I start by acknowledging the
goodness and kindness of Saptarshi Mallick, who informed me and registered my
name for the UGC-assisted DRS SAP III Phase II National Seminar on Post
Postcolonialism: Theory and Texts organized by the Department of English,
University of Calcutta, at Chandramukhi-Kadambini Sabhagriha on 23rd and 24th
February, 2012. I also thank Prof. Sanjukta Dasgupta, the DRS co-ordinator, who
reminded me to write about this seminar, which aimed at attracting young
scholars. So I write. Each of my previous articles, covering the DRS seminars
of 2006, 2009, 2010 and 2011, has a life of its own on this blog. The
viewership statistics reveal the pattern of their relative
popularity on the cyber space.
amit's DIARY Stats 2009 May – 2012 February
Posts
Reflections (Breaking the Silence: Reading Virginia Woolf, Simone de
Beauvoir and Ashapurna Devi)
Jan 19, 2009, 2 comments
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373 Pageviews
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Mar 2, 2010, 6 comments
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311 Pageviews
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Feb 15, 2011, 2 comments
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121 Pageviews
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Report
(Imperial Constructions
and Indigenous Self-fashioning)
Jan 15, 2006, 3 comments
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38 Pageviews
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The reason for this
statistical number crunching about my blog articles in cyber space is see how
these write-ups have comparatively fared since being released in the digital world. The idea
came to me from the seminar’s keynote address delivered by Prof. Pramod Nayar
of the University of Hyderabad on digital race and cyber criticism. Prof. Nayar
started in a light vein by stating that Bill Gates has difficulty in
pronouncing the names of eight of the top ten of his employees. Prof. Nayar’s
contention is that the virtual world is a window for a newer form of colonization. The internet is not an open space for the marginalized because it
dissolves ethnic identities. Hence the need for ethnicization of the digital
world. But the digital world has a characteristic of its own. It allows people
of an ethnic diaspora to unite online and at the same time it diminishes the
idea of territoriality. Moreover, cyber space is ephemeral and so are
representations there, the online avatars. This was made more evident in
Indrani Ray’s paper on the issue of identity in interactive video games
designing. Just as prejudices are built into games in the real world too it is
true. There is the neo-imperialist and racialized practice in call centers
where Shyam becomes Sam by undergoing accent training. This is a kind of
hybridity that Bhabha’s thoery does not address. This is not to indict only the
capitalist first world of exploitation. There are cases such as the mushrooming
of call centres in the by-lanes of India where with minimal establishment cost
groups off individuals sell products and services, either genuine or spurious,
to overseas clients posing as Westerners located overseas. Prof. Nayar then
raised the issue of ownership of the data generated by the Human Genome Project
and the vexed question of genetic determinism. These areas bring to the
forefront the digital divide existing in the world. These newer problem areas
of imbalances in contemporary cultural practices are what post postcolonialism
addresses.
If cyber criticism is one
post postcolonial area of exploration another is ecocriticism. Samrat Laskar’s
in his paper on “Ecological Imperialism and the Revenge of the Pastoral”
explored J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Ring as a botanical version
of nationalist struggle. He highlighted the neglected non-human elements of
nature and life. Saptarshi Mallick gave an overview of theory from the Hegelian
historiography of viewing colonizationa as a heroic adventure of spirit to the postcolonial
writings of Cesaire, Fanon, Said, Bhabha, Spivak, Ashcroft, et. al. to the new
directions of race, ethnicity and empire studies. It is exploring these new
directions that Runa Chakravarty spoke of the journey of the Bengali Dalits
after the partition of India, Somraj Basu spoke of the subjugated knowledge of Tibetan medicine, and Sreya Sarkar on the Obeah Dawta, the transformation of
the snake woman into a respectable woman in Jamaica. In the field of gender
discourse Srima Nandi delved into the narratives of Chinese women to show how
the early capitalist America saw immigration as a masculinist enterprise.
Trayee Sinha questioned the paradigms of postcolonial feminist historiography
in her study of the new women in the fictions of Shashi Deshpande and Dr. Tania
Chakraverty showed the resistance to patriarchy in the stories of Chitra
Banerjee Divakaruni. Debarati Maity explored gender identities in time and
space in the backdrop of the political turmoils in Sri Lanka of the 1970s an
1980s in novels like Funny Boy and A Change of Skies.
The return of focus to texts
was apparent in Dr. Arpa Ghosh’s interrogation of nation-concept in the novels
of Amitav Ghosh, Dr. Naina Dey’s reading of Life of Pi as a survivalist
text, Debanjali Roy’s study of cultural identities in Brick Lane, Ujjwal
Panda’s examination of the concepts of de/re-territorialization in Seamus
Heaney’s poetry, Anirban Guha Thakurta’s reading of Achebe’s poetic bricolage,
Jashomati Ghose’s exploration of the bildungsroman of the new Nigerian diaspora
and Sonal Kapur’s exposition of Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories
as an amalgamation of east and west. It was not only the written word but also
Ketan Mehta’s movie Mangal Pandey: The Rising, where the allegorization
of the nation/al was shown by Gargi Talapatra. Kuntala Sengupta showed in the
paintings of Jayasri Barman how postcolonialism share boundaries with
cosmopolitanism, transnationalism and globalization.
From the wide area of theory
to the specificity of textual analysis leads to post postcolonial reading of Gora
by Anwar Hossain, who showed how Tagore, as an internationalist, has given
importance to the individual. Sanghita Sanyal showed in her paper Tagore’s
vision of a glocal identity for Visva Bharati. Nabaneeta Sengupta depicted how
globalization was anticipated in the travel writings of nineteenth century
Bengali travel writers. Mahitosh Mondal in his paper titled “World as a Single
Nest: The Postcolonial, the European Dialectics and Beyond” questioned whether
we are wasting our time reading Foucault, Lacan and Derrida instead of
Chaitanya, Vivekananda and Aurobindo. Will it be too humanist a position to take
if the concept of the world as a single nest is not only studied for its
archival value but also put into practice as an alternative form of
cosmopolitanism? These questions were perhaps anticipated in the inaugural
address of the seminar given by the Head of the English Department, Dr. Tirtha
Prasad Mukhopadhyay. He had made it clear that he is not in agreement with the
postcolonial agenda because postcolonial binarism does not exist in history as
it is accepted in the echelons of academia. According to him, colonialism is a
misnomer for a hierarchical system of human existence where human beings have a
natural tendency towards aggrandizement. In this context colonization appears
as a phenomenon of about five hundred years old, etched in the history of
civilized human beings, of more than five thousand years old, and
postcolonialism is the theory and practice of territorial and ideological
decolonization and its existence is subject to the presentism and topicality of
the earlier phenomenon. Increasingly as the world is becoming transnational,
accepting hybridity and asserting ethnicity, the rubric of colonizer/colonized
designation is becoming indeterministic. In the future the exploiter will no
longer remain of a particular class, caste, religion, etc. and neither the
exploited remain so. Prof. Sanjukta Dasgupta commented that oppression was
present everywhere and in all times and Prof. Jharna Sanyal added that one must
not fall in the trap of categorizing oppression. So post postcolonialism has to
confront the hideous cockatrice formed by the coalescing of a variety of
potential oppressors who have control of the limited resources of the world. In
order to domesticate such a terribly hybrid monster all the archival materials,
which have survived elision, need to be articulated in such a manner that they
are made universally significant.
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