My essay looks afresh at the South Asian Partition in conjunction with trauma theory to excavate ... more My essay looks afresh at the South Asian Partition in conjunction with trauma theory to excavate affective histories of the region obscured by “the overpowering emotional experience” of nationalism (Jawaharlal Nehru). Nehru’s exploratory urge to map South Asia as an “ancient palimpsest” to “know if there was any real connection between the past and the present” (Nehru 25) is echoed in Qurratulain Hyder’s feminist novel Sita Betrayed (1960), which, however, casts memorialization in more uncanny, melancholic terms. Hyder constructs a trans-subcontinental trauma sensorium – a memorial landscape shaped by sensory experiences – to contain the marginalized histories of the Partition dispossessed obscured by the Nehruvian dialectic of antiquity within modernity that the new Indian nation confidently claimed, or the “newness” of an Islamic birth distanced from the subcontinent’s past, that Pakistan declared. Hyder’s composition of a sensorium of trauma through tropes of the palimpsest allows spatial and temporal projections of grief and memory. By exploring her affective landscapes and their histories we can get a distinctive sense of material traumas as they permeated Partition history and shaped the conditions of postcoloniality that the subcontinent experienced as both independence and rupture. Hyder’s mobilization of melancholia and haunting, significantly, offers us a way to understand how the South Asian Partition endorses the value and promise of affect-mediated postcolonial trauma theory.
My article explores complex urbanisms of the Global South enmeshed in the enduring aftermath of c... more My article explores complex urbanisms of the Global South enmeshed in the enduring aftermath of colonialism. I examine Congolese writer Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s novel Tram 83 that fictionalizes Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of Congo, built and developed around exploitative mining and forced migrant labour, and mediates and captures forms of urban change beyond the metrics of gentrification. The novel charts the volatile existence of miners, students and ordinary citizenry of ‘the City-State’ where they work from dawn to dusk deep in the bowels of the earth and between dusk and dawn cavort deep in the belly of nightclub Tram 83. There seems to be an acceleration and contraction of life itself, available only in limited, repetitive futures, and a drive towards total expenditure. Mujila’s novel, however, also uncovers tempo-spatialities within these extractive spaces that allow openings into other forms of urban liveability. Mujila mobilizes the affective and embodied lives of th...
My article explores complex urbanisms of the Global South enmeshed in the enduring aftermath of c... more My article explores complex urbanisms of the Global South enmeshed in the enduring aftermath of colonialism. I examine Congolese writer Fiston Mwanza Mujila's novel Tram 83 that fictionalizes Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of Congo, built and developed around exploitative mining and forced migrant labour, and mediates and captures forms of urban change beyond the metrics of gentrification. The novel charts the volatile existence of miners, students and ordinary citizenry of 'the City-State' where they work from dawn to dusk deep in the bowels of the earth and between dusk and dawn cavort deep in the belly of nightclub Tram 83. There seems to be an acceleration and contraction of life itself, available only in limited, repetitive futures, and a drive towards total expenditure. Mujila's novel, however, also uncovers tempo-spatialities within these extractive spaces that allow openings into other forms of urban liveability. Mujila mobilizes the affective and embodied lives of the mining city as a constitutive aspect of urban informality that at once exceeds and clarifies colonial infrastructural remains.
In The Posthuman (2013), Rosi Braidotti offers us a productive triangulation between the Anthropo... more In The Posthuman (2013), Rosi Braidotti offers us a productive triangulation between the Anthropocene, the non-human, and the postcolonial. The post-human condition in the contemporary phase of late capitalism, Braidotti contends, seeks a relationality, a connection with geo/bio/techno environments, that can lead ultimately to an ethical relationship with radical Others. She thus provides a framework to examine precarity and the possible solidarities through which a new ‘post-human’ subjectivity and politics may emerge. In this article, I examine Arundhati Roy’s novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), arguing that Roy’s literary practices consummately carve a space for this posthuman subject and its relational politics. The novel’s structure, according to Roy, is meant to mirror that of a sprawling metropolis in the Global South, where planned spaces are constantly ambushed by encroachments by the ‘surplus and the unwanted’. The novel thus spatializes both precarity and the embryonic communities that emerge teetering on the porous borders between life and death, human and non-human, abandonment and community. I explore this spatialization through two sites that are central to The Ministry: the borderland of Kashmir and the urban crannies of Delhi - Old and New - where Roy locates affirmative alliances amid death and dereliction.
My essay looks afresh at the South Asian Partition in conjunction with trauma theory to excavate ... more My essay looks afresh at the South Asian Partition in conjunction with trauma theory to excavate affective histories of the region obscured by “the overpowering emotional experience” of nationalism (Jawaharlal Nehru). Nehru’s exploratory urge to map South Asia as an “ancient palimpsest” to “know if there was any real connection between the past and the present” (Nehru 25) is echoed in Qurratulain Hyder’s feminist novel Sita Betrayed (1960), which, however, casts memorialization in more uncanny, melancholic terms. Hyder constructs a trans-subcontinental trauma sensorium – a memorial landscape shaped by sensory experiences – to contain the marginalized histories of the Partition dispossessed obscured by the Nehruvian dialectic of antiquity within modernity that the new Indian nation confidently claimed, or the “newness” of an Islamic birth distanced from the subcontinent’s past, that Pakistan declared. Hyder’s composition of a sensorium of trauma through tropes of the palimpsest allows spatial and temporal projections of grief and memory. By exploring her affective landscapes and their histories we can get a distinctive sense of material traumas as they permeated Partition history and shaped the conditions of postcoloniality that the subcontinent experienced as both independence and rupture. Hyder’s mobilization of melancholia and haunting, significantly, offers us a way to understand how the South Asian Partition endorses the value and promise of affect-mediated postcolonial trauma theory.
In The Posthuman (2013), Rosi Braidotti offers us a productive
triangulation between the Anthropo... more In The Posthuman (2013), Rosi Braidotti offers us a productive triangulation between the Anthropocene, the non-human, and the postcolonial. The post-human condition in the contemporary phase of late capitalism, Braidotti contends, seeks a relationality, a connection with geo/bio/techno environments, that can lead ultimately to an ethical relationship with radical Others. She thus provides a framework to examine precarity and the possible solidarities through which a new ‘post-human’ subjectivity and politics may emerge. In this article, I examine Arundhati Roy’s novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), arguing that Roy’s literary practices consummately carve a space for this posthuman subject and its relational politics. The novel’s structure, according to Roy, is meant to mirror that of a sprawling metropolis in the Global South, where planned spaces are constantly ambushed by encroachments by the ‘surplus and the unwanted’. The novel thus spatializes both precarity and the embryonic communities that emerge teetering on the porous borders between life and death, human and non-human, abandonment and community. I explore this spatialization through two sites that are central to The Ministry: the borderland of Kashmir and the urban crannies of Delhi - Old and New - where Roy locates affirmative alliances amid death and dereliction.
My essay looks afresh at the South Asian Partition in conjunction with trauma theory to excavate ... more My essay looks afresh at the South Asian Partition in conjunction with trauma theory to excavate affective histories of the region obscured by “the overpowering emotional experience” of nationalism (Jawaharlal Nehru). Nehru’s exploratory urge to map South Asia as an “ancient palimpsest” to “know if there was any real connection between the past and the present” (Nehru 25) is echoed in Qurratulain Hyder’s feminist novel Sita Betrayed (1960), which, however, casts memorialization in more uncanny, melancholic terms. Hyder constructs a trans-subcontinental trauma sensorium – a memorial landscape shaped by sensory experiences – to contain the marginalized histories of the Partition dispossessed obscured by the Nehruvian dialectic of antiquity within modernity that the new Indian nation confidently claimed, or the “newness” of an Islamic birth distanced from the subcontinent’s past, that Pakistan declared. Hyder’s composition of a sensorium of trauma through tropes of the palimpsest allows spatial and temporal projections of grief and memory. By exploring her affective landscapes and their histories we can get a distinctive sense of material traumas as they permeated Partition history and shaped the conditions of postcoloniality that the subcontinent experienced as both independence and rupture. Hyder’s mobilization of melancholia and haunting, significantly, offers us a way to understand how the South Asian Partition endorses the value and promise of affect-mediated postcolonial trauma theory.
My article explores complex urbanisms of the Global South enmeshed in the enduring aftermath of c... more My article explores complex urbanisms of the Global South enmeshed in the enduring aftermath of colonialism. I examine Congolese writer Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s novel Tram 83 that fictionalizes Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of Congo, built and developed around exploitative mining and forced migrant labour, and mediates and captures forms of urban change beyond the metrics of gentrification. The novel charts the volatile existence of miners, students and ordinary citizenry of ‘the City-State’ where they work from dawn to dusk deep in the bowels of the earth and between dusk and dawn cavort deep in the belly of nightclub Tram 83. There seems to be an acceleration and contraction of life itself, available only in limited, repetitive futures, and a drive towards total expenditure. Mujila’s novel, however, also uncovers tempo-spatialities within these extractive spaces that allow openings into other forms of urban liveability. Mujila mobilizes the affective and embodied lives of th...
My article explores complex urbanisms of the Global South enmeshed in the enduring aftermath of c... more My article explores complex urbanisms of the Global South enmeshed in the enduring aftermath of colonialism. I examine Congolese writer Fiston Mwanza Mujila's novel Tram 83 that fictionalizes Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of Congo, built and developed around exploitative mining and forced migrant labour, and mediates and captures forms of urban change beyond the metrics of gentrification. The novel charts the volatile existence of miners, students and ordinary citizenry of 'the City-State' where they work from dawn to dusk deep in the bowels of the earth and between dusk and dawn cavort deep in the belly of nightclub Tram 83. There seems to be an acceleration and contraction of life itself, available only in limited, repetitive futures, and a drive towards total expenditure. Mujila's novel, however, also uncovers tempo-spatialities within these extractive spaces that allow openings into other forms of urban liveability. Mujila mobilizes the affective and embodied lives of the mining city as a constitutive aspect of urban informality that at once exceeds and clarifies colonial infrastructural remains.
In The Posthuman (2013), Rosi Braidotti offers us a productive triangulation between the Anthropo... more In The Posthuman (2013), Rosi Braidotti offers us a productive triangulation between the Anthropocene, the non-human, and the postcolonial. The post-human condition in the contemporary phase of late capitalism, Braidotti contends, seeks a relationality, a connection with geo/bio/techno environments, that can lead ultimately to an ethical relationship with radical Others. She thus provides a framework to examine precarity and the possible solidarities through which a new ‘post-human’ subjectivity and politics may emerge. In this article, I examine Arundhati Roy’s novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), arguing that Roy’s literary practices consummately carve a space for this posthuman subject and its relational politics. The novel’s structure, according to Roy, is meant to mirror that of a sprawling metropolis in the Global South, where planned spaces are constantly ambushed by encroachments by the ‘surplus and the unwanted’. The novel thus spatializes both precarity and the embryonic communities that emerge teetering on the porous borders between life and death, human and non-human, abandonment and community. I explore this spatialization through two sites that are central to The Ministry: the borderland of Kashmir and the urban crannies of Delhi - Old and New - where Roy locates affirmative alliances amid death and dereliction.
My essay looks afresh at the South Asian Partition in conjunction with trauma theory to excavate ... more My essay looks afresh at the South Asian Partition in conjunction with trauma theory to excavate affective histories of the region obscured by “the overpowering emotional experience” of nationalism (Jawaharlal Nehru). Nehru’s exploratory urge to map South Asia as an “ancient palimpsest” to “know if there was any real connection between the past and the present” (Nehru 25) is echoed in Qurratulain Hyder’s feminist novel Sita Betrayed (1960), which, however, casts memorialization in more uncanny, melancholic terms. Hyder constructs a trans-subcontinental trauma sensorium – a memorial landscape shaped by sensory experiences – to contain the marginalized histories of the Partition dispossessed obscured by the Nehruvian dialectic of antiquity within modernity that the new Indian nation confidently claimed, or the “newness” of an Islamic birth distanced from the subcontinent’s past, that Pakistan declared. Hyder’s composition of a sensorium of trauma through tropes of the palimpsest allows spatial and temporal projections of grief and memory. By exploring her affective landscapes and their histories we can get a distinctive sense of material traumas as they permeated Partition history and shaped the conditions of postcoloniality that the subcontinent experienced as both independence and rupture. Hyder’s mobilization of melancholia and haunting, significantly, offers us a way to understand how the South Asian Partition endorses the value and promise of affect-mediated postcolonial trauma theory.
In The Posthuman (2013), Rosi Braidotti offers us a productive
triangulation between the Anthropo... more In The Posthuman (2013), Rosi Braidotti offers us a productive triangulation between the Anthropocene, the non-human, and the postcolonial. The post-human condition in the contemporary phase of late capitalism, Braidotti contends, seeks a relationality, a connection with geo/bio/techno environments, that can lead ultimately to an ethical relationship with radical Others. She thus provides a framework to examine precarity and the possible solidarities through which a new ‘post-human’ subjectivity and politics may emerge. In this article, I examine Arundhati Roy’s novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), arguing that Roy’s literary practices consummately carve a space for this posthuman subject and its relational politics. The novel’s structure, according to Roy, is meant to mirror that of a sprawling metropolis in the Global South, where planned spaces are constantly ambushed by encroachments by the ‘surplus and the unwanted’. The novel thus spatializes both precarity and the embryonic communities that emerge teetering on the porous borders between life and death, human and non-human, abandonment and community. I explore this spatialization through two sites that are central to The Ministry: the borderland of Kashmir and the urban crannies of Delhi - Old and New - where Roy locates affirmative alliances amid death and dereliction.
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Papers by Rituparna Mitra
triangulation between the Anthropocene, the non-human, and
the postcolonial. The post-human condition in the contemporary
phase of late capitalism, Braidotti contends, seeks a relationality,
a connection with geo/bio/techno environments, that can lead
ultimately to an ethical relationship with radical Others. She thus
provides a framework to examine precarity and the possible
solidarities through which a new ‘post-human’ subjectivity and
politics may emerge. In this article, I examine Arundhati Roy’s
novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), arguing that Roy’s
literary practices consummately carve a space for this posthuman
subject and its relational politics. The novel’s structure,
according to Roy, is meant to mirror that of a sprawling
metropolis in the Global South, where planned spaces are
constantly ambushed by encroachments by the ‘surplus and the
unwanted’. The novel thus spatializes both precarity and the
embryonic communities that emerge teetering on the porous
borders between life and death, human and non-human,
abandonment and community. I explore this spatialization
through two sites that are central to The Ministry: the borderland
of Kashmir and the urban crannies of Delhi - Old and New -
where Roy locates affirmative alliances amid death and dereliction.
triangulation between the Anthropocene, the non-human, and
the postcolonial. The post-human condition in the contemporary
phase of late capitalism, Braidotti contends, seeks a relationality,
a connection with geo/bio/techno environments, that can lead
ultimately to an ethical relationship with radical Others. She thus
provides a framework to examine precarity and the possible
solidarities through which a new ‘post-human’ subjectivity and
politics may emerge. In this article, I examine Arundhati Roy’s
novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), arguing that Roy’s
literary practices consummately carve a space for this posthuman
subject and its relational politics. The novel’s structure,
according to Roy, is meant to mirror that of a sprawling
metropolis in the Global South, where planned spaces are
constantly ambushed by encroachments by the ‘surplus and the
unwanted’. The novel thus spatializes both precarity and the
embryonic communities that emerge teetering on the porous
borders between life and death, human and non-human,
abandonment and community. I explore this spatialization
through two sites that are central to The Ministry: the borderland
of Kashmir and the urban crannies of Delhi - Old and New -
where Roy locates affirmative alliances amid death and dereliction.