how this show aligns itself with the perspectives of criminalized, incarcerated woman; and as a cultural trope how far this representation challenges and reifies the hegemonic concepts of heteronormativity, race, class, and gender.
Train, as a marker of mobility appears in innumerable cultural texts where individuals and community are also placed in the context of modernity. In the Indian context, this however becomes concurrent with colonial modernity. The selected films of Apu Trilogy by Satyajit Ray have been analysed by Sandip Mondal as a site for the performance of several socio-cultural narratives seen in the first half of twentieth century Bengal. The reference of train and railways apart from forming visual metaphors discernible in all three films develop larger cultural narratives than merely contributing to the concerned stories of those films. But apparently conceived of as a mode of communication, railways can also function as an agency of emulating desire, memory, alienation and estrangement, of ideas amenable to the notions of border. This metaphorical track of railways developing the binaries of past and present, country and city, memory and desire continues to inform the culture of colonial Bengal more as a border. In Chapter 8, Mondal attempts to discuss the Apu Trilogy from this perspective.
The contemporary world has become “one marked by the globalization of markets, the privatization of the world under the aegis of neoliberalism, and the increasing imbrication of the financial markets, the postimperial military complex and electronic and digital technologies” (Mbembe, 2017: 3) in which the Zizekian paradigm that it seems easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the capitalist system is more present than ever. Populist nationalist-infused politics of fear are on the rise which leads to a localization of borders and tough xenophobic immigration policies, not based on race or origin solely anymore, but on the purchase level of individuals. Bearing this in mind, the Earth is currently facing the Necrocene epoch, a geological age triggered by Capital mass-accumulation which “reframes the history of capitalism’s expansion through the process of becoming extinction” (McBrien, 2016), not only of species, but languages, peoples, resources and the (de)construction through pollution. The Necrocene is already affecting, amongst other entities, the peoples from islands and coastline areas. The current estimates of sea-level rise rates predict a human cataclysm by the end of the 21st Century which will change our perception of our global reality in a catastrophic event never acquainted before, devaluing the prediction of future events through previous knowledge. In Chapter 9, Oriol J. Batalla seeks to explore the conflict of the climate refugees from coastline areas and islands from a Political Ecology and Environmental Humanities perspective, related to the conceptualizations of (b)order and (b)ordering, and the dialectic it predicts between locality and globality amidst the ability to thrive amongst the different populations affected. This work also aims to produce alternative narratives towards a rethinking and reordering of the Contemporary and its politics regarding Environment, Politics, Culture and a Degrowth future.
The idea of nature has always been of central importance to the idea of what a human being is. Different images of nature have historically shaped different ideas of human society—a solid and dense background of our lives against which we have routinely defined ourselves. However, the current sense of global ecological disaster has seriously questioned our sovereign Romantic liberal-humanist concept of ‘Nature’ as some pristine and organic background of our lives. The threats of Global Warming, Climate Change, overpopulation and more explicitly our planet entering the Anthropocene era are issues that confound both Natural Sciences and the Humanities alike. All these factors have contributed to the birth of a new ‘Re-invented Nature’, a nature having its own agency as opposed to something seen solely as an object of human control and representations. The urgency of this kind of crisis is something that is without any historical precedence and as such disruptive of all our representational schematics with which the people in the Humanities feel familiar. Faced with such an unprecedented situation, we are forced to ask ourselves some uneasy and pressing questions like: Is there anything called ‘Nature’ exists today? Can the Humanities scholars have anything to offer to this crisis? If yes, then what will exactly be its own counter-text? Can we still talk about ‘the Humanities’ and ‘Natural Sciences’ in separate and monolithic terms, as in the past? In what follows, the chapter attempts to draw attention to new eco-logics of nature at a time of anthropogenic Climate Change that would lead to a Re-imagining of the humanities discipline in particular and human life in general. In Chapter 10, Ratul Nandi aims to build the responses towards the question of how to deal with this new ‘deconstructed nature’ and particularly to what possibilities are open to our arts and literature for dealing with this crisis.
The concept of a ‘border’ accommodates the contradictory connotations of ‘nearness’ and ‘separation’. As Derrida argues in relation to the ‘hyphen’, a demarcation line not only separates but always, already joins the entities on either side of it. Transgression is therefore structural to any (b)order, including that of self/other, home/abroad, human/nonhuman, etc. The ‘shadow lines’ of any border are always in motion, re-producing it as a liminal space which keeps-erasing itself. It is this operation of trace which makes every border a site of intense conflict and contestation, especially for those caught in the undecided in-between. Chapter 11 explores this onto-ethical and political implications of such a hyphenated existence, caught between moving (b)orders of nationality, race, class, and gender. If we consider the self to be our most intimate home, the discussion then spirals out to issues of roots and routes—to cultural hybridity, transnationality and the postcolonial condition at large. Rajarshi Bagchi thus, attempts a comparative study on selfhood and agency by taking up Homi K. Bhabha’s postcolonial idea of the culturally hybrid subject and juxtaposing it with the French feminist thinker Hélène Cixous’s anti-phallogocentric conception of feminine ‘self/s’. Finally, the chapter engages with Cixous’s diasporic auto-fiction, Reveries of the Wild Woman: Primal Scenes, in order to explore how a hyphenated existence affects one’s self-identity.
South Asia presents a peculiar yet spectacular mix of cultures, languages, religions, customs and traditions that have evolved over time to shape the distinctiveness that it possesses today. The Mauryans, the Mughals and the Cholas to name a few, along with the British East India Company and the subsequent British Raj have all contributed towards this shaping of South Asia as we know it today. Following the independence of India, new realities of ‘border-ism’ were born ending with the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. Furthermore, in the fast-paced and inter-connected lives of states, borders have come to be understood in many forms, one of them being the rising concept of border-lands. In the wake of the discipline of Area Studies in the United States, the term ‘South Asia’ was created, perhaps in an attempt to categorize the Asian sub-continent. The term however, is understood to be an anomaly due to the fact that South Asia with its ultra-wide selection of languages, cultures and customs is still categorized as one single region. The term ‘Indian Sub-continent’ is rarely used in academic parlance today and has largely given way to ‘South Asia’. It is with this idea that this chapter seeks to explore the various cultures, subcultures, languages, socio-economic and geopolitical aspects of South Asia and whether its borders have evolved over time to play an important role in connecting forces rather than dividing-lines in the region. For a detailed analysis of the region, the historical legacy of the South Asian borders cannot be overlooked. However, in the context of the tightly-knit multipolar global order of today, these perceptions need to be changed to adapt to the demands of economic globalization. In Chapter 12, Aditya Kant Ghising looks at how this may be achieved. Inter-state relations in South Asia have largely been guided by a sense of shared culture and historical background. This can further be given a positive direction amidst economic gains in today’s global order characterized by an increasing focus on connectivity. The study of borders and cultures has fascinated scholars for generations and his chapter aims to make a humble contribution to the existing literature.
Written in the wake of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, almost a decade after the events in India, Lost Links in Indian Mutiny by H P Malet opens up one such strange ‘diaspora space’. The novel begins with Yusuff’s sojourn to Mecca, for Hadj. In a weirdly episodic narrative it follows the strange tale of Hoossein ben Hassan, son of Yusuff’s friend and fellow pilgrim in Hadj, Hassan, who died during the pilgrimage. Dictated by strange talismanic
