scholarly journals Between the Peechil-kamra and the Dabusa: Mapping Worldbuilding and Heterotopic Space on Board the Ibis in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-45
Author(s):  
Damini Kashyap ◽  
Hemjyoti Medhi

With the steady rise in the exploration of the idea of worldbuilding, studies have extensively researched the production and consumption of fantasy worlds created by animation studios like Disney and Studio Ghibli. However, the idea of worldbuilding remains inadequately studied in the context of South Asian fiction. This paper aims to engage with the thematic ramifications of ideas such as subcreation and worldbuilding by critically examining Sea of Poppies (2008), the first novel in Amitav Ghosh’s “Ibis” trilogy. The prevalent scholarship on this novel has largely romanticised the creation of the ship-community of jahaj-bhais and jahaj-bahens which was forged through the bond of jahaji-nata and have argued how, in the process of subcreating a world for themselves, the characters “transgress the accepted boundaries of race, gender, and caste” and free themselves from the artificial barriers and divisions prevalent on land. However, such a reading privileges the perspective of a few major characters such as Deeti and Paulette, while denying the multiple layers and hierarchies that permeate the physical space of the ship. Taking this as a point of departure, this paper explores through the eyes of a minor character, Jodu, how the dominant utopic narrative of jahaji-nata of Paulette and others may be challenged from within the heterotopic world of the Ibis. By reinforcing the structural inequities of our everyday lives in the subcreated world of the Ibis, Ghosh’s textual imagination constantly subverts the dominant perspective while holding the two worlds in precarious equilibrium.

Author(s):  
Jill Hicks-Keeton

The Introduction claims that the ancient romance Joseph and Aseneth moves a minor character in Genesis from obscurity to renown, weaving a new story whose main purpose was to intervene in ancient Jewish debates surrounding gentile access to Israel’s God. Aseneth’s story is a tale of the heroine’s transformation from exclusion to inclusion. It is simultaneously a transformative tale. For Second Temple-period thinkers, the epic of the Jewish people recounted in scriptural texts was a story that invited interpretation, interruption, and even intervention. Joseph and Aseneth participates in a broader literary phenomenon in Jewish antiquity wherein authors took up figures from Israel’s mythic past and crafted new stories as a means of explaining their own present and of envisioning collective futures. By incorporating a gentile woman and magnifying Aseneth’s role in Jewish history, Joseph and Aseneth changes the story. Aseneth’s ultimate inclusion makes possible the inclusion of others originally excluded.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 178-195
Author(s):  
Oliver Friggieri

The Semitic character of Malta’s language and the Latinity of its culture have both contributed towards the complex formation of a unique country marked by dualities of language and identity. This article seeks to outline the development of Maltese as a medium through which Malta could best express itself and construct its own literature, as Maltese intellectuals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sought to create an alternative to the older Italian and more recent British dominance. The establishment of Maltese as the national language and of a thriving Maltese literature reflects a move away from the use of Maltese Italian as a minor literature to the creation of an “ultraminor” Maltese for an independent country.


1992 ◽  
Vol 2 (10) ◽  
pp. 287-304
Author(s):  
Ian Leigh

The broadcasting world is currently undergoing a revolution. The new technologies of cable and, more importantly, satellite broadcasting have brought within reach an enormous potential expansion and diversity in broadcasting. The Broadcasting Act 1990 is the government's response to the challenge, creating a mostly new regulatory framework. Alongside technological advance there has been a growing concern with regulating programme quality, as the creation of the Broadcasting Standards Commission (placed by Pt. V of the Act on a statutory footing) bears witness. A minor, but not insignificant, place in these cross-currents of ferment is occupied by religious broadcasting. This article seeks to place the controls and duties relating to religious broadcasting under the new regime within the context of its history in the UK and to consider the extent to which the new legal and administrative controls achieve an acceptable balance between religious expression and control of standards.


2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 397-415 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Garmann Johnsen ◽  
Lena Olaison ◽  
Bent Meier Sørensen

This article uses the concept of style to rethink sustainable entrepreneurship. Our point of departure is the conceptual distinction between organization as style made durable and entrepreneurship as the disruption of style. We show that style is not simply an aesthetic category, but rather what ties different social practices together. While organization makes the connections between social practices durable, entrepreneurship disrupts such patterns. We further elucidate how organization and entrepreneurship are two intermingled processes – those of durability and disruption – that together enable the creation of new styles. In order to conceptualize this creative process, we explore how play can create disharmonies within the organization, but we also maintain that any new practice will remain marginal without a collective assemblage capable of adopting it. On this basis, we argue that sustainable entrepreneurship consists of making an environmentally friendly and socially conscious style durable, but also of disrupting such a style. In order to illustrate our argument, we use the example of the sustainable smartphone producer Fairphone. In conclusion, we argue that the concept of style may strengthen the dialogue between entrepreneurship studies and organization studies.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shiv Issar

In this paper, I propose the concept of “algorithmic dissonance”, which characterizes the inconsistencies that emerge through the fissures that lie between algorithmic systems that utilize system identities, and sociocultural systems of knowledge that interact with them. A product of human-algorithm interaction, algorithmic dissonance builds upon the concepts of algorithmic discrimination and algorithmic awareness, offering greater clarity towards the comprehension of these sociotechnical entanglements. By employing Du Bois’ concept of “double consciousness” and black feminist theory, I argue that all algorithmic dissonance is racialized. Next, I advocate for the use of speculative methodologies and art for the creation of critically informative sociotechnical imaginaries that might serve a basis for the sociological critique and resolution of algorithmic dissonance. Algorithmic dissonance can be an effective check against structural inequities, and of interest to scholars and practitioners concerned with running “algorithm audits”.


2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (118) ◽  
pp. 51-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Schwarzbart ◽  
Kristine Samson

Within recent years, art and urbanism have gradually moved closer to each other and come together around socially engaged, dialogical projects. Participation and the creation of urban publics are topics that often concern artists as well as urban planners and activists. Based on a record of this recent conjunction between art and urbanism, the article examines practices, fractures, and conflicts in the aftermath of the social turn. With a point of departure in the coalescing public programme of the Istanbul Biennial and Occupy Gezi at Taksim Square in 2013, the article questions the art of participation. What type of public is created in the participative art? And is an artistic social turn towards the city even possible beyond the art institution? The article concludes that precisely in the conflict between the two different rationales of art and urbanism a participatory, urban public can emerge; a public, however, which lie beyond the intention and rationales of the individual actor.


Author(s):  
Jean Louis Halpérin

Bentham has defended the idea of a general codification as a “map of the law” that could allow the comparison between the laws of different nations. This essay aims to use this relationship about the ideas of codifying the law and mapping the laws to think about the possibility of mapping the history of codification, taking as its point of departure the writing specialized codes - not only the civil codes. Mapping can be a means to deal with the relationships between the countries adopting a code, the opportunity to consider the relationships between the codes and the creation of new States, the national processes of unification, the adoption, the political and social revolutions and ruptures. Also, it will try to make correspondences between these phenomena in order to construct tables that could be represented through future maps.


2021 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Hahn ◽  
Ernest Van Eck

In any research of the biblical themes in Scriptures, the exegete must exercise discipline in strictly adhering to an exegetical process wherein the text is permitted to speak for itself in the context of the passage. This article therefore explored the literary traits and analysed characterisations in the story of the lame man at the pool of Bethesda as portrayed in John 5 through a ‘narratological and exegetical’ approach, considering literary, social, cultural and historical criticism with significant attention given to the text of the author or narrator. It is very important to know the author’s theological viewpoint as seen in the characterisation of an anonymous character in the related gospel narrative, because it may be easily be overlooked due to the lack of attention for a minor character. The author’s theological point of view is revealed in the characterisation of the lame man, the Jewish religious leaders, and of Jesus. Although the lame man himself is generally regarded as one of the ‘minor characters’ who appears in the gospel, the narrative of the lame man’s healing is an important part of John’s Christology and doxology, establishing Jesus as the Son whom God the Father sent to do God’s work not for his own glory, but for the glory of God the Father. An analysis is undertaken of the literary traits and various characterisations evident in the seven scenes of John 5’s account of the healing of the lame man, comparing him with other minor characters in John 4 and 9 who were healed.Contribution: In this article a narratological and exegetical approach is employed to identify the Christological and doxological significances in John 5 by exploring the literary traits of the narrative point of view and character presentation through the theological perspective of the narrator.


1963 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Lipstein

Introduction: TheProblems(1) Whichever is taken as the point of departure, a general principle of liability for injurious acts done intentionally or negligently, or a catalogue of individual protected interests, and whatever the wish to establish criteria of general liability, a comparison between some of the leading systems of the law of the Western World—both civil and common law—shows that it is impossible to get away from the individual situation, irrespective of the force of an existing, or the desire for the creation of, a general principle.


Mnemosyne ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 300-313
Author(s):  
Kathrin Winter
Keyword(s):  
A Minor ◽  

AbstractIn Apocolocyntosis 13 the figure of Narcissus is not a minor character with a solely ornamental function but part of a complex play of echoes, repetitions, and similarities. Exploiting the fact that this particular freedman of Claudius was named Narcissus, Seneca turns the figure into a mirror image of Claudius and uses it to make subtle intertextual allusions. In this way, he destabilises the identities of Claudius and Narcissus to ridicule Claudius even further and expose him as a weak and cruel princeps who is unable to recognise himself.


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