ECSAS 2023 – Turin 26-29 July

35 – Postmodern Narratives of Caste and Indigeneity

This panel considers narratives of caste and indigeneity across genres, media, and languages and their explicit engagement with narrative conventions of the postmodern.

Convenors

Laura Brueck - Northwestern University, Dept. of Asian Languages and Cultures, Evanston, United States
Veronica Ghirardi - Università degli Studi di Torino, Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici, Torino, Italy
Praseeda Gopinath - State University of New York Binghamton, English, Binghamton, United States

Long Abstract

This panel considers narratives of caste and indigeneity across genres, media, and languages and their explicit engagement with narrative conventions of the postmodern. Literary postmodernism emerged in Euro-American literature as a set of experimental narrative approaches in the late 1960s, notably the same period when in India, Dalit literature in Marathi was consolidating its interventionist narrative politics and radical experiments with language and form. This panel seeks to trace the strategic employment and diversification of postmodern storytelling techniques in literatures and other media explicitly engaged in the politics of caste and indigeneity and considers the ways in which the grammar of postmodernism is reconfigured through an exploration of Dalit and indigenous fictions. We invite contributions that address the question: how do Dalit and Adivasi fictions disrupt and interrogate the artistic category of postmodernism itself? Contributions to this panel might consider the employment of tropes such as embodied and non-chronological time, visceral memory, literal and figurative travel, speculative storytelling, futurity, space, otherworldliness, and alternative realities. The question of postmodernism and/in translation is also a central concern. This panel seeks to provide a forum for a transnational network of scholars working to situate Indian and South Asian literatures of caste and indigeneity across disciplines and in innovative and comparative critical ways.

Presentations

Postmodernism in Raj Gauthaman’s Autofictions
Subramanian Darun - The English and Foreign Languages University, Cultural Studies, Hyderabad, India
Text, Performance and Anti-caste politics : Conceptualizing Postmodern Dalit Performance Aesthetics
Shrimali Maulikraj - Northwestern University, Performance Studies, Evanston, United States
Mothertongues vs. other tongues: A postmodern poetics of language in Dalit and Adivasi literatures
Shailendra Soumya - Northwestern University, Comparative Literary Studies, Evanston, United States
How the revolting turns into a piece of art: Imagery of disgust in Hindi Dalit autobiographies
Rimscha Marina - Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Asian Studies, Jerusalem, Israel
Towards a Postmodern Dalit Aesthetics: A Study of Devanooru Mahadeva’s Kusumabale
Mohan Greeshma - Mahindra University, Humanities and Social Sciences, Hyderabad, India
Whence Kusumabale, Whence Postmodernism?
Kumar Shashi - University of Alberta, Department of English and Film Studies, Edmonton, Canada
Anna Bhau Sathe and the Dalit Recovery of the Political
K V Cybil - IIT BHU, Humanistic Studies, Varanasi, India
‘Broken Steps of the Step-Well:’ Alienated Men in Ajay Navaria’s Short Stories
Gopinath Praseeda - Binghamton University, State University of New York, English, Binghamton, United States
The revenge of the pigs: postmodern strategies in Dalit fiction by Roop Narayan Sonkar
Ghirardi Veronica - Università degli Studi di Torino, Humanities, Torino, Italy
Caste and the Uncanny
Brueck Laura - Northwestern University, Dept. of Asian Languages and Cultures, Evanston, United States