Preface: Context, Continuity, Commentaries, Challenges 1. Prologue: Literature, Sport, and Story-... more Preface: Context, Continuity, Commentaries, Challenges 1. Prologue: Literature, Sport, and Story-Telling 2. 'The Athletic Body in Classical Athens: Literary and Historical Perspectives' 3. 'Tumultuous Text: the imagining of Australia through Literature, Sport and Nationalism from Colonies to the Federation' 4. 'Cultures of the Body in Colonial Bengal: the career of Gobor Guha' 5. 'Conformity Confronted and Orthodoxy Outraged: The Loom of Youth - Succes de Scandale? In search of a wider reality.' 6. 'Cycling in circles: Flann O'Brien's free-wheeling stories in The Third Policeman' 7. The Imperial Imperative : Sport in the Service of Japan 8. 'Nature boys, Supermen, Fanatics: Perspectives on Finnishness in three Sports Novels' 9. 'In the Ring: Gender, Spectatorship, and the Body' 10. 'Heroes, Fans and the Nation: Exploring Football in Contemporary Fiction' 11. 'Cricketing Multiculturalism in Caryl Phillips's Playing Away' 12. Cricket and the Nation 13. Epilogue: Global Futures: Sport and Literature
JONSON'S close reading of alchemical texts and his accurate use of them in The Alchemist sca... more JONSON'S close reading of alchemical texts and his accurate use of them in The Alchemist scarcely need further confirmation. The labours of CH Herford and the Simpsons, and earlier of Edgar Hill Duncan,1 have identified several works to which he is substantially indebted: in ...
In Staying with the Trouble (2016), the feminist philosopher Donna Haraway argues for a practice ... more In Staying with the Trouble (2016), the feminist philosopher Donna Haraway argues for a practice of speculative, collective fabulation, or sympoiesis, allied to cross-species relation, generation, and continuity, as our only means of survival on a devastated planet. Placing her trust in the intricate knots of biological relationality and mutual dependence that persist in earth's muddy soil, or compost, she offers, in the story of the symbiont Camille, a fable of symbiogenesis, or "becoming-with-others for a habitable, flourishing world." This essay argues that The Faerie Queene, a poem centrally concerned with the opposition of waste and fertility, is an open, unfinished, sympoietic work deeply interested in soil and its generative admixtures, producing its own version of what Haraway describes as material-semiotic composting, or theory in the mud. Denying privilege to the human, Spenser employs speculative, interlaced fictions to argue for the persistence of life-forms emerging from earth's damaged soil.
Modernist Communities across Cultures and Media ed. Caroline Pollentier and Sarah Wilson (U of Florida Press) , 2019
Of all aesthetic movements, modernism most strikingly connects class, coterie, community, cosmopo... more Of all aesthetic movements, modernism most strikingly connects class, coterie, community, cosmopolis, and culture, placing all these terms under the sign of capital. Indeed, global modernity itself, as a working out of capital's social relations, requires us to examine how artistic or literary communities are formed, or aesthetic practices initiated, in specific local contexts where short-lived, often fragmentary ideological alliances also have roles to play. In an important study, Miranda Joseph has contested organicist visions of community, arguing instead that "capitalism and, more generally, modernity depend on and generate the discourse of community to legitimate social hierarchies" (viii; see Waddell 740-42). This is true of colonial societies, but it is also true that writing communities served as sites of resistance and enabled friendships across the colonial divide. Investigating a series of such friendships from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, Leela Gandhi proposes the term "affective community" to describe transnational ethical and intellectual affinities (4-7).
In this collection of conversations that were conducted in Calcutta, at the London School of Econ... more In this collection of conversations that were conducted in Calcutta, at the London School of Economics, through Jewish Book Week, and on the radical Web site openDemocracy, internationally renowned Jewish scholar Jacqueline Rose explores the debates that have fueled her writing and thinking over three decades. Drawn out by her interlocutors, Rose discusses the difference between political and sexual identity and inquires whether psychoanalysis can be considered a radical form of thought that can be used fruitfully in dialogue about political struggle. Most significantly - since each of these conversations was sparked by her recent and controversial writing on Zionism, Israel, and Palestine - Rose reflects on the role of Jewish dissent in our time. In these conversations, Rose appears courageous, passionate, ethical, and never afraid to engage politically on issues that are of human concern in the ongoing Middle and Near East crisis.
Through a series of reflections on the film Jole Dobe Na (Those Who Do Not Drown, 64 minutes, 202... more Through a series of reflections on the film Jole Dobe Na (Those Who Do Not Drown, 64 minutes, 2020), directed by Naeem Mohaiemen, this essay explores the relations between archives, dust and memory. It argues that memory is constantly struggling against the proliferation of detritus that clutters the material archive as we attempt to recover or reconstitute the past. Mohaiemen's Jole Dobe Na, a film about loss and mourning, places its protagonists in an abandoned hospital filled with disused furniture, equipment, and records, through which we pursue the thread of memory like searchers in an archive. But while Mohaiemen's earlier, research-driven films have excavated archives for documents, photographs and film footage in order to comment on history or release unexplored historical possibilities, Jole Dobe Na appears to view the archive itself as debris, always threatening to collapse into dust as memory confronts the past as wreckage. Mohaiemen's Tripoli Cancelled (2017) and Jole Dobe Na (2020), films set in liminal, derelict spaces (an airport and a hospital) both speak to the questions of site and space that preoccupy cinema today, especially artists' films meant for gallery viewing. They also reflect on the archive as a ruin rather than a repository.
This book offers fresh theoretical, methodological, and empirical analyses of the relation betwee... more This book offers fresh theoretical, methodological, and empirical analyses of the relation between religion and the city in the South Asian context. Uniting the historical with the contemporary by looking at the medieval and early modern links between religious faith and urban settlement, the book brings together a series of focused studies of the mixed and multiple practices and spatial negotiations of religion in the South Asian city. It looks at the various ways in which contemporary religious practice affects urban everyday life, commerce, craft, infrastructure, cultural forms, art, music, and architecture. Chapters draw upon original empirical study and research to analyze the foundational, structural, material, and cultural connections between religious practice and urban formations or flows. The book argues that Indian cities are not 'postsecular' in the sense that the term is currently used in the modern West but that there has been, rather, a deep, even foundational link between religion and urbanism, producing different versions of urban modernity. Questions of caste, gender, community, intersectional entanglements, physical proximity, private or public ritual, processions and prayer, economic and political factors, material objects, and changes in the built environment are all taken into consideration, and the book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of different historical periods, different cities, and different types of religious practice. Filling a gap in the literature by discussing a diversity of settings and faiths, the book will be of interest to scholars of South Asian history, sociology, literary analysis, urban studies, and cultural studies.
Preface: Context, Continuity, Commentaries, Challenges 1. Prologue: Literature, Sport, and Story-... more Preface: Context, Continuity, Commentaries, Challenges 1. Prologue: Literature, Sport, and Story-Telling 2. 'The Athletic Body in Classical Athens: Literary and Historical Perspectives' 3. 'Tumultuous Text: the imagining of Australia through Literature, Sport and Nationalism from Colonies to the Federation' 4. 'Cultures of the Body in Colonial Bengal: the career of Gobor Guha' 5. 'Conformity Confronted and Orthodoxy Outraged: The Loom of Youth - Succes de Scandale? In search of a wider reality.' 6. 'Cycling in circles: Flann O'Brien's free-wheeling stories in The Third Policeman' 7. The Imperial Imperative : Sport in the Service of Japan 8. 'Nature boys, Supermen, Fanatics: Perspectives on Finnishness in three Sports Novels' 9. 'In the Ring: Gender, Spectatorship, and the Body' 10. 'Heroes, Fans and the Nation: Exploring Football in Contemporary Fiction' 11. 'Cricketing Multiculturalism in Caryl Phillips's Playing Away' 12. Cricket and the Nation 13. Epilogue: Global Futures: Sport and Literature
JONSON'S close reading of alchemical texts and his accurate use of them in The Alchemist sca... more JONSON'S close reading of alchemical texts and his accurate use of them in The Alchemist scarcely need further confirmation. The labours of CH Herford and the Simpsons, and earlier of Edgar Hill Duncan,1 have identified several works to which he is substantially indebted: in ...
In Staying with the Trouble (2016), the feminist philosopher Donna Haraway argues for a practice ... more In Staying with the Trouble (2016), the feminist philosopher Donna Haraway argues for a practice of speculative, collective fabulation, or sympoiesis, allied to cross-species relation, generation, and continuity, as our only means of survival on a devastated planet. Placing her trust in the intricate knots of biological relationality and mutual dependence that persist in earth's muddy soil, or compost, she offers, in the story of the symbiont Camille, a fable of symbiogenesis, or "becoming-with-others for a habitable, flourishing world." This essay argues that The Faerie Queene, a poem centrally concerned with the opposition of waste and fertility, is an open, unfinished, sympoietic work deeply interested in soil and its generative admixtures, producing its own version of what Haraway describes as material-semiotic composting, or theory in the mud. Denying privilege to the human, Spenser employs speculative, interlaced fictions to argue for the persistence of life-forms emerging from earth's damaged soil.
Modernist Communities across Cultures and Media ed. Caroline Pollentier and Sarah Wilson (U of Florida Press) , 2019
Of all aesthetic movements, modernism most strikingly connects class, coterie, community, cosmopo... more Of all aesthetic movements, modernism most strikingly connects class, coterie, community, cosmopolis, and culture, placing all these terms under the sign of capital. Indeed, global modernity itself, as a working out of capital's social relations, requires us to examine how artistic or literary communities are formed, or aesthetic practices initiated, in specific local contexts where short-lived, often fragmentary ideological alliances also have roles to play. In an important study, Miranda Joseph has contested organicist visions of community, arguing instead that "capitalism and, more generally, modernity depend on and generate the discourse of community to legitimate social hierarchies" (viii; see Waddell 740-42). This is true of colonial societies, but it is also true that writing communities served as sites of resistance and enabled friendships across the colonial divide. Investigating a series of such friendships from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, Leela Gandhi proposes the term "affective community" to describe transnational ethical and intellectual affinities (4-7).
In this collection of conversations that were conducted in Calcutta, at the London School of Econ... more In this collection of conversations that were conducted in Calcutta, at the London School of Economics, through Jewish Book Week, and on the radical Web site openDemocracy, internationally renowned Jewish scholar Jacqueline Rose explores the debates that have fueled her writing and thinking over three decades. Drawn out by her interlocutors, Rose discusses the difference between political and sexual identity and inquires whether psychoanalysis can be considered a radical form of thought that can be used fruitfully in dialogue about political struggle. Most significantly - since each of these conversations was sparked by her recent and controversial writing on Zionism, Israel, and Palestine - Rose reflects on the role of Jewish dissent in our time. In these conversations, Rose appears courageous, passionate, ethical, and never afraid to engage politically on issues that are of human concern in the ongoing Middle and Near East crisis.
Through a series of reflections on the film Jole Dobe Na (Those Who Do Not Drown, 64 minutes, 202... more Through a series of reflections on the film Jole Dobe Na (Those Who Do Not Drown, 64 minutes, 2020), directed by Naeem Mohaiemen, this essay explores the relations between archives, dust and memory. It argues that memory is constantly struggling against the proliferation of detritus that clutters the material archive as we attempt to recover or reconstitute the past. Mohaiemen's Jole Dobe Na, a film about loss and mourning, places its protagonists in an abandoned hospital filled with disused furniture, equipment, and records, through which we pursue the thread of memory like searchers in an archive. But while Mohaiemen's earlier, research-driven films have excavated archives for documents, photographs and film footage in order to comment on history or release unexplored historical possibilities, Jole Dobe Na appears to view the archive itself as debris, always threatening to collapse into dust as memory confronts the past as wreckage. Mohaiemen's Tripoli Cancelled (2017) and Jole Dobe Na (2020), films set in liminal, derelict spaces (an airport and a hospital) both speak to the questions of site and space that preoccupy cinema today, especially artists' films meant for gallery viewing. They also reflect on the archive as a ruin rather than a repository.
This book offers fresh theoretical, methodological, and empirical analyses of the relation betwee... more This book offers fresh theoretical, methodological, and empirical analyses of the relation between religion and the city in the South Asian context. Uniting the historical with the contemporary by looking at the medieval and early modern links between religious faith and urban settlement, the book brings together a series of focused studies of the mixed and multiple practices and spatial negotiations of religion in the South Asian city. It looks at the various ways in which contemporary religious practice affects urban everyday life, commerce, craft, infrastructure, cultural forms, art, music, and architecture. Chapters draw upon original empirical study and research to analyze the foundational, structural, material, and cultural connections between religious practice and urban formations or flows. The book argues that Indian cities are not 'postsecular' in the sense that the term is currently used in the modern West but that there has been, rather, a deep, even foundational link between religion and urbanism, producing different versions of urban modernity. Questions of caste, gender, community, intersectional entanglements, physical proximity, private or public ritual, processions and prayer, economic and political factors, material objects, and changes in the built environment are all taken into consideration, and the book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of different historical periods, different cities, and different types of religious practice. Filling a gap in the literature by discussing a diversity of settings and faiths, the book will be of interest to scholars of South Asian history, sociology, literary analysis, urban studies, and cultural studies.
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Papers by Supriya Chaudhuri