Tuesday 28 February 2023

"Let’s consider ourselves as individuals..."

It’s time to stop talking about "feminism"!

Sai Shri R | 28/2/23

“Feminism” means “equality” and I believe that the latter proves to be better!

While it’s important to learn feminism and issues associated with women empowerment from History, feminism itself is a very Indian concept often westernised.

There are umpteen number of reasons to stop thinking about feminism and I am trying to list down some of the ones I believe to be prominent.

Clinging to the old weak branches of issues related to women empowerment blinds us from seeing the existing ones. While women suffered a great deal of harassment in the past and as many may argue they still do, soap operas contribute a great deal to set lower and in some cases no expectations at all.

Times have changed! While in most cases men are portrayed as mamma’s boys, let’s do a reality check!

Yes! There are men who don’t spend time with their wives and would want to spend time with their parents more, but don’t we see couples seeking therapy for the same, isn’t that a step forward?

We have learnt to analyse red flags in relationships and marriages from history and we have learned to walk away from them. It’s easier for manipulative men and their side to get us to believe that toxicity is normal if we don’t see the improvement that shines right in front of our eyes.

It’s easier for misogynists to make a woman see harassment as normalcy, if we don’t see the majority of good men willing to learn and unlearn.

Most in-laws are normal people believing in equality, trying to get the daughter-in-law unlearn the deep rooted insecurities and the beliefs gathered up halfway that a mother-in-law is the ruler of the house, most in-laws in cosmopolitan societies want their daughter-in-laws to excel in their respective fields.

I have seen my dad stand up for my mom umpteen number of times and I have also seen how he stands up for himself and for her, like the gentleman that he is, when he is taunted for the same.

We aren’t the first generation seeing women empowerment; it has been there for aeons now. But the negativity proves its might giving a nice time for misogynistic people. It’s time for us to come out of it.

Negativity attracts negativity. Many of the present-day relationship problems aren’t related to feminism, it has got a lot to do with communication issues. Us feminists don’t hate men, we hate inequality. When we say so, we must also be very careful not to abuse men as abuse doesn’t see faces or sexes, it only has the abuser and the one being abused.

While many men learning to do the household chores and cooking, the chances of women being looked at as maids that bring home salary are less. It is still important for women stick to their terms of spending the money that they earn.

Now we haven’t done away with inequality, we still find inequality in our society. But most often in the workplaces, where a man with lesser efficiency still feels somehow superior to his women counterparts who are actually better than him.

We have bigger problems like gender playing a very important role in pay gap, while our previous generations opted for single child, this pay gap is a real problem we face, causing repercussions in health and living conditions for the elderly.

While feminism still means equality, let’s consider ourselves as individuals and not as a man and a woman when it comes to equality, let’s consider ourselves as employees and not allow ourselves to be categorised as male and female employees, emphasising equal opportunities and equal pay and benefits.

Using the alternative term “equality” gives a lot more scope for women to achieve equal rights starting from making the decision to choose a nuclear or joint family, it becomes a lot more easier to break gender barriers thereby breaking gender associated responsibilities.

I believe that in the current context, gender is personal and it is important to be seen as individuals.

Monday 27 February 2023

"An ability to see things from multiple perspectives, also known as critical skills..."

Scrabble Tournament @ MCC | Today

The First Ever Scrabble Tournament in MCC, got underway today at the Examinations Hall.

Well, students had already assembled in the Hall, much ahead of time, with all eagerness and enthusiasm writ large on them, awaiting the arrival of our Guest of the Day, Scrabble Champion Mr. Ranganatha Chakravarthy to kickstart the Tournament.

Dr. P. Wilson, our beloved Principal, had a special word of appreciation for Scrabble. Highlighting the importance of Scrabble especially for students, he also emphasized on the basic skills expected of students – which are –

An ability to see things from multiple perspectives, also known as critical skills. The ability to communicate at every level, also known as social skills or social intelligence. The ability to think and act creatively, also known as creative thinking skills, etc. Hence, Scrabble assumes great relevance and importance because it generates creative and critical thinking skills amongst players of the game, he added.

Well, before we proceed further, first let’s take a brief look into the impressive and inspirational profile of Mr. Ranganatha Chakravarthy.

Profile of Ranganatha Chakravarthy –

Mr. Ranganatha Chakravarthy is a lawyer by training, who then gave up on his profession for the love of Scrabble.

He’s now been playing the game competitively for 24 years, and is currently, ranked 4th in India. He has also represented the country in four World Scrabble Championships (2001, 2007, 2017 and 2019). This apart, Mr. Ranganatha Chakravarthy has founded the Madras Scrabble Foundation in 2014 to put India on the world map as a dominant force in the game of Scrabble.

We are indeed so privileged to have Mr. Ranganatha Chakravarthy, here with us today, who, with such passion and vibrancy, engaged the students throughout the morning session. 

Dr. Mekala Rajan, our beloved Head of the Department welcomed the gathering. Dr. Ann Thomas gave the opening prayer. Dr. Rufus [this blogger] introduced the Chief Guest of the Day. Prof. Arun Kumar proposed the vote of thanks. 

We are so thankful to Dr. Phebe Angus, and Prof. John Jeba Jeyasingh, [a confirmed Coffee bhakta like me, ;-) of the highest order], who have been very instrumental in so meticulously coordinating and arranging the entire logistics connected with the programme at the venue, much ahead of the event. 


Ever grateful to Dr. Maria Preethi Srinivasan, Head, Dept. of English, Queen Mary’s College (Autonomous), Chennai, for having introduced Mr. Ranganatha Chakravarthy to us in the first place. His session with the students at QMC last month, was a big draw.


Also, we are so thankful to Mr. Ganesh Aadhitya, S, II MA English, for having a fruitful interview session [albeit brief, and on the move] with Mr. Ranganatha Chakravarthy.

Finally, a note of appreciation to all our vibrant students in the I BA & II BA English Literature classes who were rapturously hooked on the game from start to finish.

Mr. Ranganatha Chakravarthy, an embodiment of passion, cheerfulness and enthusiasm

The Invite

In short, a rewarding day, in every way today with words – the Scrabble way! 

And well, a big thank you to Mr. Sankey, II MA English, for the lovely, sprightly snaps. 

Wednesday 22 February 2023

"Women’s knowledge becomes mere ‘intuition,’ women’s talk becomes ‘gossip.’ Women deal with the irredeemably particular..."

“The Creation of Patriarchy” | Gerda Lerner

[Abridged Version]

From Women and History. Vol. 1 The Creation of Patriarchy. OUP, 1986.

Introduction

Women’s History is indispensable and essential to the emancipation of women. After twenty-five years of researching, writing, and teaching Women’s History, I have come to this conviction on theoretical and practical grounds. 

I have observed profound changes in consciousness which students of Women’s History experience. Women’s History changes their lives. Even short-term exposure to the past experience of women, such as in two-week institutes and seminars, has the most profound psychological effect on women participants.

Women: Central to the Making of Society and the Building of Civilisation

Like men, women are and have been central, not marginal, to the making of society and to the building of civilization. Women have also shared with men in preserving collective memory, which shapes the past into cultural tradition, provides the link between generations, and connects past and future. 

This oral tradition was kept alive in poem and myth, which both men and women created and preserved in folklore, art, and ritual.

Women: ‘Outside’ of the Making of History [History-making]

History-making, on the other hand, is a historical creation which dates from the invention of writing in ancient Mesopotamia. From the time of the king lists of ancient Sumer on, historians, whether priests, royal servants, clerks, clerics, or a professional class of university-trained intellectuals, have selected the events to be recorded and have interpreted them so as to give them meaning and significance. 

Until the most recent past, these historians have been men, and what they have recorded is what men have done and experienced and found significant. They have called this History and claimed universality for it. What women have done and experienced has been left unrecorded, neglected, and ignored in interpretation.

Towards Creating a Feminist Theory of History

Assuming civilization to have begun with the written historical record, my inquiry had to begin in the fourth millennium B.C. This is what led me, an American historian specializing in the nineteenth century, to spend the last eight years working in the history of ancient Mesopotamia in order to answer the questions I consider essential to creating a feminist theory of history.

What Women ‘Ought to Do’ to the Recorded History of Society

Looking at the recorded History of society as though it were such a play, we realize that the story of the performances over thousands of years has been recorded only by men and told in their words. What women must do, what feminists are now doing is to point to that stage, its sets, its props, its director, and its scriptwriter, as did the child in the fairy tale who discovered that the emperor was naked, and say, the basic inequality between us lies within this framework. And then they must tear it down.

Writing of History Without the Umbrella of Dominance

What will the writing of history be like, when that umbrella of dominance is removed and definition is shared equally by men and women? We will simply step out under the free sky. We may, after all, see with greater enrichment. 

We now know that man is not the measure of that which is human, but men and women are. Men are not the center of the world, but men and women are. This insight will transform consciousness as decisively as did Copernicus’s discovery that the earth is not the center of the universe.

Patriarchy: A Historical Creation of 2500 years

Patriarchy is a historical creation formed by men and women in a process which took nearly 2500 years to its completion. The basic unit of its organization was the patriarchal family, which both expressed and constantly generated its rules and values.

The ‘Reification’ of Women: Claude Levi-Strauss

The development of agriculture in the Neolithic period fostered the inter-tribal “exchange of women,” because societies with more women could produce more children. In every known society it was women of conquered tribes who were first enslaved, whereas men were killed. 

The product of this commodification of women - bride price, sale price, and children - was appropriated by men. It may very well represent the first accumulation of private property. 

Claude Levi-Strauss, to whom we owe the concept of ‘the exchange of women,’ speaks of the reification of women, which occurred as its consequence. But it is not women who are reified and commodified, it is women’s sexuality and reproductive capacity which is so treated. The distinction is important. Women never became ‘things,’ nor were they so perceived.

Sustaining of Patriarchy in the Past through the Cooperation of Women

The system of patriarchy can function only with the cooperation of women. This cooperation is secured by a variety of means: gender indoctrination; educational deprivation; the denial to women of knowledge of their history. 

Women have for millennia participated in the process of their own subordination because they have been psychologically shaped so as to internalize the idea of their own inferiority.

Taking the Half for the Whole: Inability to Describe Reality Accurately

By taking the half for the whole, they have not only missed the essence of whatever they are describing, but they have distorted it in such a fashion that they cannot see it correctly. As long as men believed the earth to be flat, they could not understand its reality, its function, and its actual relationship to other bodies in the universe. 

As long as men believe their experiences, their viewpoint, and their ideas represent all of human experience and all of human thought, they are not only unable to define correctly in the abstract, but they are unable to describe reality accurately.

The Functions of History: Preserving the ‘Collective Past’

History gives meaning to human life and connects each life to immortality, but history has yet another function. In preserving the collective past and reinterpreting it to the present, human beings define their potential and explore the limits of their possibilities.

Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex ignores History

In her brilliant work The Second Sex, she described man as autonomous and transcendent, woman as immanent. But her analysis ignored history. Explaining “why women lack concrete means for organizing themselves into a unit” in defense of their own interests, she stated flatly: “They [women] have no past, no history, no religion of their own”. 

Simone De Beauvoir is right in her observation that woman has not ‘transcended,’ if by transcendence one means the definition and interpretation of human knowledge. But she was wrong in thinking that therefore woman has had no history. 

Two decades of Women’s History scholarship have disproven this fallacy by unearthing an unending list of sources and uncovering and interpreting the hidden history of women.

A Tiny Minority of Privileged Women: Who Gave us an Alternative to Androcentric Thought

Yet there have always existed a tiny minority of privileged women, usually from the ruling elite, who had some access to the same kind of education as did their brothers. From the ranks of such women have come the intellectuals, the thinkers, the writers, the artists. It is such women, throughout history, who have been able to give us a female perspective, an alternative to androcentric thought. 

They have done so at a tremendous cost and with great difficulty. However, those academically trained women, have first had to learn ‘how to think like a man.’ 

In the process, many of them have so internalized that learning that they have lost the ability to conceive of alternatives. The way to think abstractly is to define precisely, to create models in the mind and generalize from them. Such thought, men have taught us, must be based on the exclusion of feelings.

Women: Mistrust their Own Experience & Hence Devalue It

Living in a world in which they are devalued, their experience bears the stigma of insignificance. Thus, they have learned to mistrust their own experience and devalue it. What wisdom can there be in menses? 

Women’s knowledge becomes mere ‘intuition,’ women’s talk becomes ‘gossip.’ Women deal with the irredeemably particular: they experience reality daily, hourly, in their service function (taking care of food and dirt); in their constantly interruptable time; their splintered attention. 

Historically, thinking women have had to choose between living a woman’s life, with its joys, dailiness, and immediacy, and living a man’s life in order to think.

Entering the ‘Historical Process’: Men vs Women

Women and men have entered ‘historical process’ under different conditions and have passed through it at different rates of speed. 

If recording, defining, and interpreting the past marks man’s entry into history, this occurred for males in the third millennium B.C. It occurred for women (and only some of them) with a few notable exceptions in the nineteenth century. 

Until then, all History was for women pre-History. Women's lack of knowledge of our own history of struggle and achievement has been one of the major means of keeping us subordinate.

Lack of Knowledge of Female Past: Deprived Us of Female Heroines

Moreover, each emergent woman has been schooled in patriarchal thought. We each hold at least one great man in our heads. 

The lack of knowledge of the female past has deprived us of female heroines, a fact which is only recently being corrected through the development of Women’s History. So, for a long time, thinking women have refurbished the idea systems created by men, engaging in a dialogue with the great male minds in their heads. Kate Millet argued with Freud, Norman Mailer, and the liberal literary establishment; Simone de Beauvoir with Sartre, Marx, and Camus; all Marxist-Feminists are in a dialogue with Marx and Engels and some also with Freud. 

In this dialogue woman intends merely to accept whatever she finds useful to her in the great man’s system. But in these systems woman - as a concept, a collective entity, an individual - is marginal or subsumed. In accepting such dialogue, thinking woman stays far longer than is useful within the boundaries or the question-setting defined by the ‘great men.’ And just as long as she does, the source of new insight is closed to her.

The Shift in Consciousness: Leaving Patriarchal Thought Behind

Revolutionary thought has always been based on upgrading the experience of the oppressed. The peasant had to learn to trust in the significance of his life experience before he could dare to challenge the feudal lords. 

The industrial worker had to become ‘class-conscious,’ the Black ‘race-conscious’ before liberating thought could develop into revolutionary theory. So with women. The shift in consciousness we must make occurs in two steps: we must, at least for a time, be woman-centered. We must, as far as possible, leave patriarchal thought behind.

Stepping Outside of Patriarchal Thought

To step outside of patriarchal thought means: Being skeptical toward every known system of thought; being critical of all assumptions. Testing one’s statement by trusting our own, the female experience. 

Since such experience has usually been trivialized or ignored, it means overcoming the deep-seated resistance within ourselves toward accepting ourselves and our knowledge as valid. It means getting rid of the great men in our heads and substituting for them ourselves, our sisters, our anonymous foremothers. 

Perhaps the greatest challenge to thinking women is the challenge to move from the desire for safety and approval to the most ‘unfeminine’ quality of all - that of intellectual arrogance, the supreme hubris which asserts to itself the right to reorder the world. The hubris of the godmakers, the hubris of the male system-builders.

Conclusion

The system of patriarchy is a historic construct; it has a beginning; it will have an end. Women’s History, is the essential tool in creating feminist consciousness in women. A feminist world-view will enable women and men to free their minds from patriarchal thought and practice and at last to build a world free of dominance and hierarchy, a world that is truly human.

*****

Tuesday 21 February 2023

"And what had happened to the experts on Islam, and why were their contributions either bypassed entirely or submerged in the “Islam” discussed and diffused by the media?"

“Islam and the West” | Edward Said

Abridged Version [from Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World, 3-32. 1981]

Introduction

Discussions about Islam are not all carried on in scholarly treatises. The role of the popular media has drawn a good deal of attention in reinforcing categories that are based not on scholarly critical reflection but upon the acceptance of media images; such images are ultimately expressions of power, often overtly political or ideological.

The Provocative Cover

Edward Said, in his Orientalism argued that the impositions of conceptualizations of Islam were tools in the hands of colonialist powers to control and to manage the “Other” they encountered in their empires. Said saw this happening not only in the work of the Orientalists, but, as he explores in “Islam and the West,” in the image of Islam portrayed in the Euro-American media.

The Con Ed commercial

In order to make a point about alternative energy sources for Americans, Consolidated Edison of New York (Con Ed) ran a striking television advertisement in the summer of 1980. Film clips of various immediately recognizable OPEC [Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries] personalities - Yamani, Qaddafi, lesser-known robed Arab figures - alternated with stills as well as clips of other people associated with oil and Islam: Khomeini, Arafat, Hafez al-Assad. None of these figures was mentioned by name, but we were told ominously that “these men” control America’s sources of oil.

It was enough for “these men” to appear as they have appeared in newspapers and on television for American viewers to feel a combination of anger, resentment, and fear. And it is this combination of feelings that Con Ed instantly aroused and exploited for domestic commercial reasons. There are two things about the Con Ed commercial: One, of course, is Islam, or rather the image of Islam in the West generally and in the United States in particular. The other is the use of that image in the West and especially in the United States.

Basis of Orientalist Thought: Polarised Geography

But let us first consider the history of relationships between Islam and the Christian West. From at least the end of the eighteenth century until our own day, modem Occidental reactions to Islam have been dominated by a radically simplified type of thinking that may still be called Orientalist.

The general basis of Orientalist thought is an imaginative and yet drastically polarized geography dividing the world into two unequal parts: the larger, “different” one called the Orient; the other, also known as “our” world, called the Occident or the West. Even when the world of Islam entered a period of decline and Europe a period of ascendancy, fear of “Mohammedanism” persisted.

Orientalism and the ‘Iconography’ of Islam

There was the longstanding attitude to Islam, the Arabs, and the Orient in general that I have been calling Orientalism. For whether one looked at such recent, critically acclaimed fiction as V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River and John Updike’s The Coup, or at grade-school history textbooks, comic strips, television serials, films, and cartoons, the iconography of Islam was uniform, was uniformly ubiquitous, and drew its material from the same time-honored view of Islam: hence the frequent caricatures of Muslims as oil suppliers, as terrorists, and more recently, as bloodthirsty mobs.

Treatment of Islam from an ‘Invented’ or ‘Culturally Determined’ Ideological Framework

Most people, if asked to name a modern Islamic writer, would probably be able to pick only Khalil Gibran (who wasn’t Islamic). The academic experts whose specialty is Islam have generally treated the religion and its various cultures within an invented or culturally determined ideological framework filled with passion, defensive prejudice, sometimes even revulsion; because of this framework, understanding of Islam has been a very difficult thing to achieve.

For Naipaul and his readers, “Islam” somehow is made to cover everything that one most disapproves of from the standpoint of civilized, and Western, rationality.

Labels as ‘Cultural History’ rather than as Objective Classification

Labels purporting to name very large and complex realities are notoriously vague and at the same time unavoidable.

I think it is more immediately useful to admit at the outset that they exist and have long been in use as an integral part of cultural history rather than as objective classifications. Labels function as interpretations produced for and by what I shall call communities of interpretation. We must therefore remember that “Islam,” “the West,” and even “Christianity” function in at least two different ways, and produce at least two meanings, each time they are used.

First, they perform a simple identifying function, as when we say Khomeini is a Muslim, or Pope John Paul II is a Christian. The second function of these several labels is to produce a much more complex meaning. To speak of “Islam” in the West today is to mean a lot of the unpleasant things I have been mentioning. Moreover, “Islam” is unlikely to mean anything one knows either directly or objectively.

The same is true of our use of “the West.” And we must note immediately that it is always the West, and not Christianity, that seems pitted against Islam.

The Western Mind & the Diminished Role of Religion

For the Western mind, conditioned since the Reformation to historical and intellectual developments which have steadily diminished the role of religion, it is difficult to grasp the power exerted by Islam [which, presumably, has been conditioned neither by history nor by intellect.

Islam has never been welcome in Europe. Most of the great philosophers of history from Hegel to Spengler have regarded Islam without much enthusiasm. Apart from some occasional interest in the odd Sufi writer or saint, European vogues for “the wisdom of the East” rarely included Islamic sages or poets.

Omar Khayyam, Harun al-Rashid, Sindbad, Aladdin, Hajji Baba, Scheherazade, Saladin, more or less make up the entire list of Islamic figures known to modem educated Europeans.

Public discussions of Islam Provided only by Political Crisis

More significantly, the occasions for public discussions of Islam, by experts or by nonexperts, have almost always been provided by political crises.

It is extremely rare to see informative articles on Islamic culture in the New York Review of Books, say, or in Harpers. Only when the stability of Saudi Arabia or Iran has been in question has “Islam” seemed worthy of general comment.

Provocative Cover of the Time Magazine

When Time magazine devoted its major story to Islam on April 16, 1979, the cover was adorned with a Gerome painting of a bearded muezzin standing in a minaret, calmly summoning the faithful to prayer. Anachronistically, however, this quiet scene was emblazoned with a caption that had nothing to do with it: “The Militant Revival.”

There could be no better way of symbolizing the difference between Europe and America on the subject of Islam. A placid and decorative painting done almost routinely in Europe as an aspect of one’s general culture had been transformed by three words into a general American obsession.

Wasn’t Time’s cover story on Islam simply a piece of vulgarization, catering to a supposed taste for the sensational? Does it really reveal anything more serious than that? And what had happened to the experts on Islam, and why were their contributions either bypassed entirely or submerged in the “Islam” discussed and diffused by the media?

A few simple explanations are in order first. As I said above, there has never been any American expert on the Islamic world whose audience was a wide one; moreover, with the exception of the late Marshall Hodgson’s three-volume The Venture of Islam, posthumously published in 1974, no general work on Islam has ever been put squarely before the literate reading public.

‘Essentialised’ Caricatures of the Islamic World

It is only a slight overstatement to say that Muslims and Arabs are essentially covered, discussed, apprehended, either as oil suppliers or as potential terrorists.

Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab-Muslim life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Islamic world. What we have instead is a limited series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world presented in such a way as, among other things, to make that world vulnerable to military aggression.

American Obsession with ‘Modernization’ of the Third World

Almost without exception, the Third World seemed to American policy-makers to be “underdeveloped,” in the grip of unnecessarily archaic and static “traditional” modes of life, dangerously prone to communist subversion and internal stagnation.

For the Third World, “modernization” became the order of the day, so far as the United States was concerned. Huge sums were poured into Africa and Asia with the aim of stopping communism and promoting United States trade, and above all, the transformation of backward countries into mini-Americas. In time the initial investments required additional sums and increased military support to keep them going.

The “Vietnamization” Fiasco

Vietnam is a perfect instance of this. Once it was decided that the country was to be saved from communism and indeed from itself, a whole science of modernization for Vietnam (whose latest and most costly phase came to be known as “Vietnamization” came into being. Not only government specialists but university experts were involved.

In time, the survival of pro-American and anticommunist regimes in Saigon dominated everything, even when it became clear that a huge majority of the population viewed those regimes as alien and oppressive, and even when the cost of fighting unsuccessful wars on behalf of those regimes had devastated the whole region and cost Lyndon Johnson the presidency.

An ‘Illusion’ in Modernization Theory

Among the many illusions that persisted in modernization theory was one that seemed to have a special pertinence to the Islamic world: namely, that before the advent of the United States, Islam existed in a kind of timeless childhood, shielded from true development by an archaic set of superstitions, prevented by its strange priests and scribes from moving out of the Middle Ages into the modem world.

Role of Israel in ‘Mediating’ Western Views of the Islamic World

One more thing needs mention here: the role of Israel in mediating Western and particularly American views of the Islamic world since World War II. In the first place, Israel’s avowedly religious character is rarely mentioned in the Western press: only recently have there been overt references to Israeli religious fanaticism.

This kind of one-sided reporting is, I think, an indication of how Israel - the Middle East’s “only democracy” and “our staunch ally”- has been used as a foil for Islam. Thus Israel has appeared as a bastion of Western civilization hewn (with much approbation and self-congratulation) out of the Islamic wilderness.

The Sets of ‘Illusions’ that Serve to Promote Western Power over the Orient

In these ways, three sets of illusions economically buttress and reproduce one another in the interests of shoring up the Western self-image and promoting Western power over the Orient: the view of Islam, the ideology of modernization, and the affirmations of Israel’s general value to the West.

In addition, and to make “our” attitudes to Islam very clear, a whole information and policy-making apparatus in the United States depends on these illusions and diffuses them widely. A little lower down come the mass media, which take from the other two units of the apparatus what is most easily compressed into images: hence the caricatures, the frightening mobs, the concentration on “Islamic” punishment, and so on.

Conclusion: The Double Bind of US Interests and Covering Islam

When President Carter spent his first New Year in office with the shah in 1978, and said that Iran was “an island of stability,” he was speaking with the mobilized force of this formidable apparatus, representing United States interests and covering Islam at the same time.

*****

Pic. Courtesy: https://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19790416,00.html

Tuesday 14 February 2023

"So think of this as time travel, from then, to now, to find out what you're missing out on..."

My Favourite Five for Today!

Well, I’ve always been a greattt fan of romantic comedies.

Yes, rom-coms have always been my cuppa of coffee anytime!

Of late, I should also admit that, I’ve got this fascination for watching thrillers [investigative thrillers in particular] as well! [thanks to some solid encouragement on the family front].

But but but… I’ve never taken a fascination for those evil-dead-like horror movies... nayver! 

Interestingly, my ward [just last year] did her entire thesis exclusively on Horror Movies, and I gladly gave her the go-ahead for that!

On an added note, well, I had to interview her a full hour to get to know what interested her the most about horror movies. And her answers were so persuasive and convincing enough! More power to her!

Pardon me if I’ve hit a slightly discordant note here. But but but... as for me and my heart, horror movies are nayver our kind! ;-) Even Pizza, that ‘pranky’ horror movie starring Vijay Sethupathy in the lead role, couldn’t gel well with the likes of my temperament. 

On an aside, you may want to read a very humorous take on this movie, that we colleagues in our Department, went along to watch in Mayajaal, on our past post here. 

Light-hearted comedies that double up as romances, where all’s well that ends well have always been my pick!

So considering the added inspiration on such a beautiful day as this, me thought of giving my favourite five movies of all time – that are also available on OTT platforms, I guess!

First and foremost –

Before Sunrise!

What a movie! What a movie! A movie on this scale I guess can never be made yet again. Never!

A thoroughly romantic masterpiece with such amazing, awe-inspiring dialogues.

If at all there’s one movie that’s got just two characters all through the movie, who capture our attention and our hearts, just through their stunning dialogues, it’s Before Sunrise, hands down!

That amazing chemistry between Ethan and Julie (as Jesse and Celine) should be seen to be believed.

Sample these awesome lines from the movie –

Jesse : Alright, I have an admittedly insane idea, but if I don't ask you this it's just, uh, you know, it's gonna haunt me the rest of my life.

Celine : What?

Jesse : Um... I want to keep talking to you, y'know. I have no idea what your situation is, but, uh, but I feel like we have some kind of, uh, connection. Right?

Celine : Yeah, me too.

Jesse : Yeah, right, well, great. So listen, so here's the deal. This is what we should do. You should get off the train with me here in Vienna, and come check out the capital.

Celine : What?

Jesse : Come on. It'll be fun. Come on.

Celine : What would we do?

Jesse : Umm, I don't know. All I know is I have to catch an Austrian Airlines flight tomorrow morning at 9:30 and I don't really have enough money for a hotel, so I was just going to walk around, and it would be a lot more fun if you came with me.

And if I turn out to be some kind of psycho, you know, you just get on the next train.

Jesse : Alright, alright. Think of it like this: jump ahead, ten, twenty years, okay, and you're married.

Only your marriage doesn't have that same energy that it used to have, y'know. You start to blame your husband. You start to think about all those guys you've met in your life and what might have happened if you'd picked up with one of them, right?

Well, I'm one of those guys. That's me y'know, so think of this as time travel, from then, to now, to find out what you're missing out on.

See, what this really could be is a gigantic favor to both you and your future husband to find out that you're not missing out on anything.

I'm just as big a loser as he is, totally unmotivated, totally boring, and, uh, you made the right choice, and you're really happy.

Celine : Let me get my bag.

No spoilers though! Do watch this stunning masterpiece of a romantic movie!

The next four movies in line are –

When Harry Met Sally

La la Land

Notting Hill

The Notebook

(in that order).

Details for each to follow, when I get some added me-time on me.

For now, Before Sunriseeee!

Pic courtesy: IMDB

Saturday 11 February 2023

"Step out onto the Planet. Draw a circle a hundred feet round. Inside the circle are 300 things nobody’s ever really seen. How many can you find?"

Bioregional Literary Studies: An Overview

Works of Literature as Bioregional Models

Works of literature and art provide proactive, engaging models on how to reinhabit a bioregion or otherwise transform our relationships to places.

A fine example is Freeman House’s Totem Salmon, an account of a grassroots effort to restore the salmon population to the Mattole River in northern California, and thus to restore the ecological health of the entire watershed. Bioregional perception is more a certain kind of attention to place than a sense of identity that divides one place from another. 

The Inland Island, Josephine Johnson’s memoir of restoring to ecological health a thirty- nine- acre former farm in southwestern Ohio, provides a striking example of a bioregional attention to place that considers nonhuman as well as human members of the community, the ugly as well as the beautiful, and above all refuses the false comfort of seeing her land as an “island” disconnected from other places around the globe.

And there is a role for speculative works of literature, such as Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia or Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, which sketch out alternate modes of existence that can help us imagine both high-tech and low-tech ways to synchronize lifestyles to place.

Bioregional Vs Regional Writing

It’s helpful to compare bioregional literature with the more widely recognized category of regional writing. As Tom Lynch argues in Xerophilia, bioregionalism moves away from common regional designations such as “West,” “Southwest,” and “Northwest”; from a bioregional perspective, these terms have “no internally inherent meaning, but only describe a place by reference to its direction from some other, presumably more central, place.

By contrast, bioregions are internally coherent rather than externally defined by their relationship to a distant urban reference point”. Lynch points out that conventional regional literature is most often composed for an audience of outsiders rather than for the residents of the region and thus is more likely to be a “literature of tourism” that highlights the odd and exotic and relies on generalities and stereotypes.

As he explains, the authors of this literature tend to be “former residents of the hinterlands [who] move to the big city and write stories about the colorful if rapidly fading life they left behind” or “writers from the big cities [who] may move (often temporarily) to the hinterlands to write stories about their new abodes for the amusement and edification of an audience back home”. 

Bioregional literature, by contrast, is more likely to be oriented towards those who live in that bioregion. As Lynch puts it, “the implied reader is more likely to be a neighbor than a dweller in a remote city”.

Bioregional vs Traditional Regional Writing

Lawrence Buell also differentiates modern bioregional literature from traditional regional writing in The Future of Environmental Criticism, arguing that the former displays a “sense of vulnerability and flux” that is less pronounced in the latter. To support this point, he discusses Thomas Hardy’s 1887 novel The Woodlanders, in which the “villagers’ basic life- rhythms have scarcely changed for years and seem unlikely to do so in the future,” despite disasters that befall individuals (88).

In contrast, he offers Graham Swift’s 1983 Waterland, in which the residents of the East Anglian fenlands experience the world as a less stable and more porous place and are clearly affected by the “shock waves” from political and technological developments of the wider world, often in ways that affect their whole region.

Poems that Raise Bioregional Awareness

At the Planet Drum Foundation in San Francisco, a poem by Lew Welch is displayed on a wall of the office:

Step out onto the Planet. | Draw a circle a hundred feet round. | Inside the circle are 300 things nobody understands, and, maybe nobody’s ever really seen. How many can you find? “Ring of Bone” (1973)

When asked about the poem, Peter Berg replied simply, “poetry changes consciousness.” An important role of bioregionally minded critics is to identify literature such as Welch’s poem that raises bioregional and biospheric awareness.

Importance of Bioregional Thinking

Bioregional thinking consistently emphasizes practice and the ways theories and concepts emerge from the ground up. Consequently, bioregional literary criticism can encourage readers to connect the texts they read with their own lives, places, and practices, helping them imagine how to move, both physically and imaginatively, from the word to the world.

Working against larger cultural impulses to experience literature and other art as simply entertainment, escape, or intellectual or aesthetic exercise, bioregionally concerned critics cultivate an awareness of the implications of these creative expressions for readers’ lives in the here and now.

Bioregional literary critics can also challenge us to see the bioregional value in texts from a diversity of places different from our own.

Bioregional Vision

And critics can use literature to help us reimagine bioregionalism itself. For example, works of criticism that explore texts by African American and Chicano writers may challenge (white, middle-class, North American) assumptions about what it means to live responsibly and responsively in a particular place and thus help cultivate an awareness of environmental justice and its importance to the democratic aspirations of the bioregional vision. 

Significance of the Bioregional Perspective/Approach to Literature

A bioregional perspective, in turn, can remind readers and critics that texts grow out of the specific places that produced them (and their writers) - though certainly some texts make that more obvious than others.

As Cheney emphasizes in his essay on the postmodern bioregional narrative, a bioregional approach to literature challenges the notion of universal truths and values - not in a nihilistic way that rejects truth and value in general, but rather by valuing contextual discourse, which is grounded in and expressive of the diversity of specific places, over what he calls totalizing discourse, which ignores diversity and “assimilate[s] the world to it”.

By reflecting and respecting the context - both cultural and natural - of specific places, bioregional literature and criticism make a powerful statement that where you are matters.

From The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology & Place. Ed. Cheryll Glotfelty et al