Exploring Love, Sex, and Loneliness in Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay's "Panty"

Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay (b. 1974), a modern feminist writer, promotes and celebrates women’s freedom that the women seek to enjoy both physically and psychologically. Bold and candid, Bandyopadhyay exposes “hardcore sexuality” into her work, going against the flow in society. Panty, one of her best-known works, is a novella about a nameless woman who goes through surreal experiences. The novella is set in contemporary Kolkata, a boisterous metropolis, where women work at part with men, but still the women feel a sense of inferiority. The woman in the novella enters a dark apartment, owned by a mysterious man with whom she has a complicated relationship, at night and finds a soft and silky panty in leopard-skin print. Circumstances force her to wear the panty, and just then she begins to imagine its original owner along with her wild sexual life. The rest of the story evolves around the woman’s imagination, her love, sex, loneliness, uncertainty, fear, anxiety, and so forth. This article analyzes how a woman struggles to achieve a secure space in society as well as an established identity. The article also explores how a woman navigates between love and sex, freedom and dependence, and continues to search for a life that she has not yet lived.

The Doors of Compression

In the introduction to the third edition of Globalization: The Transformation of Social Worlds, editors D. Stanley Eitzen and Maxine Baca Zinn define globalization as a “process whereby goods, information, people, money, communication, fashion (and other forms of culture) move across national borders” (1). The anthology includes notable writers from a number of fields—Anthony Giddens, Khalid Koser, and Thomas Friedman, to name a few—and it contributes to a body of early twenty-first century scholarly and popular analyses that collectively described a new and ever-shrinking world.1 Technological advancements in transportation and communication allowed people, cultures, and capital to move easily and relatively freely, arguments go, making borders, real and metaphoric, if not anachronistic then at least more pliable than ever before. Neoliberal policies supposedly unleashed market forces and “flattened” the world, to use Friedman’s metaphor, but these processes also catalyzed a race to the bottom and widened gaps between the wealthy and poor, the secure and the insecure. The inevitability of the new global order manifest in freer movement and deeper global connections seems to have stalled, as seen in recent political events,such as 2016’s Brexit vote and the rise of nativist populism most notably emblematized in the United States’ election of Donald Trump.

Curing Oneself of One's (Father)Land

In the opening section of his 2017 memoir An Odyssey, the American writer and scholar Daniel Mendelsohn aptly notes that the English language has a number of nouns to describe the act of moving in space from one point to another. While “voyage,” due to its Latin provenance is “saturated in the material”2 (Lat. viaticum, i.e. provisions for a journey), and “journey,” which originates in the Old French word jornee (meaning day or its portion), points to the temporal dimension of moving, the word “travel” (also French in origin, travail) refers to effort and pain (Mendelsohn 20). “Travel,” Mendelsohn asserts, “suggests the emotional dimension of travelling: not its material accessories, or how long it may last, but how it feels. For in the days when these words took their shape and meaning, travel was above all difficult, painful, arduous, something strenuously avoided by most people” (20–21).

Women's Health in Uganda

The landscape surrounding reproductive health in Uganda is underpinned by layered interactions between a host of powerful factors, all of which contribute to grim health outcomes for Ugandan women. Yet, over the last two decades, several key interventions have demonstrated success in improving women’s reproductive health, including the implementation of diagonal approaches to healthcare delivery and grassroots educational programs. This review synthesizes a diverse body of literature and elucidates the relationship between colonialism, neocolonialism, gender inequality, ethnolinguistic fractionalization, andwomen’s health outcomes in Uganda. To clarify several key terms, gender inequality defined as, “allowing people different opportunities due to perceived differences based solely on issues of gender” (Parziale 978). Ethnolinguistic fractionalization involves considering how multiple languages and ethnic groups can create greater perceived distances between groups. Thus, this narrative literature review will explicate the socio-historical framework impacting women’s health and describe several successful interventions in promoting women’s health in Uganda.

Cooper, Darius. Aavaan Javaan: Arriving at and Departing from. Authorspress, 2018

Review of: Cooper, Darius. Aavaan Javaan: Arriving at and Departing from. Authorspress, 2018. Reviewed by Mitali P. Wong.

Narrating Pakistani History

Kamila Shamsie writes revisionary historiography of her country. Official historiography erases some very significant areas and experiences which she has tried to recuperate, thus redefining the role of a postcolonial writer in the society. This article examines the relationship between history, memory and experience in Shamsie’s novels, elaborating on their potential to change the collective or individual lives of people in a society that is in the process of transition. Shamsie takes up challenges of putting a chaotic world in order, of recording what official histories erase most often. Her novels are penetrating analyses of Pakistan’s recent troubled history. She talks of the break-up of Pakistan in 1971, of the insecure, uncertain and perturbed times under the despotic rule of Zia’s regime, and ethnic violence in Karachi. History in her novels is not only the knowledge of past, it is also the continuity of past in present. She shows that what happened then is happening now, back and forth, now and then; the conflict between Bengalis and the rest of Pakistan in 1971 and now between native Karachites and Muhajirs or immigrants in the 1980s. Such frictions and hostilities produced fissures in the tight-knit social groups. Shamsie portrays this history painstakingly, as she identifies history as a major sight for the identity formation of any country.

"Not at Home in Empire"

Amitav Ghosh opposes the “agonistic” or “reconciliatory” strand in postcolonial studies espoused amongst others by Bhabha. By fusing postcolonialism with postmodernism, this school of postcolonial thought rejects resistance and reconfigures the historical project of invasion, expropriation and exploitation as a symbiotic encounter. As a staunch anti-colonialist, what Ghosh presents in his writing is the ubiquity of the Eurocentrism of the colonized. The Glass Palace represents how colonial discourses (primarily the military discourse) have molded native identity and resulted in severe vulnerability and existential crisis. Self-alienation is apparent in the characters of the Collector, a Britain-trained colonial administrator and the soldier, Arjun, who has been transformed into a war-machine in the hands of British military discourse. The narrative attempts to revisit and reframe the colonial past by questioning the ideological, epistemological and ontological assumptions of the imperial powers, the masks of conquest. The community of the disillusioned soldiers of the British Indian army presented in The Glass Palace is one that challenges, provokes, threatens, but also enlivens, is a community of disagreement, dissonance, and resistance. Popular or insurgent nationalism thus reclaims or imagines forms of community and challenges colonial rule giving shape to a collective political identity. This article also intends to trace the failures of Burmese nationalism after a series of insurrections on ethnic grounds belied the aspirations of the postcolonial nation state.

"You're White": You Can Do Anything"

The Ghost and the Darkness (dir. Stephen Hopkins, 1996) possesses ingredients that could have yielded a film that was popular and perhaps even iconic. It features Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas, two major stars in the 1990s. It was written by William Goldman and photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond, both Oscar winners. Yet critics dismissed this period melodrama about killer lions as being derivative of Jaws (French; Newman). Even key players in the production expressed disappointment in Ghost’s quality (Goldman 94; Logan). Since its release, Ghost has not received critical reappraisal, nor has it achieved ironic cult status. Roger Ebert commented that Ghost “lacks even the usual charm of being so bad it’s funny. It’s just bad.” However, Ghost’s ineptitude is a key reason why postcolonial scholars interested in the environmental humanities should revisit this text.

Decoding Black Iconography

The paper examines how the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, the only one in the country dedicated to the work of African descended women artists, is used as a pedagogical tool in the interdisciplinary African Diaspora and the World course to help students further explore the depiction and visualization of diasporan aesthetics during their matriculation. From a visual culture perspective, this is a critical examination of the process of looking among non-art major college goers. The emphasis of the analysis is on the perceiver or the “educand” as Paulo Freire puts it, and ways she is trained to visually represent Africa and its diasporas. The article discusses how the subjects, first year students at a black liberal arts women’s college, are taught to construct meaning from and respond to imagery made by women artists from the diaspora. At the heart of the study is the response of the perceivers, through an Audio Narrative assignment, to artefacts that communicate an African and Afro-descended iconography.

"Identity Negotiation and Alien Residency"

In her memoir, Not for Everyday Use (2014), and her novel Anna in Between (2009) and its sequel, Boundaries (2011), Elizabeth Nunez explores the nature of the migrant experience for first generation Afro-Caribbean immigrants to the USA. With specific reference to the use of language, characterization, history, imagery, and the interweaving of history, she analyzes the complexities of that reality as they attempt to adjust to a host locale (USA) that has had, from its inception, a very contentious relationship with blackness that fragments potential solidarity of blackness. Extrapolating from the lives her protagonists as filtered through the prism of her own migrant journey, Nunez sees them as existing in a permanent state of liminality from which there is no escape. Despite the finality of the act of migration, Caribbean-Americanlives are forever in a state of flux over which they can exert only limited control. Migration promises freedom and yet denies its full efflorescence; it offers the excitement of choice but only provides the exercise of it remains within the confines of fixed circumferences; it encourages belonging, yet castigates the complacency that belonging engenders. This paper will show that Nunez clearly represents the Afro-Caribbean immigrant life in America as uneasy existence in unsafe space, yet sends a firm message that the disillusionment of that reality is more palatable than the idea of return. The state of in-betweenity, therefore, while not static in essential nature, is as permanent and unavoidable as is the act of migration itself. In order to feel more at ease the migrant must quickly learn the balancing act of becoming yet never being; the migrant must come to appreciate the complex dance between commonality and contestation even within a diaspora of shared African origin.