Of cityscapes, affect and migrant subjectivities in Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss

Kiran Desai's Inheritance of Loss revolves around questions of identity and entities flawed by a deep sense of deprivation and loss left by colonization that manifests itself in various forms through generations. The novel chronicles the lives of an Anglophile Indian judge, Jemubhai Patel, whose educational sojourn in Britain permanently brands him as an alien both abroad and in his homeland, and of his orphaned 16-year-old granddaughter Sai, her tutor/lover Gyan, and Patel’s cook who pushes his son, Biju, to go seek his fortune in America. This paper seeks to discuss the lives of Jemubhai and Biju as it tracks the role of the city and its impact on the construction of their identities. This impact factor is further analyzed through affective theory, namely Jose Munoz’s concept of “disidentification,” a tactic of survival by which minoritarian subjects either consciously or unconsciously “neither assimilate nor strictly oppose the dominant regime.”

Polic(sh)ing up the Leipzig Main Station: an ethnographic reflection on abjection, space and resistance

In this article, I explore the interplay of abjection, space and resistance at the example of a protest intervention that reclaims a highly policed urban space in the city of Leipzig (Saxony, Eastern Germany)—the Main Station. Methodologically, I combine ethnographic material collected throughout the process of a performative counter-action attempting to reclaim and re-imagine Leipzig Main Station as a venue and politicized space with a contextual analysis regarding the discursive landscape evolving around and shaping this urban locale. My empirical analysis is structured along the theoretical discussion of abjection: While Butler's theorization (Butler in Bodies that matter, Routledge, New York, 1993) allows me to focus on the formative power of spatial exclusion and the disruptive potential of protest, theoretical accounts in which abjection is conceived as a “threshold zone” or “overlap space” (Sharkey and Shields in Child Geogr 6:239–256, 2008; Vighi et al. in Between urban topographies and political spaces. Threshold experiences, Lexington Books, Lanham, 2014) help me to outline ‘abject space’ as a space of negotiation and contradiction.