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- Convenors:
-
Alessandra Consolaro
(University of Torino)
Thomas de Bruijn
- Location:
- 25H92
- Start time:
- 24 July, 2014 at
Time zone: Europe/Zurich
- Session slots:
- 3
Short Abstract:
Globalization has deeply influenced cultural production in South Asia. This panel invites papers that explore how the global and the local interact with each other and how far the term and the concept of "glocalization" can be applied to explain contemporary developments in South Asian narratives.
Long Abstract:
Globalization - the worldwide exchange of ideas, economies and life-styles - has deeply affected South Asian society and culture. The effects of globalization are far more complex and pluriform than archetypical cases such as that of South Asian writers reaching a worldwide audience. Globalization is a complex, multidirectional and interactive process, simultaneously homogenizing and dividing social and cultural discourses, leading to numerous changes in the scenery of South Asian narratives. The notion of 'glocalization' as demonstrated in the pioneering work of Robertson and Bauman, provides an interesting perspective that encompasses the dialogic and interactive nature of the effects of globalization.
This panel invites papers that analyse contemporary South Asian narratives in literature or cinema through the lens of 'glocalization'. Possible topics for this analysis are the impact of global modes of communication on individuals and their relations with family or larger communities, changes in urban or metropolitan cityscape and the social structures that build these, changes in the content and distribution of cultural ideals, new social inequalities or deprivations caused by the oppressive presence of global forces, etc. etc.
Papers should focus on specific narratives from literature or cinema in all South Asian languages including English, but go beyond content analysis. They should contribute to a critical discussion of 'glocalization' and its application in the analysis of contemporary South Asian narratives, possibly leading to an authoritative volume of essays which add a new perspective to existing discourses in South Asian studies.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses how Rai and Phalke, two filmmakers from the silent era who, with the help of their wide experience from the west, were able to universalize particular experiences on screen and transcend from local to achieve global levels.
Paper long abstract:
Himanshu Rai and Dada Saheb Phalke were two Indian film producers who were hugely impacted by the European style of film making. Their combined vision of global ideas with local considerations had played a decisive role in shaping the early Indian film industry.
Images of Jesus in films like Life and Passion of the Christ (1903,Dir:Nonguet and Zecca),helped Phalke conceive films on Indian Gods like Lanka Dahan, Kaliya Dahan and Shri Krishna Janma.Phalke's internalizing the globalization process while working with Cecil Hepworth in England and his training in camera, developing,printing and publicity gave Indian Cinema an early boost. He was instrumental in introducing the Studio Model of filmmaking followed in the West.He also developed a production team of his own and mainly included his family members in it.
Manifested by the global changes in the structure of the film format , Himanshu Rai entailed a restructuring of Indian film production style with the help of Anglo-German support. He also established his film studio which consisted of hand picked technicians from the West who were instrumental in revolutionizing the film industry with their innovations..As Rai screened his film across Europe he broke transnational boundaries and brought cosmopolitan ideas as themes for his movies.(Light of Asia based on Edwin Arnold's poem).
The paper analyses how local and global forces in Rai and Phalke's cinema boosted cultural open mindedness and economic growth.
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses Agnidev Chatterjee’s Charulata 2011 - a recent Bengali film that explores cyber romance - as an example of a glocalized South Asian narrative, arguing that it shows the impact of global modes of communication (emails) on individuals and their personal relationships.
Paper long abstract:
A lonely wife in Kolkata and a bachelor in London have a virtual affair, but are forced to re-think their relationship when they discover he is her brother-in-law. Charulata 2011 is an ingenious post-millennial adaptation of Tagore's novella, Nashtanirh (The Broken Nest), already immortalized by Satyajit Ray in his classic, Charulata (1964). This intertextuality, especially with Ray, lends an added dimension to the film, allowing Chatterjee to contrast two modernities in Bengal - the colonial and glocal - over the course of a century.
Both these women gain temporary respite from their suffocating marriage through an affair, but their circumstances are vastly different. While Tagore/Ray's heroine (like Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary and Lady Chatterley in the Continent) could only bond with a man she knew, technology expands Charulata's choice in 2011. She romances the strange and the unknown - an unseen tall dark stranger with a gift for words. While the 19th century Bengali heroine had to reign in her erotic impulse, her 21st century counterpart submits to it, though with an overwhelming sense of guilt. But there are similarities too - both are childless homemakers; have a literary sensibility; and though a 100 years apart, in both their cases, the lover eventually departs, and duty ultimately wins over passion, bringing back the duly chastened wife to the wronged husband.
The paper proposes to read Charulata 2011 as a dramatization of a glocalized South Asian narrative, where the protagonist negotiates an uneasy juxtaposition of a globalized outlook on the world with the entrapment of age-old social obligations in her self.
Paper short abstract:
This paper seeks to identify the changing status of an 'otherness' of Bengali 'Bhadralok' culture in the available modes of Indian cinema in the post-global scenario. It uses two recent Indian films, 'Kaahani' (2012) and 'Bhooter Bhobishyot' (2012), as the representative sites of the said changes.
Paper long abstract:
The present paper engages with the question of an 'otherness' of the Bengali 'Bhadralok' culture in the available representative modes of Indian cinema within the post-Global scenario. It studies the socio-cultural dynamics through which this 'otherness' happens to be dissipated in different direction in the recent years. It takes two recent films, 'Kahaani' (2012) and 'Bhooter Bhobishyot' (2012), in Hindi and Bengali languages respectively, to consider where two contradictory aspects of this dissipation are at play. The objective of this analysis primarily aims to historicize the construction of a particular cultural pattern called 'Bengaliness' in Indian cinema by marking some of the significant junctures in the course of its history of development. Using the films as cases in point, this article attempts to envisage a possible framework where the changing landscape of the city of Calcutta, shifting codes of the cultural habits of 'Bhadralok's and reconfigured ideas about the Bengali nation can be seen operating to develop a reconstructed complimentary relationship between the post-liberal West Bengal and the other India.I would say, the global cultural inflow, along with the localized notions of the post-liberal 'Bengaliness' are engaged constructing a matrix for the said changes to happen.
Paper short abstract:
After an analysis of the specificities of the Hindi version of the TV game show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire", this paper examines the ways this worldwide phenomenon has been fictionalized and made “local” in Swarup’s novel "Q & A", and questions the relevance of the concept of ‘glocalization’.
Paper long abstract:
The television game show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" is certainly one of the most eloquent illustrations of a contemporary phenomenon that has had a global effect (both geographically and socially) on the cultural world. Originally created in the UK in 1998, this show has been produced in Hindi since 2000 under the name "Kaun Banega Crorepati" (KBC). Inspired by the TV show, the novel "Q & A" (2005) by the Indian diplomat and writer Vikas Swarup became an immediate best-seller before being (quite freely) adapted to cinema by the English film director Danny Boyle, whose film, "Slumdog Millionaire" (2008), won 8 Oscars.
After a short analysis of the cultural specificities of the Hindi TV show, this paper will examine the ways in which this worldwide phenomenon has been fictionalized and made "local" in Swarup's Indo-English novel. Although several studies have already dealt with either the game show or the book/film, none seems so far to have linked both aspects of this phenomenon, which may be seen as the perfect product of both the process of globalization and the cultural circulation of an object between the many means of communication constituting today's world (TV, cinema, literature, internet, etc.). Finally, this paper will question the relevance of the concept of 'glocalization' in this context.
Paper short abstract:
The paper is based on a novel by N.Varma “Raat kaa Reportar”. Aspects of glocalization are presented, starting from the title up to the final word. Language, stylistic features and context of the novel, including autobiographical experience of the author, show an interaction of a “global and “local”
Paper long abstract:
The paper deals with some aspects of glocalization depicted in N.Varma's novel "Raat kaa Reportar". Though the term 'glocalization' appeared practically at the time of the novel's publication, it can be considered as one of the first novels which represented this process clearly, not declaring or even mentioning it openly in the text. A combination and sometimes diffusion of a global and local is clearly seen in the novel starting from the title and up to the last word 'VOID', which could not be understood without a context of the novel.
Nirmal Varma's autobiographical experience, European and Indian political or literary context help to find sources and explain some of the aspects of glocalization presented in the novel, probably without any special intention of the author. The novel does not show or discuss a development of "a global market - vishwa bazaar" in India, but presents a deep process of local and global interactions mainly in intellectual, literary, political and private spheres. It is seen thanks to some parallels with N.Varma's story "Doosrii duniyaa" also.
The main attention in the paper will be given to the novel's language which demonstrates a combination of Hindi and English vocabulary, when practically every personage has a specific "word pattern" depending on his/her characteristic and a role in the plot. Delhi is also one of the novel's heroes and is presented not only as the capital of India, but a specific example of a global city "at the times of turmoil", psychological, mental or practical.
Paper short abstract:
The paper will explore the extent to which the impact of glocalization is changing the traditional world of the mountain villages of Himachal Pradesh.
Paper long abstract:
In the eponymous short story by S.R. Harnot, "m.com" (written in Devanagari as "em.dåt.kåm") is the name of a shop that deals with the disposal of animal carcasses, for centuries the traditional occupation of the Chamar caste. The shop has grown into a small computerised business which an old woman, who needs to have a cow's carcass removed from the cattleshed, is unable to access.
Starting out with this example of what could be described as the "rape" of tradition by technological progress, which cuts off direct contact between human beings, the paper goes on to illustrate the various effects of glocalization on particularly isolated rural communities like those of the mountain villages, which in this analysis are those of Himachal Pradesh, the setting of S.R. Harnot's Hindi short stories.
Paper short abstract:
This presentation, based on the work of contemporary Indian poets who make their literary pacts across languages, space and time, aims at discussing the way translation shapes these 'sceneries of glocalization'.These writers with everything they have *read*, and everything they have *translated*.
Paper long abstract:
'How poor and barren our lives would be if someone or the other had not
translated Tolstoi, Kafka, Camus, Dostoievsky, Halldor Laxness, Celine,
Saramago, Juan Rulfo ... Curzio Malaparte', acknowledged the English-Marathi
novelist Kiran Nagarkar in 2010. And in a recent article, Arvind Krishna
Mehrotra evokes the 'globe-encircling strides' of modern Indian poets who
make their literary pacts across languages, space and time. These poets who
write from a particular place (like Mumbai or Allahabad), also *write* with
everything they have *read*, and everything they have *translated*. Their
work give evidence of overlapping multilingualities, geographies and
literary cultures.
This presentation aims at discussing the way translation shapes these
'sceneries of glocalization': translation as practice, since many
contemporary Indian writers are also translators, and as the 'active
presence' or 'consumption' of world literature which sustains their
creative writing, be it in English or in the regional languages. My aim is
to discuss these issues by concentrating on debates over 'nativism' vs
'cosmopolitanism', and alongside another concept which I have found
particularly enlightening for the works concerned, that of 'vernacular
cosmopolitanism' (Appadurai, Bhabha, Pollock).
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores how Geetanjali Shree’s Khali Jagah (2006) and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth (2008) converge in the use of highly interiorized characterization to represent the intrusion of the global in personal lives, thus undermining stereotypes of cultural identities.
Paper long abstract:
Geetanjali Shree's Khali Jagah (2006) and Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth (2008) are almost contemporary, but originate from totally different literary contexts. They seem to converge in their use of a highly personalized, interiorized narration and characterization to relate the intrusion of political violence, migration, displacement and other global events in personal lives. Khali Jagah is more radical in the sense that it stretches the possibilities of speech and characterization to relate the coming to terms with the loss of offspring as a result of a terrorist attack. Lahiri's fiction subtly personalizes the diaspora experience migration, innovating and extending the palette of 'migration' fiction with an individualized psychological dimension.
The paper analyses how the two authors, each in their own manner, relate the experience of globalisation in a local, personal space that is not primarily defined by cultural identifications. Is this 'glocalized' literary idiom in writing coming from or related to South Asia superseding existing modes of representation of the postmodern experience, such as Bhabha's 'hybridity'?
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses how the global genre of reality-TV is adapted in Indian regional language television to target 'housewives' as consumers, and how women's engagement with these programmes relate to the regional social history and local domestic politics of patriarchy and gender subordination.
Paper long abstract:
The global phenomenon of reality-TV has taken India by storm from the early 2000s and developed some distinctive forms, particularly in regional language programmes. In Bengal, a dominant sub-genre of reality-TV involves 'housewives'. In the wake of India's consumer revolution and economic liberalization, women are now targeted as a key constituency of consumers by advertisers and television programme sponsors. Primetime TV serials, designed for women viewers, are now dominated by 'domestic' dramas with women as chief protagonists, while the advent of reality-TV has opened up a vast site to solicit the active participation of 'housewives', whom one advertising professional has termed 'CEOs of the household'. This paper examines Bengali reality-TV shows for 'housewives', and analyses how women's engagement with these programmes as viewers and participants relate to the regional social history and domestic politics of patriarchy and gender subordination. For female participants, the global format of reality-TV has provided a crucial site for the re-signification of local gender relations and the renegotiation of domestic politics. The paper argues that while their familial and maternal role is often reinforced in reality-TV, yet women define new identities and imagine new possibilities of forging self-hood in the interstices of the market-driven media promotion of the 'enterprising housewife', and their self-construction exceeds the meaning and purpose intended by the shows. In this way, the paper queries whether the structural logic of the globalised market undermines women's local, personal experience of emancipation and reconstruction of subjectivity that global market processes unwittingly bring forth.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the re-appropriation of Western feminist claims and discourses through the prism of literature in South Asia, where women’s struggles are rooted in a cultural context where the relations to men, nature and traditions are certainly specific.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the re-appropriation of Western feminist claims and discourses in South Asia, where women's struggles are rooted in a cultural context where the relations to men, nature and traditions are certainly specific. It shows how contemporary feminist cultural production (literature, but also cinema) in South Asia bears witness to a particular and alternative culture where the notion of gender and the difference between sexes are deeply nurtured by complex traditions and mythologies of femininity and masculinity. For example, if Mallika Sen Gupta's essays on gender (such as Strilinga Nirmana, "The construction of Womanhood", 1994 and Purush Noi Purushtantra, « Not man but Patriarchy», 2002) are certainly nourished which contemporary Western discourses on gender issue, her poetry is however traversed by an oral folk culture that belongs to the traditional women whom Mallika addressed to. This perspective is crucial as it allows to rethink feminist and gender theo
ries as fundamentally located and historicized, inherited from and intimately connected with a cultural and historical context, despite the universalist agenda of some Western feminist discourses.
Paper short abstract:
Through the lens of ecofeminism, the paper will analyse some different perspectives on women claiming for the rule over their own resources, as the indigenous outlook of Maitreyī Puṣpā's novels challenging the globalized lexicon of films and advertisements.
Paper long abstract:
My paper aims at analysing some reactions to the dynamics of globalization through the lens of ecofeminism in India. The claims for the management of local sources represent a response to the global trade policies disregarding any ethical and ecological commitment. The women embody the creative forces that resist the cultural flattening and the environmental destruction of globalization. Their expressive modalities often collide with the communication techniques of the global world, eluding any canonical categorizations - even those of conventional feminism. The management of local resources comes to epitomize the women claim for independence and self-determination.
I will use the metaphor of water - being the essential resource of life and a symbol of femininity - as a key to investigate some dynamics of the relation global-local. I will propose some textual analyses dealing with water management and offering different perspectives on women claiming for the rule over their own resources. For example, in the indigenous outlook of Maitreyī Puṣpā's novel Betvā bahtī rahī (1994) the challenges of women unavoidably mingle with local misery, far away the India shining of globalization. In a different way, the globalized lexicon of blockbuster films radically differs from environmental documentaries; while the marketing strategies of some advertisements emphasize water as a vital source to enhance its profit resources.
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyzes Pankaj Bisht’s Hindi novel Pankhvali nav (2007), whose protagonist is a man having sex with men. It problematizes the discourse on gender and sexuality in India, and the emergence of a queer identity and literature corresponding to the neoliberal turn in Indian economy.
Paper long abstract:
Pankhvali nav (The winged boat) is a Hindi novel by Pankaj Bisht that appeared in installments in Hans (2007) and was published as a book in 2009. The protagonist is a man having sex with men, and the novel, defined by the author as a "sensitive human tragedy" (Tehelka, 05/12/2012), constructs a highly heterocentered discourse on queerness. Set in India just before the neoliberal turn, the story discusses sexual citizenship not only with reference to Indian society, but also in a global context. In this paper I analyze the text, problematizing the notion of gender and the emergence of a queer identity corresponding with the opening up of Indian economy to neoliberal capital. Politics of sexual identity in newly globalizing economies are linked to global discourses on HIV/AIDS prevention, sexual health, sexual rights, and reproductive health. Also the emergence of queer literature in India, and of 'khush' literature in the Hindi literary field, has to be investigated on the backdrop of global queer identity: after 1991, the process of 'coming out' has gained momentum, and has spread from creative writing to political action, assertion of one's own identity and demand for a queer-space. Without denying the existence of heteronormative prejudices and homophobic discourses in India, I argue that existing discourses on queer liberation are often based either on a regression to an ancient or medieval cultural heritage, or on a reductive view of sex in non-Western contexts.