Conference Presentations by Allison Nowak Shelton
Interdisciplinary.Net Annual Global Conference: "Storytelling: Global Reflections on Narrative", 2013
Mahasweta Devi’s well-known novella, _Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha_, within the collectio... more Mahasweta Devi’s well-known novella, _Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha_, within the collection, _Imaginary Maps_, is a careful meditation on the implications, both personal and political, of representing another’s cultural history. The story examines notions of misunderstanding, authenticity, and truth, as well as the interconnectedness of narrative and history. Analyzing the story in terms of narratology, I consider the author herself, the English translator, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and the characters of the pterodactyl, Bikhia, and Puran as different kinds of storytellers with unique perspectives on, connections with, and responsibilities to the fictional village of Pirtha and the conditions of life there. Reading these figures through both the textual and paratextual material reveals a multilayered narrative matrix. Each storyteller is an interpreter with a different discursive understanding and set of tools with which to re-present a narrative. Together they comprise a similarly multilayered political project that explores those difficult questions that occur again and again within wider post-colonial literary contexts: What does it mean to enter, and therefore forever alter the trajectory of someone else’s story? Is it possible to recount someone else’s history, to translate another’s past while avoiding presumption and consumption? What is true in history? What is true history? Mahasweta's celebrated work explores these questions in relation to indigenous Indian people, calling attention to the issues they face in the current neoliberal climate of decolonised India, such as famine, drought, discrimination, and exploitation.
Conference paper given at ACLA, 2014. Not for circulation or citation., 2014
Twenty years after Gayatri Spivak’s groundbreaking query, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, Deeti, the ... more Twenty years after Gayatri Spivak’s groundbreaking query, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, Deeti, the outcast heroine of Amitav Ghosh’s _Sea of Poppies_, draws her daughter’s portrait on a beam of the former slave trader transporting her to a life of indentured servitude. Thus Ghosh (re)imagines Deeti as a marginal identity of 19th c. colonial Indian history. Reading Poppies as a Glissantian cartographic (re)imagination of Atlantic/Indian Ocean historical space (Vilashini Cooppan) alongside Spivak’s critique of subaltern recovery, this paper explores the trace of Spivak’s “Subaltern” in Ghosh’s effort to create a paradoxical narrative space, manifested by the Kala-Pani (black water), from which the subaltern woman can emerge and make her mark. I analyze Ghosh’s formal and thematic use of transition that places Orientalism and Subalternity in relation with peripheral linguistic and cultural exchange, creating a linkage between narrative practice and archival practice, always uneven and en route. I then investigate the system in which the novel itself appears and circulates (David Damrosch) as contradictory to its project, as well as Ghosh’s authorial positionality, insofar as he is perceived and/or received as occupying both Indian and international anglophone space, as “rooted” and “routed” within this contradiction. I finally situate these complexities as the concrete conditions through which the global reading public comes to read/“know” the Indian subaltern woman through these internal and external cartographies, revealing how World Literature continues to construct the subaltern across temporal and spatial modes of understanding.
Book Reviews by Allison Nowak Shelton
Drafts by Allison Nowak Shelton
The titular character of Indra Sinha’s 2007 novel Animal’s People has been called posthuman, an e... more The titular character of Indra Sinha’s 2007 novel Animal’s People has been called posthuman, an environmental picaro, and the embodiment of systemic dehumanization that belies the premise of global human rights. These readings are in service of a world systems critique that highlights the production of suffering in the poverty-stricken periphery as a result of unchecked corporate offshoring from the core. However, there is less discussion of the ecocritical stakes of Animal’s environmental identity, especially the extensive forest hallucination in the novel’s final pages that contrasts his isolating slum life, an experience that first dismantles and then rebuilds his posthuman persona. This article reads the forest in the context of Indian cultural and political history as a transformative space that forces him to relate to his surroundings in a new way. By examining the environmental relations taking shape in the forest, readers can foresee a new vision of local identity formation, one more equipped to be inclusive of nonhuman co-constituents than commonly accepted modes of either national or global inclusion.
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Conference Presentations by Allison Nowak Shelton
Book Reviews by Allison Nowak Shelton
Drafts by Allison Nowak Shelton