scholarly journals Home as a Site of Resistance: A Study on Agunpakhi by Hasan Azizul Huq

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-280
Author(s):  
Md. Shamim Mondol
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experiences ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Bell Hooks ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Common ◽  
Partition Of India ◽  
A Site

This paper is an attempt to investigate Hasan Azizul Huq’s much awaited novel Agunpakhi to explore the potencies and potentials of home as an empowering site of resistance. The novel commonly studied as a counter narrative on the Partition of India has multilayered implications embedded in it. One such dimension is the exploration of home place by contesting the common ideas to redefine its scopes. Home is normally studied as a sequestered space of deprivation and gendered marginalization. The inhabitants inhibited there by the social apparatuses are simply seized mentally. The consequent ideas built around home as a site showcase it impotence, and imposing character with no productive aspects. But the lived experiences of the inhabitants and their resultant practices if studied out of the box exhibit the excellences of home as a nurturing ground for raising resistances against the oppressors. To concentrate on these empowering aspects of the space, I will draw on bell hooks for her insights on home as a site of resistance. The research will advance the argument that home is a place of care and nurturance in the face of harsh realities facilitating the emergence of voices and subjectivity leading to emancipation from exigencies of marginalization.  

Interplay of Power Relations in Neeharika’s Yogmaya: A Foucauldian Discourse Analysis

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 239-252
Author(s):  
Tirtha Raj Niraula
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Free Translation ◽  
The Face ◽  
And Gender ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Voice

This article aims at exploring how Neelam Karki Niharika‘s Yogmaya presents the complex web of power relations that comprise domination, submission, and resistance. It mainly draw son Michel Foucault‘s idea that power is pervasive, not just oppressive but productive as well. Viewed from the Foucauldian notion of power as a theoretical framework, the study reveals the interplay of dominant and counter discourses in propagating knowledge and truth that are constructed and reconstructed. The novel is treated as a site of struggle where the state power along with the discourses of religion, patriarchy, and gender roles prominently operate so as to suppress the voice of the dissent. Yogmaya, a rural woman of the humble background, continuously resists both verbally and physically against various forms of power in the face of threats. She exercises her power in the same way as those who traditionally believe they possess it. In this connection, the focus lies on the protagonist‘s persistent attempts of resistance through the bold interrogation of the hegemonizing discourses and regimes of truth. As the text under study is written in Nepali, I use transliteration and free translation in order to cite the lines for analysis.

Narrative Politics in Policy Discourse: The Debate Over Safe Injection Sites in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

2021 ◽  
pp. 009145092199382
Author(s):  
Ryan J. Lofaro ◽  
Hugh T. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Harm Reduction ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
People Who Use Drugs ◽  
Opioid Overdose ◽  
Policy Proposal ◽  
The Social ◽  
Narrative Politics ◽  
The Face ◽  
Safe Injection ◽  
A Site

Safe injection sites are spaces where people who inject drugs can do so under the supervision of staff at the sites who attempt to revive them if they overdose. Public officials in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, have proposed the sites as a means to reduce opioid overdose deaths in the city, a policy proposal that has been politically and legally contested. This article uses the Narrative Politics model to elucidate the concerns, values, and aspirations of the competing narratives in the public discourse over safe injection sites in Philadelphia. Despite the aspirations expressed within the Harm Reduction narrative to open such a site, opposition from the Nimby (not in my backyard) narrative has, at the time of this research, successfully precluded such a step. Other narratives in the discourse include the Abstinence narrative opposing safe injection sites and the Social Justice narrative opposed to incarceration but also hesitant to wholeheartedly endorse the Harm Reduction narrative for its delayed advocacy of compassionate treatment of people who use drugs now that the face of the person who uses opioids is a white one. In addition to juxtaposing competing narratives against one another and considering their alignments, disagreements, and interactions, the authors consider absences and shared presuppositions. The social construction of the purported drug addict varies in some ways between and among the prevailing narratives; in other ways, all the narratives problematize “addiction” as an affliction that justifies techniques of discipline aimed at caring for and controlling the population.

scholarly journals Of lice and men: Charles Darwin, Henry Denny and the evidence for the human races as varieties or species

BJHS Themes ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Gregory Radick ◽  
Mark Steadman
Keyword(s):  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Distinct Species ◽  
Social World ◽  
Long Run ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
Scientific Collections ◽  
Descent Of Man

Abstract Charles Darwin never doubted the common ancestry of the human races. But he was open-minded about whether the races might nevertheless be so different from each other that they ought to be classified not as varieties of one species but as distinct species. He pondered this varieties-or-species question on and off for decades, from his time aboard the Beagle through to the publication of the Descent of Man. A constant throughout was his concern with something that he first learned on the Beagle voyage and that, on the face of it, seemed to favour the species ranking: the different races, he was told, play host to distinct species of lice. This paper reconstructs the long run of Darwin's reflections and interactions on race, lice and history, using his extended correspondence with Henry Denny – curator of the scientific collections of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, and Britain's leading expert in the natural history of lice – as a window onto the social world whose imprint is everywhere in the pages of the Descent.

Supermarket Sociology

Site Reading ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 25-48
Author(s):  
David J. Alworth
Keyword(s):  
Don Delillo ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Social ◽  
Deep Significance ◽  
A Site ◽  
Nonhuman Agency ◽  
Point Of Departure

Taking Latour's engagement with the literary as a point of departure, this chapter offers a new model for thinking between the disciplines of literary studies and sociology. At the crux of this model is a site, the supermarket, that dramatizes nonhuman agency as a mundane yet complex fact of social experience—a fact that Latour theorizes throughout his writings and that a host of literary authors, above all Don DeLillo, have sought to explore in different ways. It offers a reading of the novel in terms of Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) and demonstrates how a site that is crucial to both the novelist and the sociologist can facilitate a new interdisciplinary conversation, a mode of inquiry that would divert from a more traditional sociology of literature whose objective would be to identify the deep significance of literary form in the social forces that subtend aesthetic production.

Hegemony Unbound: Tradition Gone Awry as the Female Body Mimics a Site of Colonization and Decolonization in Alice Walker’s “Possessing the Secret of Joy”

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (10) ◽  
pp. 17
Author(s):  
Dr. Samuel Obed Doku
Keyword(s):  
William Faulkner ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Carl Jung ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Bell Hooks ◽  
Genital Mutilation ◽  
Repressed Memories ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
A Site ◽  
American Authors

Alice Walker’s novel, Possessing the Secret of Joy shares some similarities with many texts written by black Americans, but it is uniquely different because its settings include an African village where the story begins. The novel is rich in intertextuality as it engages other great American authors like W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, feminist bell hooks; and Austrian psychoanalytical theorist, Carl Jung. Beside its psychoanalytical framework and story-telling pattern with multiple narrators, Possessing the Secret of Joy is also grounded in Louis Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) and Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs) theories, as well as in Antonio Gramsci’s hegemony theory.1 These theories exemplify themselves in the way the protagonist in the novel is convinced to succumb to genital mutilation and how a journey into herself to remember long-repressed memories, eventually results in her ability to liberate women of her village. Possessing the Secret of Joy is a modernist novel in which hegemony, patriarchy, and feminism converge to expose an obnoxious practice in an African village in expectations of dismantling the antiquated tradition that informs the novel.  

scholarly journals Re-framing the prostitute identity in Zimbabwe: An approach to Virginia Phiri’s novel Highway queen (2010)

Literator ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver Nyambi
Keyword(s):  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
Female Sex ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Face ◽  
Cultural Texts ◽  
Work Affect ◽  
Female Sex Work

In Zimbabwe, as in most traditionally conservative, patriarchal and Christian dominated countries, female sex work is abhorred on moral grounds as an unbecoming means of livelihood which takes away the practising woman’s social respectability. In such societies, then, the moral threat and stigma associated with female sex work affect women’s decisions on whether or not to take up sex work as a permanent means of livelihood. One can, however, ask how sustainable and stable these patriarchally constructed notions of morality and female identity are, especially in the face of crises? This article uses Virginia Phiri’s novel Highway queen, which is set in one of Zimbabwe’s economically tumultuous eras, to demonstrate how cultural texts grapple with the discourse of female sex work in contemporary Zimbabwe. The gist of my argument is that dominant prostitute identity constructs shaped by Zimbabwe’s patriarchal social and economic system are unstable. I find that the novel Highway queen manipulates such instability not only to re-inscribe sex work as a product of patriarchal impairment of female agency but, perhaps more importantly, to reflect on how women who are forced by circumstances to become sex workers can rise above their passive victimhood to achieve personal goals despite the social odds charted by patriarchy. Zooming in on the representation of the daily experiences of the female sex worker and protagonist, Sophie, the article explores the various ways in which the novel deconstructs stereotypical perceptions of female sex work and sex workers. The analysis ends with the argument that, whilst Sophie’s situation is fundamentally tragic, it affectively appeals to our sense of morality in a way which destabilises dominant (patriarchal) constructs of sex work.

scholarly journals Revisiting Gandhian Philosophy: A Critical Study of R K Narayan’s Waiting for the Mahatma

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 34-45
Author(s):  
Sheikh Mehedi Hasan ◽  
Benazir Elahee Munni
Keyword(s):  
Critical Study ◽  
Political Leader ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Common People ◽  
Independence Movement ◽  
The Common ◽  
Partition Of India ◽  
Political Turmoil ◽  
Considerable Detail

R K Narayan’s novel Waiting for the Mahatma covers in considerable detail the years of political turmoil preceding the Partition of India, taking Mahatma Gandhi as one of its leading characters. The article attempts to analyse how the novel illustrates the role of Gandhi as a political leader and philosophical guide and the influence of his ideology and philosophy on other characters during the Indian independence movement. First, it pinpoints Gandhi’s philosophical thoughts as documented in his own writings and activities and then points out how those are integrated into the novel. The article also investigates the attitudes of Gandhi’s followers (as the characters of the novel) as well as those of the common people towards his thoughts and activities. Thus, the study aims to offer a textual analysis of the novel by revisiting Gandhian philosophy focusing, especially, on values of ahimsa, Satyagraha and non-violent resistance.

scholarly journals Patrimonial Reflections

Ethnologies ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 36 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 107-128
Author(s):  
Valdimar Tr. Hafstein
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
The Body ◽  
Moral Good ◽  
Intangible Heritage ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Face ◽  
A Site ◽  
Heritage Policy

The author of this paper argues that the rise of cultural heritage is perhaps the chief example of a newfound valuation of cultural practices and objects in terms of their expediency for economic and political purposes. This is culture as a resource: a novel configuration in which culture is now a central expedient in everything from creating jobs to reducing crime, from changing the face of cities through cultural tourism to managing differences and conflicts within the population. In this context, heritage provides a strong but flexible language for staking claims to culture and making claims based on culture. He suggests that the 2003Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritagesignals a reformation of global heritage policy. Where earlier UNESCO efforts were content to document and archive expressions of folklore and traditional culture, its intangible heritage initiatives aim to assure the transmission and continuity of traditional practicesin situ. This requires direct intervention in the communities involved. UNESCO enlists intangible heritage as an instrument for safeguarding community, a social and moral good perceived to be threatened by globalization. Intangible heritage has emerged as an instrument in the production of a strong (but not exclusive) sense of belonging for members of cultural communities within (and sometimes across) states. Population groups objectify their practices and expressions as “intangible heritage” and at the same time they subjectify themselves as “communities”. Government can then act on the social field through communities and by means of, among other things, heritage policies. The author also points out that many heritage practices take the body as their central objects – they turn the body into a site of performance. Indeed, intangible heritage is very much about the ways in which culture is embodied and the ways in which bodies are cultured.

Analytical Study of Violence Theme in Victoria Schwab’s This Savage Song

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Analytical Study ◽  
Research Paper ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Vicious Cycle ◽  
Aggressive Approach ◽  
Research Article ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
Different Dimensions ◽  
The Right

This research article focuses on the theme of violence and its representation by the characters of the novel “This Savage Song” by Victoria Schwab. How violence is transmitted through genes to next generations and to what extent socio- psycho factors are involved in it, has also been discussed. Similarly, in what manner violent events and deeds by the parents affect the psychology of children and how it inculcates aggressive behaviour in their minds has been studied. What role is played by the parents in grooming the personality of children and ultimately their decisions to choose the right or wrong way has been argued. In the light of the theory of Judith Harris, this research paper highlights all the phenomena involved: How the social hierarchy controls the behaviour. In addition, the aggressive approach of the people in their lives has been analyzed in the light of the study of second theorist Thomas W Blume. As the novel is a unique representation of supernatural characters, the monsters, which are the products of some cruel deeds, this research paper brings out different dimensions of human sufferings with respect to these supernatural beings. Moreover, the researcher also discusses that, in what manner the curse of violence creates an inevitable vicious cycle of cruel monsters that makes the life of the characters turbulent and miserable.

Beckett's Watt and Monastic Tradition

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-109
Author(s):  
Kristen Marangoni
Keyword(s):  
Boarding School ◽  
Illuminated Manuscripts ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Geometric Shapes ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Book Of Kells ◽  
The Face ◽  
Choral Arrangements ◽  
Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts

The enigmatic setting of Beckett's novel Watt has been compared to places as diverse as an insane asylum, a boarding school, a womb, and a concentration camp. Watt's experience at Knott's house does seem suggestive of all of these, and yet it may more readily conform to the setting of a monastery. The novel is filled with chants, meditations, choral arrangements, hierarchical classifications, and even silence, all highly evocative of a monastic lifestyle. Some of Watt's dialogue (such as his requests for forgiveness or reflections on the nature of mankind) further echoes various Catholic liturgies. Watt finds little solace in these activities, however. He feels that they are largely rote and purposeless as they are focused on Knott, a figure who in many ways defies linguistic description and physical know-ability. Watt's meditations and rituals become, then, empty catechisms without answers, something that is reflected in the extreme difficulty that Watt has communicating. In the face of linguistic and liturgical instability, the Watt notebooks present a counter reading that can be found in the thousand plus doodles that line its pages. The drawings reinforce as well as subvert their textual counterpart, and they function in many ways as the images in medieval illuminated manuscripts. The doodles in Watt often take the form of decorative letters, elaborate marginal drawings, and depictions of a variety of people and animals, and many of its doodles offer uncanny resemblances in form or theme to those in illuminated manuscripts like The Book of Kells. Doodles of saints, monks, crosses, and scribes even give an occasional pictorial nod to the monastic setting in which illuminated manuscripts were usually produced (and remind us of the monastic conditions in which Beckett found himself writing much of Watt). Beckett's doodles not only channel this medium of illuminated manuscripts, they also modernize its application. Instead of neat geometric shapes extending down the page, his geometric doodle sequences are often abstracted, fragmented, and nonlinear. Beckett also occasionally modernized the content of illuminated manuscripts: instead of the traditional sacramental communion table filled with candles, bread and wine, Beckett doodles a science lab table where Bunsen burners replaces candles and wine glasses function as beakers. It is through these modernized images that Watt attempts to draw contemporary relevance from a classic art form and to restore (at least partial) meaning to rote traditions.

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