or disorientation inherent in those landscapes. These complex, multifaceted, geographically rooted descriptions, which incorporate and react to a variety of historical and cultural factors, take what I call an ecosystem approach, rather than continuing to rely on a false nature/culture division.
Practising Cultural Geographies: Essays in Honour of Rana P.B. Singh. (Advances in 21st Century Human Settlements series, ISSN: 2198-2546), 2022
Culture is central to human beings to the extent that the history of their evolution is incomplete without the consideration of cultural attainments across time and space. However, in the domain of geography as a discipline, its conceptualisation and place do not appear clear. The sub-discipline of cultural geography having its roots in late 19th century both in the German and the French traditions, grew and got recognition through the works undertaken by the American geographers, particularly the tradition established by Carl Sauer and his students. No matter whether culture and cultural issues were at margins or centre stage, all through the journey they remained contested. Today, it is a well recognised discipline and rich through scholarly contributions from different perspectives benefitted by the development taken place in the allied disciplines. Indian geography presents a good example wherein cultural geography could not acquire substantive status despite having tremendous scope given the cultural richness of this land. It remains a marginal sub-discipline in Indian geography even in the 21s century; of course, the works of some practicing Indian geographers have acclaimed international repute, but their number is miniscule. The present chapter is an attempt in short to trace cultural geography’s journey vis-à-vis the Indian scenario and to introduce the contents of the volume. Keywords: Culture, cultural geography, cultural turn, new cultural geography, landscape, heritage, religion, pilgrimage, tourism.
Singh, Ravi S.; Dahiya, Bharat; Singh, A.K.; and Poudel, P.C. (eds.), 2022, Practising Cultural Geographies: Essays in Honour of Rana P.B. Singh . Springer Nature Pte Ltd., Singapore., 2022
Cities, in the developing Global South, draw people, from their hinterland due to various reasons. Kashi/Varanasi or Banaras a few names by which the same city is still known and addressed across has been drawing hundreds and thousands of people, many of whom stayed back and adopted it as 'their' place. Everyone has her/his own story and experiences to share and narrate. Rana P.B. Singh, in whose felicitation this volume is published, too came as a postgraduate student (1969-70) herein, Banaras Hindu University, and received his higher education. His academic zeal took him to different places in India and overseas, but he returned to this city and adopted it. Searched and researched, sometimes alone, some other times with collaborators and friends, his 'co-pilgrims'. He has made this city his home since the late sixties but for some time when he was abroad in different capacities. And, thus spent almost half a century understanding unfolding meanings of different layers of the city as it is said metaphorically that this city is older than history and maintained the path of succession-sustenance-and-sustainability as to how Rana has narrated in his writings. His committed engagement continues till today when has entered his seventies. This chapter is a little unconventional in the sense that it is based on the narrative put forth by himself describing his journey from the place of his birth, a typical Middle Ganga Valley village, his struggles—psycho-emotional to professional, professional attainments and recognitions, and finally the future he foresees of his adopted home city and the tradition of Varanasi (Banaras) Studies that he has developed through dedicated work and untiring zeal to serve the cause of it at all forums—local, regional, national and international, perceived and projected, visualised and cosmocised. Keywords: Culture, heritage, Sacredscape, Sacred Geometry, Pilgrimage, Literary images, Faithscape.
Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture
Literary renditions of cities have always gravitated towards the spatial imagination and its ethical counterpart outside the textual space. This paper explores the multicultural geography of the North Indian city Allahabad (recently renamed Prayagraj) observed through Neelum Saran Gour’s postcolonial narratives Allahabad Aria and Invisible Ink, projecting the narrative alignment of spatial aesthetics and cultural ethics. Interrogating the spatial dimensions of a “narrative world” within narrative theory (Ryan) and its interdisciplinary crossover with cultural geography (Sauer; Mitchell; Anderson et al.), the article seeks to examine Gour’s literary city not simply as an objective homogeneous representation, but as a “kshetra” of spatio-cultural cosmos of lived traditions, memories, experiences and collective attitudes of its people, in the context of E. V. Ramakrishnan’s theoretical reflections. The article proposes new possibilities of adapting the Indian concept “kshetra” to spati...