Papers by Devaleena Kundu
Journal of Communication Inquiry
The brutal gang rape of Jyoti Singh (Nirbhaya) on a bus in New Delhi became worldwide news in 201... more The brutal gang rape of Jyoti Singh (Nirbhaya) on a bus in New Delhi became worldwide news in 2012. Widely known as the Nirbhaya rape incident, it was a landmark case that led the Indian government to amend existing criminal laws on sexual violence and rape. The rape also came to transform the media landscape into a space of social activism. Despite that popular cultural representations of the incident have been critiqued for appropriating rape myths. Through a thematic analysis of the BBC documentary, India's Daughter (2015), and the Netflix series, Delhi Crime (2019), the paper examines the ways in which popular culture sustains and furthers rape culture. By interrogating the thematic-cum-visual discourse of these texts, this paper explores the ideological and sexual tropes to understand the cultural configuration of rape and rape victims/survivors. The study finds the ongoing discourse centering rape in popular culture to be a reiteration of the patriarchal norms prevalent in...
Victoriographies
This article attempts to study deathlessness in relation to notions of physical and moral transgr... more This article attempts to study deathlessness in relation to notions of physical and moral transgression. Through a close textual analysis of Mary Shelley's work, ‘The Mortal Immortal’, the article undertakes an enquiry into the discomforts of arrested immortality. It argues that by turning an otherwise normative body corporeally interstitial, deathlessness prompts a narrative of transgression. The focus is on the protagonist, Winzy, and the impact deathlessness has on both his personal and social relations. I utilise theories of transgression, linking them to concepts of physical impurity and corruption to examine how deathlessness dehumanises the individual, rendering them a potential threat to social stability. Keeping corporeal transgression as its focal point, I also elucidate how deathlessness-generated-corporeal interstitiality can problematise sexuality. Deathlessness, therefore, is analysed in terms of multiple transgressions synthesised into one. The article identifies ...
Serial Killers in Contemporary Television, Apr 25, 2022
Atna - Journal of Tourism Studies
Christian churches in India with their growing access to digital technology have brought along pr... more Christian churches in India with their growing access to digital technology have brought along promises to im-prove the interface between religion and society. This study looks at the Assemblies of God Fellowship (AGF), a popular youth church in Ahmedabad, Gujarat which has utilised the digital space to create an experience of engaging with the spiritual. This study contributes to-wards an ethnographically researched narrative of the church and its role in the domain of digital tourism, the manner in which religious authority negotiates the influx of the Internet. The research focusses on ways in which online communications shape religious meanings, identi-ties, expressions of religiosity, and contemporary notions of tourism. AGF‘s inclusion of the online in its day-to-day faith practices along with its establishment of new units such as the ‗media team‘ has led to the emergence of a media-savvy leadership.
MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, 2021
Thanatos (journal) , 2020
With discourses of urbanization revolving around socioeconomic factors of production, exchange, a... more With discourses of urbanization revolving around socioeconomic factors of production, exchange, and consumption even an intricately personal-cum-social event such as death is now subjected to the economic gaze. The advent of industrialization, urbanization, commercialization, and specifically medicalization, has brought about a radical attitudinal change towards death and dying, in the process modifying and magnifying them into complex structures of exchange. According to Allan Kellehear urban social complexity necessitates that "dying becomes a full economic but privatized transaction." It is in this light that I propose to analyze José Saramago's novel Death at Intervals (2008). Saramago explores the conjugation of the social and the biological within the thanatological schema and diversifies it into a newer domain-the "death industry." The literary narrativization of thanatocentric infrastructure in Death at Intervals adumbrates urban confrontations with death, dying and disposal. Is the "death industry" a requirement, or is it merely an emancipatory utilitarian perspective? Is it a safeguard mechanism adopted by the urban space to prevent being metamorphosed into a 'gerontopolis'? Is the proto-industrialization of death a logical advancement required to sustain the urban socioeconomic order? By historicizing the novel from these perspectives, this paper will elucidate the configuration of death within the liberalist, welfarist dispensations of urban society. The diachrony of thanatology, as seen through the novel, will divulge the blurring of the hazy delimitations between death, a personal face-off, and death, a social occurrence, thereby, responding to the call for a more outlined and examined resolution of the dying process in the garb of a good death.
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015
Literary discourses often seek to explore the emotional motley experienced by individuals while e... more Literary discourses often seek to explore the emotional motley experienced by individuals while encountering death and dying. Representations by literary artists offer a virtual space wherein readers partake of the conclusive episode in a character's lived experience. However, does a reader in the process imagine and accept his/her own cessation? Or does it always have to be an "other" being at whose death we are present as voyeurs? Freud in his 1918 work "Reflections on War and Death" observed: "We cannot, indeed, imagine our own death; whenever we try to do so we find that we survive ourselves as spectators." While we recognize death as the annihilation of others, we take the possibility of our own demise as somehow being unnatural. We engage in a death denial syndrome which for instance becomes the basis of the story by Leo Tolstoy titled "The Death of Ivan Ilych". This paper is a study of the literary representations of an intrinsic human tendency leaning towards denial whose basis might be social rather than purely an instinctual inclination. How do literary works perceive the truth of transience? Do these representations serve as a complementary projection of reality and reveal the socio-cultural repercussions of anthropological claims to immortality? Can literature aid in overcoming the existential dread associated with the notions of death and dying? By evoking both the aesthetic and the pathological notions of death as represented in certain select literary works, this paper looks at the paradox of mortality and the role of literature in creating a forensic field that seeks to understand and acknowledge death as the unavoidable, all pervasive entity. The paper challenges the clichéd envisioning of death as the grim reaper and replaces it with a perception of death as the rounding off of an eventful life. The argument will be substantiated by references made in particular to Karel Čapek's play The Makropulos Affair (1922), José Saramago's
The Human: Journal of Literature and Culture, 2014
Memory, defined as enabling the storage, encryption, and retrieval of information, is the collect... more Memory, defined as enabling the storage, encryption, and retrieval of information, is the collective archive of subjective emotions and socio-cultural fugues. However distinguished, "memory" inhabits an elusive zone of debates and deliberations; aimed at preserving a shared socio-cultural history from threats of extermination, modification, and disparity, the current memory boom has only intensified academic disputes and discourses. This paper will focus on the dialectic of memory and time engaging in questions like, does the past exist as a monolithic entity, or is it susceptible to polygamous interpretations? Is remembering a construct? How often is the past (in encompassing the collective) mediated by individual memory? This paper attempts to negotiate with some of these polysemic issues that increasingly baffle the field of Memory Studies. In deliberating upon and elucidating the dynamics of remembering, the paper draws upon works such as Elie Wiesel's Night, Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, and particularly, Carlos Fuentes' The Death of Artemio Cruz.
Atna: Journal of Tourism Studies, 2019
Christian churches in India with their growing access to digital technology have brought along pr... more Christian churches in India with their growing access to digital technology have brought along promises to improve the interface between religion and society. This study looks at the Assemblies of God Fellowship (AGF), a popular youth church in Ahmedabad, Gujarat which has utilised the digital space to create an experience of engaging with the spiritual. This study contributes towards an ethnographically researched narrative of the church and its role in the domain of digital tourism, the manner in which religious authority negotiates the influx of the Internet. The research focusses on ways in which online communications shape religious meanings, identities , expressions of religiosity, and contemporary notions of tourism. AGF's inclusion of the online in its day-today faith practices along with its establishment of new units such as the ‗media team' has led to the emergence of a media-savvy leadership.
Call for Papers by Devaleena Kundu
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2020/03/28/of-city-spaces-and-graveyards-a-pictorial-re... more https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2020/03/28/of-city-spaces-and-graveyards-a-pictorial-reading
Graveyards have been integral to the structuring and ethos of city spaces. With beautiful landscapes and monuments, burial spaces have come to serve not only those in mourning, but also those who seek relaxation and an escape from the drudgery of city life. This workshop, through paintings, photographs, and contemporary images of burial sites, aims at tracing the significance of such spaces within the city. It is also an attempt at understanding how pictorial representations of such landscapes can be reflective of the socio-cultural dynamics of a given place and time.
This workshop will analyse the aesthetics of burial landscapes and the ways in which they have changed over time. Today, a significant number of popular TV shows are dominated by striking images of graveyards such that the event of death, with much allure and thrill, has infiltrated our minds and domestic spaces. The recurrent portrayal of burial spaces within the domain of popular culture, has prompted a growing interest to read and understand these sites as integral components of city planning. Therefore, the workshop will aim at understanding the cultural phenomenon that burials spaces have come to be. As a space that brings together the living and the dead, how has the graveyard evolved in its physical semblance would be a question around which the workshop will pivot. Furthermore, as more and more people opt for dark tourism sites, cemetery visits and tours are being perceived and promoted as ways to relax as well as reconnect with cultural history and heritage.
It is from this point of view that this workshop intends to open up a discourse on confronting spaces of the dead in the hopes of engaging with some of the primal emotions humans experience when negotiating with death. The larger idea is to help participants and potential Death Studies enthusiasts explore the space occupied by the dead in urban spaces and in effect, comment on the changing human attitudes toward death and dying.
We hope that a diverse linguistic and cultural audience can weave together narratives, tales, legends, and myths pertaining to death and dying to inform our contemporary engrossment with graveyards, corpses, and the macabre.
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Papers by Devaleena Kundu
Call for Papers by Devaleena Kundu
Graveyards have been integral to the structuring and ethos of city spaces. With beautiful landscapes and monuments, burial spaces have come to serve not only those in mourning, but also those who seek relaxation and an escape from the drudgery of city life. This workshop, through paintings, photographs, and contemporary images of burial sites, aims at tracing the significance of such spaces within the city. It is also an attempt at understanding how pictorial representations of such landscapes can be reflective of the socio-cultural dynamics of a given place and time.
This workshop will analyse the aesthetics of burial landscapes and the ways in which they have changed over time. Today, a significant number of popular TV shows are dominated by striking images of graveyards such that the event of death, with much allure and thrill, has infiltrated our minds and domestic spaces. The recurrent portrayal of burial spaces within the domain of popular culture, has prompted a growing interest to read and understand these sites as integral components of city planning. Therefore, the workshop will aim at understanding the cultural phenomenon that burials spaces have come to be. As a space that brings together the living and the dead, how has the graveyard evolved in its physical semblance would be a question around which the workshop will pivot. Furthermore, as more and more people opt for dark tourism sites, cemetery visits and tours are being perceived and promoted as ways to relax as well as reconnect with cultural history and heritage.
It is from this point of view that this workshop intends to open up a discourse on confronting spaces of the dead in the hopes of engaging with some of the primal emotions humans experience when negotiating with death. The larger idea is to help participants and potential Death Studies enthusiasts explore the space occupied by the dead in urban spaces and in effect, comment on the changing human attitudes toward death and dying.
We hope that a diverse linguistic and cultural audience can weave together narratives, tales, legends, and myths pertaining to death and dying to inform our contemporary engrossment with graveyards, corpses, and the macabre.
Graveyards have been integral to the structuring and ethos of city spaces. With beautiful landscapes and monuments, burial spaces have come to serve not only those in mourning, but also those who seek relaxation and an escape from the drudgery of city life. This workshop, through paintings, photographs, and contemporary images of burial sites, aims at tracing the significance of such spaces within the city. It is also an attempt at understanding how pictorial representations of such landscapes can be reflective of the socio-cultural dynamics of a given place and time.
This workshop will analyse the aesthetics of burial landscapes and the ways in which they have changed over time. Today, a significant number of popular TV shows are dominated by striking images of graveyards such that the event of death, with much allure and thrill, has infiltrated our minds and domestic spaces. The recurrent portrayal of burial spaces within the domain of popular culture, has prompted a growing interest to read and understand these sites as integral components of city planning. Therefore, the workshop will aim at understanding the cultural phenomenon that burials spaces have come to be. As a space that brings together the living and the dead, how has the graveyard evolved in its physical semblance would be a question around which the workshop will pivot. Furthermore, as more and more people opt for dark tourism sites, cemetery visits and tours are being perceived and promoted as ways to relax as well as reconnect with cultural history and heritage.
It is from this point of view that this workshop intends to open up a discourse on confronting spaces of the dead in the hopes of engaging with some of the primal emotions humans experience when negotiating with death. The larger idea is to help participants and potential Death Studies enthusiasts explore the space occupied by the dead in urban spaces and in effect, comment on the changing human attitudes toward death and dying.
We hope that a diverse linguistic and cultural audience can weave together narratives, tales, legends, and myths pertaining to death and dying to inform our contemporary engrossment with graveyards, corpses, and the macabre.