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Messianic-City: Ruins, Refuge And Hospitality In Derrida, Puspa Damai
Messianic-City: Ruins, Refuge And Hospitality In Derrida, Puspa Damai
Puspa Damai
‘‘Listen first to those who, like myself, did not have to watch TV to know that SOME of L.A. was burning,’’ Derrida wrote to a newsletter in response to the riots triggered by the Rodney King events in 1992, adding, ‘‘L.A. is not anywhere, but it is a singular organization of the experience of ‘anywhere’’’ (‘‘Faxitexture’’ 28). At a time when one hardly needs to watch TV to know that many cities around the world are burning, or are targeted and wounded, bombed and invaded—as if the Biblical injunction, ‘‘Then ye shall appoint you cities to be cities of refuge …
Spectrogenetic Translation In Arundhati Roy's The God Of Small Things And Elsewhere, Puspa Damai
Spectrogenetic Translation In Arundhati Roy's The God Of Small Things And Elsewhere, Puspa Damai
Puspa Damai
South Asians, in their attempts to articulate post-colonial subjectivity, have themselves only reinscribed various aspects of colonial exoticism in their work. South Asian author Arundhati Roy’s rendering of untouchability in terms of godliness in The God of Small Things resonates with colonial ideologies that read “subalterns” as objects, not as subjects. Roy’s invocation of colonial methods of translation envisions untouchability in “absolutist terms”—a strategy that may ultimately mitigate against a recognition of the highly varied experiences, social agencies, and subjectivities of dalits living in South Asia and abroad.
Cosmopolitanism After Derrida: City, Signature And Sovereignty, Puspa Damai
Cosmopolitanism After Derrida: City, Signature And Sovereignty, Puspa Damai
Puspa Damai
Cosmopolitanism in Derrida's works sounds like an afterthought in comparison to other more recurring themes of his texts, like 'writing', 'differance', 'supplement', 'metaphysics', or 'violence'. Cosmopolitanism seems to belong to deconstruction, which is often associated with decentring, fragmentation, and critique of totality and universality, only as an intimate other, a foreign element grafted in the body by force, or by miracle. That is the reason why, perhaps, hardly any cosmopolitanist refers to the issue of cosmopolitanism in Derrida or in deconstruction, so much so that even Derrida has written very sparsely on it as it belongs perhaps to the dormant, …
Subalternative Cognitive Mapping In Rohinton Mistry’S A Fine Balance, Puspa Damai
Subalternative Cognitive Mapping In Rohinton Mistry’S A Fine Balance, Puspa Damai
Puspa Damai
In this essay I read Mistry's A Fine Balance in the context of theories of Emergency, exception, cognitive mapping, and city studies. After briefly contrasting Benjamin's and Agamben's theorizing of life under the state of exception, I examine Mistry's depiction of life during the Emergency rule in India in the context of Jameson's concept of cognitive mapping, which, I argue, needs to be expanded not only by engaging with theories of the exception but also by expanding it to include a number of totalizing maps that constitute the camp-like landscape of Mistry' s novel.