Magic realism and radical aesthetics in modern SA literature: Nabarun Bhattacharya
SYNOPSIS
The event will discuss how the volume Nabarun Bhattacharya: Aesthetics and Politics in a World After Ethics came into being, focusing on the role of aesthetics and politics in Bhattacharya's corpus, the importance of translating him into a global language and the relevance of his writings in the context of world literature.
The book aims to introduce the Bengali writer (1948-2014) to a global audience through some of his short stories and poems in English translation and a series of critical essays on his works. A political commitment to literature frames Nabarun Bhattacharya's aesthetic project and the volume wishes to tease out the various perspectives on this complex meeting of politics and aesthetics. Be it the novel on dogs or those on petro-pollution and the machine, the political question in Nabarun echoes significant contemporary issues, such as animal rights, global warming and techno- capitalism. This opens up the possibility of questioning the traditional paradigm of humanist values in a world of catastrophic and violent encounters such as nuclear war or holocaust, which keeps returning in Nabarun's works.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Chaired by Carola Lorea
Sourit Bhattacharya, Anupama Mohan, Arka Chattopadhyay, Rijula Das, Samrat Sengupta
Sourit Bhattacharya is Lecturer in Postcolonial Studies at the University of Glasgow. His research interests include postcolonial literatures; magical realism; disaster studies; food and famine studies; and materialist literary criticism. His first monograph, Postcolonial Modernity and the Indian Novel: On Catastrophic Realism was published by Palgrave in 2020. His co‐edited volume on the left radical Bengali writer, Nabarun Bhattacharya with Arka Chattopadhyay and Samrat Sengupta came out from Bloomsbury in the same year. He is currently writing a second monograph on Postcolonialism Now (Orient BlackSwan 2022). Sourit is a founding co‐editor of Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry.
Anupama Mohan is Assistant Professor of English at Presidency University, Kolkata. She is the author of Utopia and the Village in South Asian Literatures (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2012) and editor of Maritime Transmodernities (Postcolonial Text 2019). Her areas of specialization include critical theory, Indian Ocean Studies, Marxist theory and world literatures, and her essays have featured in Asian Review of World Histories, University of Toronto Quarterly, Intersections, Economic and Political Weekly, and other international peer‐reviewed journals. She is the 2021 Writer‐in‐Residence at the Samyuktha Research Foundation, Thiruvananthapuram.
Arka Chattopadhyay is assistant professor of literary studies and philosophy in the department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Gandhinagar, India. He is a B.A., M.A., MPhil in English Literature, from Presidency College and Jadavpur University, India. He has written his MPHIL thesis on Samuel Beckett and Alain Badiou and finished his PHD from Western Sydney University on Beckett and Lacanian Psychoanalysis. He has been published in books like Deleuze and Beckett, Knots: Post‐Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film, Gerald Murnane: Another World in this One etc., and journals such as Textual Practice, Interventions, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, Sound Studies and The Harold Pinter Review. He has co‐edited the book, Samuel Beckett and the Encounter of Philosophy and Literature and has guest‐edited the SBT/A issue on Samuel Beckett and the Extensions of the Mind. Arka is the founding editor of the online literary journal Sanglap (http://sanglap‐journal.in/) and a contributingeditor to Harold Pinter Review. His first monograph, Beckett, Lacan and the Mathematical Writing of the Real has been published by Bloomsbury Academic UK in 2019. He has recently co‐ edited a volume on Nabarun Bhattacharya for Bloomsbury India in 2020 and is working on a monograph on Posthumanism, contracted by Orient Blackswan and two edited volumes on Affective Ecologies and Badiou and Modernism.
Rijula Das's debut novel A Death in Shonagachhi was published in July 2021 by Picador India, and will be published in USA & world in 2022 by Amazon Crossing. She is a recipient of the 2019 Michael King Writer's Centre Residency in Auckland and the 2016 Dastaan Award for her short story Notes From A Passing. Her short story, The Grave of The Heart Eater, was longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2019. Her English translation of Nabarun Bhattacharya's short fiction has appeared in Nabarun Bhattacharya: Aesthetics and Politics In A World after Ethics, Bloomsbury, 2020. Her translation of Bhattacharya's novel Kangal Malshat is forthcoming from Seagull Books in fall of 2022. Rijula received her PhD in Creative Writing/prose‐fiction in 2017 from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, where she taught writing for two years. Her critical research focuses on the connections between public space and sexual violence. A Death in Shonagachhi was born of this research. Her short fiction and translations have appeared in Journal of Contemporary Thought, Newsroom, New Zealand, and The Hindu. She lives in Wellington, New Zealand.
Samrat Sengupta is Assistant Professor and Head of the Dept. of English at Sammilani Mahavidyalaya under University of Calcutta. His research interests include Experimental Bengali published a book chapter on Bernard Stiegler and Jacques Derrida’s take on teletechnology and power in an anthology from Springerlink. He has Guest edited a special issue of the International journal Sanglap on “Caste in Humanities”. His first Bengali monograph on Pratibader Pathokrom (Syllabi of Resistance) is forthcoming in 2021. His co‐edited volume on Bengali experimental writer Nabarun Bhattacharya titled Nabarun Bhattacharya: Aesthetics and Politics in a World after Ethics has been published recently from Bloomsbury. He is one of the founding members of the Indian Posthumanism Network.
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