Now available online…
University of Toronto Quarterly - Volume 84, Issue 4, Fall 2015
http://bit.ly/utq844
To Make a Difference: A Memorial Tribute to Chelva Kanaganayakam
This special issue, edited by Prasad Bidaye and Victor Li, is a
Gedenkschrift, a memorial issue in honour of the late Chelva Kanaganayakam,
a professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto and an
influential scholar and teacher of postcolonial and South Asian literatures,
with contributions by his colleagues, students, and friends.
ARTICLES
To Make a Difference
Prasad Bidaye and Victor Li
<http://bit.ly/utq844a> http://bit.ly/utq844a
We did not say ‘Good bye’ (For Chelva)
Uzoma Esonwanne
<http://bit.ly/utq844b> http://bit.ly/utq844b
“Touching Them into Words”: Running with Michael Ondaatje among the Dead
Neil ten Kortenaar
Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family makes the claim, however obliquely,
that the author can speak with his dead father. This contact relies on
shifting pronouns that in writing, unlike in speaking, can be attributed to
more than one person in different contexts. The text cannot reach out
directly and touch the dead, but it makes room for the dead to enter, much
as wild animals invade human spaces. The dead exist in the depths of the
flat page, and writing allows them to communicate with the living. Writing
can do so because the living and the dead are both readers. The article
seeks to extend this kind of communication beyond Ondaatje and his father to
include Ondaatje's readers, specifically the author of the article and the
Sri Lankan-Canadian critic Chelva Kanaganayakam. <http://bit.ly/utq844c>
http://bit.ly/utq844c
Giraya and the Gothic Space: Nationalism and the Novel in Sri Lanka
Anupama Mohan
The essay turns to Punyekante Wijenaike's 1971 novella, Giraya, to study the
ways in which the Gothic features as a framing device for the exploration of
the gendered and ideological domain of home in twentieth-century Sri Lankan
writing. The walauwe or feudal manor is transformed, in Wijenaike's novella,
into a spectral space that challenges the prevailing nationalist discourses
and literatures which fashioned the Sri Lankan nation as a rural utopia.
Nostalgia and visions of national utopias give way to terror and dislocation
as the fragmentary narrative of Giraya calls into question, from the very
heart of the idealized nation – its home – the representational powers of
the ordered social realist novel, Sri Lanka's most dominant literary genre
in the post-Independence era. <http://bit.ly/utq844d> http://bit.ly/utq844d
(In)auspiciousness, Discipline, and Sympathy in Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's
Bishabriksha and Rabindranath Tagore's Chokher Bali
Margaret Herrick
The article traces how, in two extremely influential early Bengali novels, a
widow's “inauspiciousness,” the destructiveness she trails in her wake
(variously defined), is instrumentalized to inaugurate a new domesticity and
a new bourgeois couple who inhabit it. These novels, in other words, use a
widow's inauspiciousness to create modern citizen subjects. And they do so,
the article argues, both within their own pages (the householder
protagonists are transformed into citizen subjects) and beyond them (their
readers are transformed into citizen subjects too). By the end of these
texts, however, the widow herself is hurried offstage, effectively
containing the danger of any further social change and banishing
inauspiciousness as such to a realm outside modernity.
<http://bit.ly/utq844e> http://bit.ly/utq844e
The Nation's Taxidermist: Ungovernable Bodies in R.K. Narayan's The
Man-Eater of Malgudi
Sundhya Walther
The taxidermy animal confronts the viewer with an array of strange
contradictions, in part owing to the strong colonial resonance of taxidermy
as a form. This article examines the representation of taxidermy in R.K.
Narayan's 1961 novel The Man-eater of Malgudi. It considers how the novel
utilizes the taxidermy body as a conduit for its political critique aimed at
the modernization and capitalist expansion of the post-Independence period.
At the same time, the taxidermy animals exceed the project of the novel, and
expose Narayan's Malgudi itself as a taxidermic representation. By cutting
away the complex realities of its context, The Man-eater of Malgudi conducts
a problematic act of preservation, one that constructs and holds in stasis
an imagined India. This reading connects taxidermy and literature as forms
that aim to place nonhuman animal bodies, both spatially and ontologically,
within anthropocentric frames. <http://bit.ly/utq844f>
http://bit.ly/utq844f
On Responsible Distance: An Interview with R. Cheran by Aparna Halpé
R. Cheran and Aparna Halpé
R. Cheran speaks on his trajectory as a Tamil poet, journalist, and
intellectual, during the years of conflict in Sri Lanka and on his current
work as a playwright, activist, and collaborator in the development of Tamil
diaspora studies with Chelva Kanaganayakam in Toronto, Canada. This
interview provides a glimpse of the histories of dislocation, censorship,
and exile that framed Tamil political, cultural, and intellectual life
throughout the latter half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the
twenty-first century. Precariously positioned as an artist and scholar who
eschewed the non-democratic, militant positions of successive Sri Lankan
governments and Tamil militant organizations, Cheran interrogates evolving
notions of Tamil nationalism as articulated in the post-war context and
looks to the future of the idea of the Tamil nation in Sri Lanka and around
the world. This interview is a transcript of the public interview held at
Trans(sub)continental Imaginations: Three Centuries of South Asian Literary
English, a symposium in memory of Chelva Kanaganayakam, University of
Toronto at Mississauga, 25 March 2015. <http://bit.ly/utq844g>
http://bit.ly/utq844g
Poems by Ashley Halpé
Ashley Halpé
http://bit.ly/utq844h
Communal Identities in Rohinton Mistry's Bombay Novel
Kelly A. Minerva
The article examines Rohinton Mistry's Such a Long Journey as a defining
example of the Bombay novel. This genre of literature, I argue, depicts
Bombay as a powerful force that defines individual residents just as much as
it is defined by them. The genre demands a reading strategy that highlights
the artifice and agency necessary to create the composites of personal and
public (i.e., historical and political) narratives that comprise the city's
postcolonial identities. Mistry, like many Bombay novelists, presents the
city as a nuanced site produced through the interactions between memory,
personal and public histories, and power relationships. His use of literary
realism emphasizes the limitations of individual agency and presents Bombay
as a decaying, unwelcoming place defined by pessimistic nostalgia. Thus,
Mistry's depiction of Bombay exemplifies the tenuous nature of individual
narrative agency over personal and urban identity as well as both the
alienating and the restorative consequences of communal politics.
<http://bit.ly/utq844i> http://bit.ly/utq844i
Slavery, Death, and the Village: Localizing Imperatives of Nigerian Writing
Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi
This article explores the ubiquitous citations of the village and the
manifestation of villagers in Nigerian fiction published since about 2000.
Through a close reading of Chuma Nwokolo's Diaries of a Dead African, I
argue that Nwokolo's novel exemplifies the ongoing critical regionalism in
Nigerian writing, a practice through which writers expand the geographical
imaginaries of Nigerian fiction as well as meditate reflexively upon the
circulation of Nigerian fiction within the global book-publishing industry.
This critical regionalism responds to the global circulation of the Nigerian
novel by drawing upon, revising, and updating the geographical imaginaries
of early Nigerian novelists. Elements of the village novel as a genre and
ideas of the village as a crucial iteration of African spaces are deployed
to signal the interplay between the complex spaces and representational
practices of emerging fiction. In sum, this article works toward the
legibility of the village within contemporary writing.
<http://bit.ly/utq844j> http://bit.ly/utq844j
The Varthamanappusthakam or Is there Justice for the Narrating Subaltern?
Clara A.B. Joseph
The article examines India's first modern travelogue, The
Varthamanappusthakam, from the point of view of narratology and
Kanaganayakam's observations on storytelling from the margins. The focus is
on the travelogue's narratology, including the story and its narration, and
on the discussion it triggers, in a secular academy that is Western or
Westernized, with a closed canon that incorporates postcolonial studies. The
article draws on, among other things, Gérard Genette's narrative theories
and Gerhart Husserl's phenomenological discussion of communities. It makes
an argument for the inclusion of a translation of a Christian text from the
Indian subcontinent in the curriculum of English Studies as a challenge to
preconceived notions of colonial India, thereby providing the required
institutional approval that Gayatri Spivak points to.
<http://bit.ly/utq844k> http://bit.ly/utq844k
US–Soviet Antagonism and the “Indirect Propaganda” of Book Schemes in India
in the 1950s
Sarah Brouillette
The article addresses US perceptions of subsidized pro-Soviet books and
periodicals in India in the 1950s and the way that pro-US book programs,
intended to counter the Soviet initiative, imagined that they might help to
strengthen the hold of liberal capitalist democracy in the face of the
threat of Soviet influence. <http://bit.ly/utq844l> http://bit.ly/utq844l
Poems by Rienzi Crusz
Rienzi Crusz
http://bit.ly/utq844m
Submissions to UTQ
University of Toronto Quarterly welcomes contributions in all areas of the
humanities – literature, philosophy, fine arts, music, the history of ideas,
cultural studies, and so on. It favours articles that appeal to a scholarly
readership beyond the specialists in the field of the given submission. For
full details, please visit <http://www.utpjournals.com/utq>
www.utpjournals.com/utq
UTQ Online Archive
Full archive of issues 1931-2015 — 84 volumes, 325+ issues and more than
3200 articles and reviews —
Available on Project MUSE – http://bit.ly/UTQpm and at UTQ Online -
http://bit.ly/utqonline
__________________________________
Sign up for University of Toronto Quarterly News!
Sign up for important news relating to University of Toronto Quarterly.
You'll receive emails with peeks inside new issues, Tables of Contents,
Calls for Papers, editorial announcements, and special offers. You can
unsubscribe at any time by clicking "Unsubscribe" in the footer of our
emails. <http://bit.ly/utqalerts> http://bit.ly/utqalerts
For more information, please contact
University of Toronto Press Journals Division
5201 Dufferin St., Toronto, ON Canada M3H 5T8
Tel: (416) 667-7810 Fax: (416) 667-7881
email: <mailto:[log in to unmask]> [log in to unmask]
<http://www.utpjournals.com/utq> www.utpjournals.com/utq
<http://www.facebook.com/utpjournals> www.facebook.com/utpjournals
<http://www.twitter.com/utpjournals> www.twitter.com/utpjournals
posted by T Hawkins, University of Toronto Press Journals
|
