Aesthetics and Politics of Poetry written in Tribal Languages of Kerala

Poems written in Tribal languages are a notable presence in contemporary Malayalam poetry. As there is no script for those endangered tribal languages, they are written in Malayalam script. They are being translated into Malayalam. These poems become a declaration of the aboriginal community and of the aesthetics that obscure mainstream aesthetic concept. Tribal communities in Kerala lives in the forest areas of Idukki, Wayanad, Palakkad, Kasaragod, Trissur, Cochin, Trivandrum and Kollam districts. These marginalized people are facing a crisis of survival. The neglect of the main stream society and the Government and the destruction of the habitat have made their lives miserable. Indigenous tribal languages are endangered. It is in this context that the new generation of educated Adivasis seek to document their survival problem through poetry in the tribal language itself. Poems are written in tribal languages such as Irula, Rawla, Malavettuva, Paniya, Mavila and Muthuvan appearing in social media and in print and book form, they symbolize a different sensibility. The aim of this paper is to findout the political attitudes, aesthetic concepts and features of languages of the aboriginal community by studying these poems.

After Scotland's literary "Golden Age": Locating Agnes Owens

<p>Celebrations of Scottish literature in the last decades of the twentieth century have neglected one of Scotland’s most important writers: Agnes Owens. Owens’ work and its influence is far more complex, and far greater in reach, than most accounts acknowledge. Her significance is no secret: Alasdair Gray and James Kelman have championed her work; Glasgow University’s Douglas Gifford has said that Owens “can claim to have done more than most in the redefinition of women in fiction.” This paper aims to lay the groundwork from which meaningful criticism of Agnes Owens can be realised in the 21st Century. Taking cue from Walter Benjamin’s “The Author as Producer”, particularly his argument that “the tendency of a work of literature can be politically correct only if it is also correct in the literary sense”, I argue that the aesthetics and politics of Owens’ work deconstruct and redefine traditional models of working-class literature and representation. The first chapter analyses her first collection of short stories, Gentlemen of the West and its sequel novella, Like Birds in the Wilderness. I challenge the way these texts have been read as realist working-class fiction through a careful examination of her short stories and novellas, offering an alternative framework through which they can be read. Gentlemen subverts notions of societal “initiation” in working-class fiction, with Mac’s attempt to escape his community being undone by the conclusion of Birds. The second chapter is a study of three of her short stories, attending to her minimalist illustrations of the socially condemned, and her confronting exposition of the readers’ gaze. Finally, this thesis discusses the gendered landscape of her novel, A Working Mother. Using Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady as an organising text, I argue that Owens’ treatment of gender relations challenge literary notions of female “hysteria” and madness. Taken as a whole, this thesis addresses Owens’ absence, attempting to locate her work within Scottish literary criticism. It is offered as a way forward for the study of her work in years to come.</p>

After Scotland's literary "Golden Age": Locating Agnes Owens

<p>Celebrations of Scottish literature in the last decades of the twentieth century have neglected one of Scotland’s most important writers: Agnes Owens. Owens’ work and its influence is far more complex, and far greater in reach, than most accounts acknowledge. Her significance is no secret: Alasdair Gray and James Kelman have championed her work; Glasgow University’s Douglas Gifford has said that Owens “can claim to have done more than most in the redefinition of women in fiction.” This paper aims to lay the groundwork from which meaningful criticism of Agnes Owens can be realised in the 21st Century. Taking cue from Walter Benjamin’s “The Author as Producer”, particularly his argument that “the tendency of a work of literature can be politically correct only if it is also correct in the literary sense”, I argue that the aesthetics and politics of Owens’ work deconstruct and redefine traditional models of working-class literature and representation. The first chapter analyses her first collection of short stories, Gentlemen of the West and its sequel novella, Like Birds in the Wilderness. I challenge the way these texts have been read as realist working-class fiction through a careful examination of her short stories and novellas, offering an alternative framework through which they can be read. Gentlemen subverts notions of societal “initiation” in working-class fiction, with Mac’s attempt to escape his community being undone by the conclusion of Birds. The second chapter is a study of three of her short stories, attending to her minimalist illustrations of the socially condemned, and her confronting exposition of the readers’ gaze. Finally, this thesis discusses the gendered landscape of her novel, A Working Mother. Using Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady as an organising text, I argue that Owens’ treatment of gender relations challenge literary notions of female “hysteria” and madness. Taken as a whole, this thesis addresses Owens’ absence, attempting to locate her work within Scottish literary criticism. It is offered as a way forward for the study of her work in years to come.</p>

Uma prosa através: “Minha classe gosta / Logo, é uma bosta.”, um nuvô romã de Paulo Leminski / A word about: “My class likes/So, it’s a crap.”, a nouveau roman by Paulo Leminski

Resumo: No início dos anos 1980, surgiu em Curitiba uma revista que teria vida curta e que veicularia, em três de suas primeiras edições, novela inédita e incompleta de Paulo Leminski. “Minha classe gosta/Logo, é uma bosta.” não figura em nenhum dos livros de Leminski; ficou, assim, circunscrita àqueles três números da Raposa magazine – revista de cultura que, desde a capa, prometia vincular “humor e rumor”. O clima contracultural da Curitiba – e do Brasil – dos anos 1980 se vê refletido não só na idealização da revista, como também de maneira especial na novela leminskiana, que opera uma releitura da década anterior sem obliterar as questões políticas que estavam no centro das discussões. Com vistas a alinhar as questões éticas levantadas pela narrativa em pauta ao apuro estético de um poeta muito atento às revoluções formais do século XX, esta análise se acerca do texto de Leminski municiada das considerações de Theodor Adorno (1982; 2003) sobre a importância da forma como conteúdo sedimentado – que medeia e incorpora a barbárie do mundo –, com apoio nas leituras feitas por Jaime Ginzburg (2012) e Verlaine Freitas (2008); além disso, ensaios de Roberto Schwarz (1978), Carlos Alberto Messeder Pereira (1993), Elio Gaspari (2000; 2014) e Bernardo Kucinski (2001) ajudarão a compor o cenário histórico brasileiro dos anos 1960 aos 1980.Palavras-chave: Paulo Leminski; “Minha classe gosta/Logo, é uma bosta.”; Theodor Adorno; estética e política.Abstract: In the early 1980s, there appeared in Curitiba a magazine which would have a short life and would bring, in three of its first editions, an unpublished and incomplete novel by Paulo Leminski. “My class likes/So, it’s a crap.” is not in any of Leminski’s books; it was limited to those three issues of Raposa magazine – a culture magazine that, from its cover, promised to link “humor and rumor”. The counter-cultural climate of Curitiba – and of Brazil – in the 1980s is reflected not only in the magazine’s idealization, but also, in a special way, in the Leminskian narrative, which does a rereading of the previous decade without obliterating the political issues that were at the center of the discussions. In order to align the ethical issues raised by the narrative with the aesthetic accuracy of a poet who was very attentive to the formal revolutions of the 20th century, this analysis approaches Leminski’s text, armed with Theodor Adorno’s considerations (1982; 2003) about the importance of form as a sedimented content – which mediates and incorporates the barbarity of the world – and also with the support of by Jaime Ginzburg’s (2012) and Verlaine Freitas’s readings (2008). In addition, essays by Roberto Schwarz (1978), Carlos Alberto Messeder Pereira (1993), Elio Gaspari (2000; 2014) and Bernardo Kucinski (2001) will help to set the Brazilian historical scenario from the 1960s to the 1980s.Keywords: Paulo Leminski; “My class likes/So, it’s a crap.”; Theodor Adorno; aesthetics and politics.

‘Burn the Witch’: Decadence and the Occult in Contemporary Feminist Performance

This article introduces and theorizes ‘decadence’ as a key feature of Lauren Barri Holstein's performance Notorious (2017). The decadence of Holstein's work is approached in light of two main considerations: the spectacular presentation of witchcraft as an occult practice, and what Holstein ‘does’ with the staging of witches and witchcraft. Situated in light of performances associated with the neo-occult revival (Ivy Monteiro and Jex Blackmore), and a recent strand of feminist performance that revels in an aesthetics of trash, mess and excess (Ann Liv Young and Lucy McCormick), the article offers a close critical analysis of Notorious as a work that addresses and seeks to subvert gendered inequalities and forms of productivity in twenty-first-century capitalism. I argue that Holstein's overidentification with exertion and exhaustion as much as the subversive potentialities of witchcraft results in a decadent aesthetic, that her staging of the witch as a persecuted but powerful emblem of the occult sheds valuable light on the aesthetics and politics of decadence in performance, and that the subversive qualities of decadence emerge particularly strongly in its ‘doing’ as an embodied and enacted practice.

The Aesthetics and Politics of the Abstract Line in Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability

When Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability, a graphic biography of the life of B. R. Ambedkar, was first published in 2011, it was welcomed as an enunciation of Dalit identity and as a uniquely Indian counterpart to the Western sequential art of comics in its use of Pardhan Gond artistic practices. My argument for moving beyond the twin poles of ‘Dalit identity’ and ‘tribal art’ is threefold. First, a close reading of Bhimayana reveals that the narrative emphasis is not so much on caste as identity as it is a critique of the processes involved in that very identity. Second, the visual style of Bhimayana does not merely mirror the political concerns of the text; the images are an aesthetic response to the ‘problem’ of identity as enunciated in the linear narrative. Third, in order to identify how exactly the images form such a response, we need to arm ourselves with an alternative methodology. The question is therefore how to read, how to look—what is the ideal spectatorial position for the pages of Bhimayana such that it critically intersects with the question of identity? The analysis of the visual object at a ‘subrepresentative’ realm, therefore, becomes the key to breaking out of old habits of looking at the image as a site of representation towards the possibility that the politics of image-making lies instead in its aesthetic intensities.

Playing to the West only? Representations of Picasso, the gendered body and Islamism in Kamel Daoud’s Le peintre dévorant la femme

This research explores Algerian writer Kamel Daoud’s 2018 non-fictional text, Le peintre dévorant la femme. The text addresses questions relating to religious extremism, the meaning of art, death and eroticism, and the relationship between l’Occident and l’Orient through the visual aid of Picasso’s 1932 Année érotique. Central to this research is the notion of the hybridized public intellectual (Daoud) entering hybridized public spheres (Franco-Algerian and beyond). The consequences of operating within a plural readership suggest that Daoud, subconsciously or not, speaks to particular sectors of his western-French audience more so than the Muslim-Algerian ones, risking an imbalance. This research unpicks how Daoud negotiates the relationship between aesthetics and politics in his non-fictional writing, showing how his public move to an essai in 2018 can be read as facilitating a conversation with more a bourgeois, and potentially more republican, French audience. It also analyses Daoud’s representations of Picasso, Paris, the museum, and the gendered body in western and Muslim societies. By doing so, it attempts to highlight how although Daoud appears to offer a ‘double-edged’ critique of Algeria since independence and French neo-colonialism, his tendency to make generalizations about Islam sometimes unwittingly plays to French (and more widely, western) Islamophobic assumptions.