scholarly journals Speak Like You Were Dead: Episteme of the Ghosted in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-112
Author(s):  
Sharmila Mukherjee Mukherjee

Aravind Adiga’s 2008 Man Booker Prize-winning novel, The White Tiger has been hailed as a paradigmatic narrative of postcolonial wealth-formation in the 21st century, and as a novel that speaks to the “shining” India of globalization in its transformative moment of an emergent centrality on the global stage. I argue that The White Tiger, by using counter-intuitive epistemes, is also a transnational novel whose primary motive is to offer a trenchant critique of global neoliberalism, and its underlying epistemes of violence and inequality. Through the voice of its protagonist Balram Halwai, the novel, I claim, projects the 21st century postcolonial nation of India as Capital’s colony—a thriving and free “market”, if you will—whose well-being, in turn, is predicated on the phagocytizing of the human capital of the other India that is hidden from the gazes of those who admiringly gawk at “shining” India of Capital.

Metahumaniora ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 411
Author(s):  
Abu Bakar Ramadhan Muhamad

AbstrakHegemoni kolonialisme dalam budaya poskolonial merupakan alasan penelitian inikemudian mengkaji wacana kolonial dalam novel Max Havellar (MH) khususnya dampakditimbulkannya. Dampak dimaksud adalah posisi keberpihakan pemikiran tersirat darikarya tersebut. Hasil pembahasan menunjukkan, secara temporal maupun permanen MHmenyuarakan ketidakadilan dalam kondisi-kondisi kolonial menyangkut penindasan sangpenjajah terhadap terjajah. Hanya saja, upaya mengatasnamakan atau mewakili suarakaum terjajah terbukti mengimplikasikan ciri ideologis statis kerangka kolonialisme(orientalisme); yakni cara pandang Eropasentris, di mana “Barat” sebagai self adalah superior,dan “Timur” sebagai other adalah inferior. Dalam konteks poskolonialisme, MH dengan sifatkritisnya yang berupaya “menyuarakan” nasib pribumi terjajah, justru menampilkan stigmapenguatan kolonialitas itu sendiri secara hegemonik. Artinya, “menyuarakan” nasib pribumidimaknai sebagai keberpihankan kolonial yang kontradiktif, di mana stigma penguatankolonialitas justru lebih terasa, ujung-ujungnya melanggengkan hegemoni kolonial. Tidakmembela yang terjajah, tetapi memperhalus cara kerja mesin kolonial.AbstractThe hegemony of colonialism in the culture of postcolonial society is the reason this studythen examines the colonial discourse in the novel Max Havellar (MH) in particular the impactit brings. The impact in question is the implied position of thought in the work. The resultsof the discussion show that, temporarily or permanently, MH voiced injustice in the colonialconditions regarding the oppression of the colonist against the colonized. However, the effort toname or represent the voice of the colonized has proven to imply a static ideological characterin the framework of colonialism (orientalism); ie Eropacentric point of view, in which “West” asself is superior, and “East” as the other is the inferior. In the context of postcolonialism, MH withits critical nature that seeks to “voice” the fate of the colonized natives, actually presents thestigma of strengthening coloniality itself hegemonicly. That is, “voicing” the fate of the pribumiis interpreted as a contradictory colonial flare, where the stigma of strengthening colonialityis more pronounced, which ultimately perpetuates the hegemony of colonialism. No longerdefending the colonized, but refining the workings of the colonial machinery.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Druckman ◽  
Samara Klar ◽  
Yanna Krupnikov ◽  
Matthew Levendusky ◽  
John B. Ryan

Affective polarization is a defining feature of 21st century American politics—partisans harbor considerable dislike and distrust of those from the other party. Does this animus have consequences for citizens’ opinions? Such effects would highlight not only the consequences of polarization, but also shed new light onto how citizens form preferences more generally. Normally, this question is intractable, but the outbreak of the novel coronavirus allows us to answer it. We find that affective polarization powerfully shapes citizens’ attitudes about the pandemic, as well as the actions they have taken in response to it. However, these effects are conditional on the local severity of the outbreak, as the effects decline in areas with high caseloads—threat vitiates partisan reasoning. Our results clarify that closing the divide on important issues requires not just policy discourse but also attempts to reduce inter-partisan hostility.


Author(s):  
Louise Selanders ◽  
Patrick Crane

Modern nursing is complex, ever changing, and multi focused. Since the time of Florence Nightingale, however, the goal of nursing has remained unchanged, namely to provide a safe and caring environment that promotes patient health and well being. Effective use of an interpersonal tool, such as advocacy, enhances the care-giving environment. Nightingale used advocacy early and often in the development of modern nursing. By reading her many letters and publications that have survived, it is possible to identify her professional goals and techniques. Specifically, Nightingale valued egalitarian human rights and developed leadership principles and practices that provide useful advocacy techniques for nurses practicing in the 21st century. In this article we will review the accomplishments of Florence Nightingale, discuss advocacy in nursing and show how Nightingale used advocacy through promoting both egalitarian human rights and leadership activities. We will conclude by exploring how Nightingale’s advocacy is as relevant for the 21st century as it was for the 19th century.


1992 ◽  
Vol 8 (29) ◽  
pp. 48-58
Author(s):  
Paul Allain

Appropriately, this feature on the Polish theatre group Gardzienice is something of a cultural mix, in which the impressions of an English visitor may be contrasted with the voice of a Polish admirer – and the beliefs of the group itself, expressed in the words of its director, Wlodzimierz Staniewski. In the winter of 1989–90, Paul Allain, a graduate student at Goldsmiths' College, University of London, visited the company at its ‘headquarters’ – which is also, in effect, the small and remote Polish village from which Gardzienice takes its name. This was at a time when the new. Solidarity-led government had yet to be fully felt. Here, Allain describes the training methods and disciplines of the company which, within the context of its physical environment, have come to constitute a lifestyle as much as an approach to theatre. Janusz Majcherek writes rather of the significance of Gardzienice in relation to the ancient and fundamental need for a homeland – a need which, in Staniewski's writings, is related to the company's own hopes and plans. All this material was in our hands well before the upsurge in nationalist feeling which has succeeded the political changes in eastern Europe: and it may be felt to reflect ironically upon alternative ways of ‘returning home’ – on the one hand through the actuality or threat of civil war and the struggle for an elusive slice of the ‘free market’, on the other in that quest for a lost history and inheritance, for healing connections with one's environment, which is reflected theatrically in the work of Gardzienice.


1990 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 369-386 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wayne Fields

The world of Tom Sawyer, both that of the character and of the novel which bears his name, is a world dominated by fences; the neat, straight palings that surround the Widow Dougla's property, the fence around the Teacher house over which the lovestick Tom gazes longingly after Becky, and all the other upright boundaries delineating St. Petersburg respectability. As the central icon of the novel, Aunt Polly's white-washed fence appropriately represents the care and maintenance of order to which the town is committed, an order upon which both Tom and his story depend. Although Twain first identifies St. Petersburg as a poor, shabby, frontier village, it is far from defenseless in its confrontations either with shabbiness or wilderness. Well ordered by its fences and undergirded, like Tom's story, by the central institutions of civil and cultural order — the court, the school, the church — it is a society where things have been assigned their proper places and where the primary function of the St. Petersburg elect is to tend those places. This is a world overseen by guardians and Sunday superintendents, schoolmastes, and judges, authorities who, if sometimes mistaken, or even slightly absurd, are essentially benign and nearly always reliable. Thus it is that the minister, praying for the community's children, does so in the context of a hierarchy of responsibility that from country officials to the President of the United States, an ordering presence that, among other reassuring work, is to guarantee the well-being of the young. As though to provide the fullest representation of this benevolent system, Missouri's most important senator, Thomas Hart Benton, makes a cameo appearance in the novel, albeit one in which he is judged of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer as a book about boyish freedom, it affirms at every turn an order of the most conventional sort and depends upon that order for the version of boyhood it depicts.


2016 ◽  
Vol 55 (1-2) ◽  
Author(s):  
János Weiss

In the drama titled Az Olaszliszkai the author sums up the essence of our contemporary situation in a Shakespearean paraphrase: “The country stinks”. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a minor character utters one of the key sentences: ”Something is rotten in the state of Denmark”. Considering the consequences of “rottenness”, we can also speak of stinking. But now, not “something” stinks, the country itself has a stench – the country is Hungary at the beginning of the 21st century. Szilárd Borbély searched for the possible literary presentation of this stinking country. But what makes a country stink? That is, what can the metaphor of “stinking” hint at? Reading the novel, Nincstelenek [The Dispossessed], we tend to think that the country stinks of poverty. However, we have only shifted the question: what exactly does “human deepness” mean? How can we define its centre or rather its core? If I had to answer this question, I would point out violence first of all. The dispossessed – the poor, the small and the other – are the ones being targeted and ill-treated. The country stinks of their suffering. In this sense, “dispossession” generally features the world of the dramas, and the present paper discusses Az Olaszliszkai in this context.


2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 43-55
Author(s):  
Elaine P. Miller

Kristeva's Teresa My Love concerns the life and thought of a 16th century Spanish mystic, written in the form of a novel.  Yet the theme of another kind of foreigner, equally exotic but this time threatening, pops up unexpectedly and disappears several times during the course of the novel.  At the very beginning of the story, the 21st century narrator, psychoanalyst Sylvia Leclerque, encounters a young woman in a headscarf, whom Kristeva describes as an IT engineer, who speaks out, explaining that "she and her God were one and that the veil was the immovable sign of this 'union,' which she wished to publicize in order to definitively 'fix it' in herself and in the eyes of others." In this paper I ask what difference Kristeva discerns between these two women, a distinction that apparently makes Teresa's immanence simultaneously a transcendence, but transforms a Muslim woman in a headscarf immediately into an imagined suicide bomber.  Despite the problematic aspects of this comparison, we can learn something from them about Kristeva's ideas on mysticism and on art.  Both mysticism and art are products of the death drive, but whereas the suicide bomber and the animal directly and purely pursue death (again, on Kristeva's view) Teresa and Adel remain on its outer edge and merely play with mortality.  


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 2212
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Herman ◽  
Leon Ciechanowski ◽  
Aleksandra Przegalińska

In this experiment, we operated within the novel research area of Informal Green Spaces (often called green wastelands), exploring emotional well-being with the employment of portable electroencephalography (EEG) devices. The apparatus (commercial EEG Muse headband) provided an opportunity to analyze states of calmness and alertness in n = 20 participants as they visited selected Informal Green Spaces in Warsaw, Poland. The article aims to test the hypothesis that passive recreation in Informal Green Spaces (IGSs) has a positive impact on emotional well-being and that there is a connection between the intensity of states of calmness and alertness and 1. the type of green space (IGS/GS), 2. the type of scenery and 3. the type of IGS. The preliminary experiment showed that there might be no substantial distinction in the users’ levels of emotional states when considering existing typologies. On the other hand, data-driven analysis suggests that there might be a connection between the state of alertness and some characteristics of specific areas. After carrying out the multivariate analyses of variance in the repeated measurement scheme and finding significant differences between oscillations in different areas, we conclude that there might be three possible sources of lower alertness and increased calmness in some areas. These are 1. the presence of “desirable” human intervention such as paths and urban furniture, 2. a lack of “undesirable” users and signs of their presence and 3. the presence of other “desirable” users.


Author(s):  
Olena Haleta

The study examines the ‘unwritten novel’ “On the Other Bank” by Bohdan Ihor Antonych, a notable Western Ukrainian writer of the interwar period. Known primarily for his poetry, Antonych did not finish this novel-in-progress, leaving behind only draft notes, which offer a glimpse into the very process of his writing. Analyzed from the perspective of genetic criticism, Antonych’s manuscripts are treated as an avant-text, demonstrating a ‘scenario of writing’ in the transition from the novel of action to the novel of state. In contrast to his image-based poetry, Antonych’s prose is based on the technique of description. Depicting nature or the urban environment, the author conveys a certain emotional and psychological condition; and paying special attention to qualitative adjectives, he appeals to the sensory experience of the reader. Despite the fact that the plan of the novel indicates the main events of the plot, the author mainly captures the emotions of the characters. Dialogues also play an unusual role in the text as their function is an expressive rather than a communicative one. Since the dynamics of the text are based on emotional and psychological movement, and not on the succession of events or judgments, it is considered to be an example of affective poetics in Ukrainian modern literature. The affect appears in Antonych’s text as a force and tension. It shapes the human personality and at the same time challenges it. The affect goes beyond discursiveness and captures the body while its intensity is expressed through the voice and speed. Antonych’s characters share a common transpersonal experience in their childhood and a common object of desire after becoming adults. Moreover, the transfer of emotions into the sphere of interpersonal relations gives to the affect not only a psychological but also an ethical dimension. The researcher analyzes Antonych’s manuscript focusing on the dynamics of writing and not on the dynamics of the plot, and this approach gives reason for the conclusion about the affective nature of Antonych’s prose. It is evident that in the ‘unwritten novel’ “On the Other Bank” Antonych depicts the modernist type of literary character as ‘homo sentiens’, who perceives the world in a subtle way and experiences it deeply.


Metahumaniora ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 411
Author(s):  
Abu Bakar Ramadhan Muhamad

AbstrakHegemoni kolonialisme dalam budaya poskolonial merupakan alasan penelitian inikemudian mengkaji wacana kolonial dalam novel Max Havellar (MH) khususnya dampakditimbulkannya. Dampak dimaksud adalah posisi keberpihakan pemikiran tersirat darikarya tersebut. Hasil pembahasan menunjukkan, secara temporal maupun permanen MHmenyuarakan ketidakadilan dalam kondisi-kondisi kolonial menyangkut penindasan sangpenjajah terhadap terjajah. Hanya saja, upaya mengatasnamakan atau mewakili suarakaum terjajah terbukti mengimplikasikan ciri ideologis statis kerangka kolonialisme(orientalisme); yakni cara pandang Eropasentris, di mana “Barat” sebagai self adalah superior,dan “Timur” sebagai other adalah inferior. Dalam konteks poskolonialisme, MH dengan sifatkritisnya yang berupaya “menyuarakan” nasib pribumi terjajah, justru menampilkan stigmapenguatan kolonialitas itu sendiri secara hegemonik. Artinya, “menyuarakan” nasib pribumidimaknai sebagai keberpihankan kolonial yang kontradiktif, di mana stigma penguatankolonialitas justru lebih terasa, ujung-ujungnya melanggengkan hegemoni kolonial. Tidakmembela yang terjajah, tetapi memperhalus cara kerja mesin kolonial.AbstractThe hegemony of colonialism in the culture of postcolonial society is the reason this studythen examines the colonial discourse in the novel Max Havellar (MH) in particular the impactit brings. The impact in question is the implied position of thought in the work. The resultsof the discussion show that, temporarily or permanently, MH voiced injustice in the colonialconditions regarding the oppression of the colonist against the colonized. However, the effort toname or represent the voice of the colonized has proven to imply a static ideological characterin the framework of colonialism (orientalism); ie Eropacentric point of view, in which “West” asself is superior, and “East” as the other is the inferior. In the context of postcolonialism, MH withits critical nature that seeks to “voice” the fate of the colonized natives, actually presents thestigma of strengthening coloniality itself hegemonicly. That is, “voicing” the fate of the pribumiis interpreted as a contradictory colonial flare, where the stigma of strengthening colonialityis more pronounced, which ultimately perpetuates the hegemony of colonialism. No longerdefending the colonized, but refining the workings of the colonial machinery.


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