A Saturday Fiesta of Sorts...!

Scott Slovic on “Reading Cats & Dogs”

&

Nirmal Selvamony on “neo-tinai and Animals”

06 March 2021 | JAC, Periakulam

Professor Scott Slovic, founding President of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), gave an impactful talk based on his just released book titled, Reading Cats & Dogs: Companion Animals in World Literature, at the One Day International Webinar on Literary & Cultural Animal Studies, organized by the PG Department of English, Jayaraj Annapackiam College for Women (Autonomous), Periakulam, Theni District, Tamil Nadu.

Dr. Jeyapriya, Head, Department of English & Foreign Languages, Mother Teresa Women’s University, Kodaikanal, gave an insightful inaugural that elegantly set the tone and the ambience to this International Webinar.

Professor Scott Slovic alluded to Dr. Jeyapriya’s talk, and then went on to speak from his just released book on ‘Cats & Dogs’.

Excerpts from Professor Slovic’s Talk -

From the western American state of Oregon where I live, It’s Friday evening where I am, and it’s 8.30!

I’m going to talk to you about a new book, called,

Reading Cats & Dogs: Companion Animals in World Literature (Lexington Books, 2021), that I helped to create in the past few years, and that helped to study particular aspects of animals and culture.

Specifically on companion animals in world literature.

The aspect of the field that I’ve been working on recently, really focusses on a sub category of animals that live with and among human beings sometimes on the edges of our society that have come to be called companion animals.

The image here on my first slide, is a leash or a lead where we often find ourselves connected with our animals, where we lead them and they lead us! We find ourselves connected never quite sure who is the leader and who is the follower. Especially if we achieve a meaningful reciprocity with these companions who share our lives.

So over the past few years I’ve worked with colleagues from France, Brazil and Netherlands, to compile a book that was just published in the first few months of this year!

The book consists of 14 chapters with contributors from 13 countries, ranging from Asia to Europe to Africa to Latin America, trying to give a snapshot of the many ways in which literary works from vastly different cultures contemplate companion animals, sometimes in similar ways, sometimes in strikingly different ways. And obviously this is not encyclopedic, and absolutely comprehensive, but nonetheless there’s such a range of different cultural perspectives represented we believe we’ve demonstrated that the idea of literary representations of animals is quite ubiquitous in diverse countries from around the world.

And some of the key themes in the book that are represented by the major sections of the book are stray and feral companions, which immediately disrupt the notion that, companion animals live immediately in our domestic spheres - that they share our households always, that we consider them family members. 

In various cultures, companion animals are not really part of the household at all, but live their own independent lives. They have their own identities, communities, their own families and they live in our midst. But they have a kind of wildness and independence to their lives.

Part of the idea of the opening section is to disrupt and complicate the notion of what it means for a member of another species to be a human companion.

The second section focusses on the usefulness of companion animals. The idea that companion animals are not merely inhabitants of our experience but that they actually serve human beings in certain ways, and I mean that with a sense of agency, that they are not servile and underlings, but that they contribute powerfully to human experience.

When I say, ‘serve’ that can mean actually serving in practical ways such as protecting our homes or helping us in our farming or other kinds of activities. There is a chapter in that part of the book focusing on hunting dogs which will play a very useful role in literature for writers who are involved in the experience of hunting, but also they can be sources of inspiration for artists.

The third section emphasizes the idea of problematizing companion animals complicating our understanding of the way they are interrelated with human culture and also not assuming that companion animals always live positive lives amidst human society. There are many cases where companion animals suffer terribly, and really do not benefit at all from their interactions with human beings. There are chapters in this book that represent that, in a grim and dark way but also in a realistic way, trying to show the truth of our interactions of our animals that live closely among us.

And then finally, this is the part of the book that I will particularly emphasise when I talk to you today. There is an interesting epilogue in which the four editors from very different personal and cultural backgrounds offer personal essays about their own attachments to animal companions. We tell our individual stories.

The book emerged from a Conference that took place in Toulouse, France, in March of 2019 – so two years ago! And here we see images of the poster of the conference which later became the cover of the book, and this is the building – a beautiful castle like building where we held this meeting.

Actually the photograph for the poster and the photograph of the cover on the book is a picture of my own companion animal – a ten-year old German Shepherd dog named Hannah, and I’d talk more about Hannah later in this lecture, and in the photograph she’s sitting with a young friend of ours near our home, in Oregon.

I organized the conference with Francoise Besson in the hopes of introducing her to Zelia Bora and Marianne Marroum – and encouraging them to do a book together, these colleagues all of them from literature, are people that I've met in some of my world travels to give lectures on various aspects of ecocriticism and environmental literature. In my travels I’ve often met colleagues whom I thought should really meet each other, and work on interesting projects together.

In this case, we were able to bring Zelia from Brazil and Marianne from Lebanon to France for a week to participate in a conference and also tour around and see something of the countryside.

We saw some donkeys in the field, and they were so excited! All three of them have a particular love for cats and all three of them live with many cats in their homes.  

They had a strong sense of my own interest in companion animals and asked me to join the editorial team. Part of the sense came from my role in organizing the conference on animal love which pursues a variety of different aspects of animal love, not only the affection and attachment from humans towards non-human animals, and from animals towards humans, but also the way animals themselves interact with each other and display certain types of interests and detachment.

This image here is from the very final session of that 2019 conference where I proposed that we had a group reading - a kind of a collective reading - of a famous poem about humans and animals – by the American poet Pattiann Rogers, the poem is called, “Animals and People: The Human Heart in Conflict with Itself”.

Here is the picture of me reading the English version of the first part of the poem, and my colleague reading a French translation.

Here’s a little passage from the poem showing how confused we are, as human beings, in the way we think about animals - Our conflicted and contradictory attitude towards animals and these are some of the words from Patttiann Rogers –

We adore them and we curse

them. We caress them and we ravish them.

We want them

to acknowledge us and be with us.

We want them to disappear

and be autonomous.

We abhor their viciousness and lack

of pity, as we abhor our own

viciousness and lack of pity.

We love them and we reproach them,

just as we love

and reproach ourselves.

It’s kind of a fascinating unpacking of the conflicted complicated ambivalence we feel toward all animals.

And I think may be it’s a nice idea, if I contribute nothing else to this conference, for me at least - to invoke Patiaan Rogers’ elegant words which reveal the complexity of human thinking about animals. And if you were to look at the larger poem which I believe you can find online, you can see the many different layers of the way Rogers thinks about people and animals.

Here’s a picture of how we all lined up, participant after participant to take turns reading passages from this beautiful poem about animals and people.

So two years after the conference, and, we now have the book “Reading Cats and Dogs”. And here are a few very broad lessons.

There is a vast amount of literature across the wide world that directly or obliquely addresses the complexities of our relationships with animal companions, but relatively little literary criticism concerned with this literature in a multinational context.

And that’s actually what the book is. Apart from the epilogue which is a personal collection of four personal stories of the editors’ attachment to companion animals.

The rest of the book is literary criticism focusing on a variety of different textual representations of how different cultures respond to and contemplate relationships with other species. Particularly cats and dogs, but not only cats and dogs.

We thought the title ‘reading cats and dogs’ had a catchy sound to it. Kind of like the old saying, raining cats and dogs, when it’s raining really hard; and we thought reading cats and dogs played with that familiar phrase, and also has a sort of a double entendre in that it implies reading the literature of cats and dogs, and actually reading the lives of cats and dogs, and in a broader sense, other species.

Also, one of the broad lessons of this project has been the idea that animals who live among us - may also live poignant lives beside or on the fringes of human society, as stray or feral – or even wild – presences.

And I’m sure in your own lives in India, you can take many examples of this – you feel that you have some kind of relationship with animals that are really up to their own business – you are not controlling them, no human being is controlling them – and yet humans do form certain kinds of attachments to them nonetheless. And this came through pretty strongly to me in reading the articles we received for this book – that there is a strong interest in the independent autonomous lives of animals who are also in a certain sense, companions to human beings.

The opening section includes chapters about stray and feral animals in the US, South Africa, Russia, Turkey, Kuwait, the UK, Sri Lanka, and China.

Niroshini Gunasekara (University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka) – her house is a refuge for abandoned cats, 12 of them;

About Michael Ondaatje’s memoir Running in the Family, she writes:

“Animals play an important role in [the author’s father’s] life.  They are mainly stray animals or wild creatures who are as solitary as he was. These stray animals were social outcasts whom we consider with affection, although they are kept at a distance due to accepted social norms.” (96) She writes about dogs, polecats, a cobra etc, and various other animals that abound in MO’s family in Sri Lanka.

There’s also a very interesting chapter about stray cats in Turkey. Shows how intricately interwoven in the neighbourhood these street cats are, even though they are technically not owned by anyone.

The next two sections of the book focus on the usefulness of Companion Animals and Problematising Companion Animals... ...

That brings us to the end of Professor Scott Slovic’s impactful talk.

*****

Now over to Dr Nirmal Selvamony’s Talk - 

[Excerpts] 

I would like to dedicate this talk to my friend and colleague Lakshman who passed away three years ago. He was a rationalist and also an atheist. His email address also used in Latin form of the words reason and rational in English – rationious – he used to send me emails every now and then.

This particular story that I am going to narrate to you now, is about an amazing story he shared with me.

It’s about Laurence Antony, an international conservationist from South Africa, and he is the author of three books including the best seller ‘The Elephant Whisperer”.

I quote this message that Antony sent me. Antony bravely rescued wildlife and rehabilitated elephants from all over the globe from human atrocities including the courageous rescue of Baghdad zoo in Iraq, animals during US invasion in 2003.

On 07 March 2012, Laurence Anthony died. He is remembered and missed by his wife, two sons and two grand sons and numerous elephants.

Two days after his passing, the wild elephants showed up at his home, led by two large matriarchs. Separate wild herds arrived in droves to say goodbye to their beloved man friend. Walking slowly for days making their way in a solemn one-by-one cue from their habitat to his house, Laurence’s wife was especially touched, knowing that the elephants had not been to his house prior to that day for well over three years.

A total of thirty one elephants had walked over 112 miles to get to his South African house. Witnessing this spectacle, humans were obviously in awe not only because of the supreme intelligence and precise timing that these elephants sensed about Laurence’s passing away, but also because of the profound memory and emotions that the beloved animals evoked in such an organized way, but yet they knew where they were going.

The elephants obviously wanted to pay their deep respects honouring their friend who had saved their lives. So much respect that they stayed two days and two nights without eating anything.

And one morning they left, making their long journey back home. This narrative that Lakshman sent me ends with this quote – something in the universe is greater and deeper than human intelligence.

The second story is about my meeting with Jane Goodall the ethologist on 22 January 2007. 

[On an aside, this blogger was also blessed to be with Dr. Nirmal on this particular day. You may want to read the blog report of that particular Jane Goodall event at the British Council, Chennai, on our blog HERE.]

As you know, she is a renowned conservationist who spent many years studying chimpanzees in Africa. In a conversation with her in the lawns of the British Council, over a cup of tea, she narrated an incident she witnessed in the jungle in Africa. She said, she saw the chimpanzee standing in front of a water fall on a moonlit night, in a posture which could only be described as one that was appropriate in an act of prayer. That’s my second story.

From these two stories and also from our own good intuitions we know that the argument that the other animals can neither produce a tolkaapiyam or a computer is no good to prove the superiority of humans.

If responsible good life which ensures such life for all beings is the parameter of superiority, I’m sure you’d all agree with me that humans will fare very poorly, won’t they?

Now we know enough about other animals to know that we do not know enough about them. 

Study about other animals or Animal Studies should help us not only to know enough about other animals but also make us realise our ignorance about them, the infinite distance between them and us. 

Unless we realise this distance between them we have no hope of realizing how our being interpenetrates theirs. Animal Studies supposedly helps focus on animals, and human and other animal relations, but Animal Studies in the Humanities especially Ecocriticism has to pay attention to all non-human entities - plants, land, water, among others.

To gain understanding of human relation to the nonhuman world, and to engage with everyday human – non-human interaction, animal studies has to dialogue with studies of other constituents of the non human world like Plant studies, Earth Studies and so on.

Why?

We are already a community of human and non-human members. At tinai, an oikos, scholarly attention to just one member of this primordial home, like anthropology or Animal Studies will not do!

To be continued…

 Dr. Nirmal with the vibrant Organising Team! 

Congratulations Benitta...!

Media Misrepresentation vs Reality | Benitta Linjo Pozhil

Congratulations to Ms. Benitta Linjo Pozhil for having authored a very profound study on the Media Misrepresentation of the Neithal Community, in her book titled, “Media Misrepresentation vs Reality: Neithal Community through Kadal Adi”.

Giving us all snippets from the Foreword to this lovely book – Dr.Ganesh –

I am very happy to write this Foreword to the book written by Ms. Benitta Linjo Pozhil titled, Media Misrepresentation Vs Reality: Neithal Community through Kadal Adi. I have known Benitta for the past seven years and have had many opportunities to see her as a diligent and dedicated student, who has constantly striven for an interface between Literature and Life. This work by her is extremely germane both to the research world and the world at large as it foregrounds the plight and predicament of indigenous people, which need attention as well as redressal. The book states, with utmost clarity, the misconceptions perpetrated about the indigenous people.

The author brings out the meaningful connect between the landscapes and the indigenous people using the concept of Tinai as explicated in Sangam literature of the Tamils. She quite prudently locates a distinct group of the indigenous people, the fisher folk, with Neithal Tinai, a landscape associated with the seashore. Besides this, she positions the indigenous people within the geopolitical world called the Fourth World. Alluding to Shuswap Chief George Manual’s book, The Fourth World: The Indian Reality, this book deals with the language and culture of the indigenous people focusing on cultural memories and orality which preserves the memories.

The book, then, focusses on the indigenous fishing community which has inhabited this world since time immemorial. It convincingly traces the different trajectories of the lives of the Aboriginals using critical parameters such as Double Colonisation to argue that the non-indigenous be it individuals, governments or corporates have treated the aboriginals with disdain. The author implicates the media in the creation of false constructs with regard to the Indigenous peoples. The book also states that those who undermine these peoples do not realise that the distinct worldview of the indigenous peoples show them as a highly evolved people having consequential ties with the world of nature, which has become the bedrock of their metaphysical view.

The significant part of the book concerns itself with the novel Kadal Adi by Kurumpanai C. Berlin. Published in 2017 by New Century Book House, the novel, the book argues, is undoubtedly one of the best documentations of the Kanyakumari District fisher folk’s life. The book also argues that Kadal Adi is a subversive text that radically questions the false constructs regarding the fisher folk. The author brilliantly argues that the fisher folk share the characteristic features of the sea as they live in communion with the sea. In keeping with deep ecological principles, the book argues for the relevance and importance of the fisher folk in the mosaic of human culture. The book makes out a case for the fisher folk by sensitively appraising their lives and demolishing the false constructs regarding them. Kadal Adi, which is studied in this book, is indubitably a significant contribution to Indigenous Studies,

writes Dr. Ganesh.

On behalf of everyone of us at the Research Department of English, Madras Christian College, Chennai, we extend our congratulations to Ms. Benitta, and we also wish her many many more such delightful academic laurels in the years to come.

PS: Copies of the book are now available on Amazon Kindle, HERE.

One-Day International Seminar on Literary & Cultural Animal Studies...!

 

Google Form for Registration - HERE

The Brochure - HERE

Painting Dreams...

Painting Dreams | Prof. Aparna

Imagine a book that paints beautiful dreams ethereal with the brush of positivity, using the vibrant colours of hope, happiness, love, and coffee?

Bliss of the highest order, ain’t it?

And that’s exactly what Prof. Aparna’s anthology of poems titled, Painting Dreams is all about!

‘Poetry is the language of the soul’, says Prof. Aparna. ‘It is also a magic pill that tranquilises the mind’, she adds, in her Editorial to this Anthology.

This anthology proves unique for any many reasons.

Firstly, the poems have been penned by poets from all walks of life – be it authors, professors, doctors, engineers, homemakers or students – you have them all here! Such a kaleidoscopic, variegated sprinkle of poetry of all hues makes this book all the more appealing to the reader.

Secondly, this collection is born of a passion – an intense passion for poetry. ‘As a poet I wanted to do something for the art form I love the most, and hence I wish to dedicate this book to the genre of poety’, says Prof. Aparna, on the reason behind this noble venture.

The Foreword by Dr. P. Jeyappriya, [Head, Department of English & Foreign Languages, Mother Teresa Women’s University, Kodaikanal, TN] also authenticates and attests beautifully to this ‘hope’ and ‘positivity’ quotient that pervades the length and breadth of this lovely poetry Anthology.

‘All the 53 enchanting poems by 49 effervescent poets brim with hope bearing witness to the resilience of the human spirit’, writes Dr. Jeyappriya on the Foreword to the book.

Thirdly, all the poems have been handpicked and curated meticulously in alphabetical order.

Right from Dr. Abdul Hadi’s call for having hope and positivity as one’s forte, every poem has a touch and a sprinkle of either hope or happiness or positivity or love or coffee to its texture!

Finally, the vibrant cover design, along with the excellent paper quality make it a delectable visual treat to the reader. 

Our heartiest congratulations to Prof. Aparna on coming out with this wonderful, inspiring book of poetry, and we wish her many many more laurels in the years to come.

Congratulations Sangamithra...!

The Lonely Wanderer | Sangamithra Nataraj

Hearty congratulations to Ms Sangamithra Nataraj on publishing her next book titled, The Lonely Wanderer.

 

The Lonely Wanderer is about the conservation efforts undertaken by the SSTCN volunteers in Neelankarai beach with regards to the Olive Ridley Turtle population. The added beauty of the book is that, a few of the chapters have been written from the point of view of the turtle to give some additional perspective from their side as well.

 Copies of the book, can be purchased at the Amazon e-store HERE!

Sangamithra Nataraj is a poet, short story writer and novelist. She is known for her collections of haiku poetry – The Wolf in the Mountains and Going Back Home!

She is also the author of the fantasy series – The Chronicles of Elthry’ha which is being published by Woolf Press. She has also published five short stories in anthologies, and is planning on publishing a full solo collection.

You may view Sangamithra’s author page - HERE.

Congratulations Dear Sir...!

Hearty Congratulations to dear Dr. Nirmal Selvamony on being conferred with the Excellent Tamil Scholar Award by the Tiruchirapalli Chapter of the Indian Medical Association at 5 pm on 07 February 2021.

We wish our dear Sir many many more laurels in the years to come.

Bonding over Books...

For the Love of Good Books, Good Coffee & Good Friends...

Nineteen years ago – when we both were colleagues, we used to regularly bond over books and coffee – quite as often as we could!

Those were the days when networking sites were literally unheard of!

Any book exhibit, mela, fest, store or stack, we first browsed through the day's newspapers, took note of the date and time... and voila! we were there! and yes! we still do! (We were called LASER Babus back then!).

Yesterday, when we met yet again, as we usually do, - over a cuppa strong coffee – at Anna Nagar, Chennai, nostalgic recollections started flooding in - of those good ol’ days in the past, when we both, as happy, go-lucky bachelors, were making hay or making the most of our bachelor’s days bonding over good books and good coffee!]

And yesterday, on our rendezvous, to the ‘sweet surprise’ of both of us, after almost fifteen minutes into our literary discussions, he surprised me with a lovely book - as usual, - and me too ‘surprised’ him with a lovely book, as usual! ;-)

You may want to read yet another wistful rumination involving buddy and me, from 2003, that I’ve recollected in this past post HERE!

Blessed literally to have such good friends in our lives – friends who cherish books, discuss books, love books, relish books and bond over books!

So overwhelmed was I, that, in my lecture class today, I decided to acknowledge the gift, and do a small dedication to buddy Prem, for our mutual love of books!

You may access the YouTube link to today's class video HERE!

For the love of books, coffee and good friendship!

PS: By the way, please don’t forget the Chennai Book Fair that starts on 24 February 2021! Just a couple of weeks to go!

'I remember a whole summer sitting in my room at Oxford trying to write my dissertation and not being able to find any theoretical framework which I could adopt...'

Professor Homi K Bhabha LiVE …

8.30 PM | 01 February 2021

The Legendary Homi K Bhabha, considered one among the famous ‘trinity of Postcolonial Studies’, delivered the 60^th Lecture of the Calcutta Comparatists’ online lecture series, this evening at 8.30 pm.

Excerpts from his Illuminating Interactive Session -  

Question: You’ve started your journey from Mumbai and then to London and then to Chicago. As a boy from Mumbai, what made you interested in Postcolonial theory and criticism?

Homi K Bhabha: I didn’t start off with the availability of a Postcolonial theory as we know it today, although it is a term that has many definitions and many takes on the definition.

It was not a term of art, criticism or school or theory.

I did my English literature from Elphinstone College [University of Mumbai] and then at Oxford. [M.A., M.Phil., and D.Phil. in English Literature from Christ Church, Oxford University]

When I did my dissertation, at Oxford, I decided to work on V S Naipaul. He was a controversial choice, because as you know, he is greatly admired by many writers, including me, but many people from the postcolonial world at that time found that he was not sympathetic to the postcolonial cause. They found him as a ‘19^th century liberal’.

I found that problem very fascinating. I found the conflict or the tension between admiring a writer profoundly for his vision, insights and the richness of his perspectives, and yet having differences with that writer’s politics and his views on history and society.

When I started working on Naipaul, there was no postcolonial theory to appeal to, or to address or to help in my own work. The available theories that were actually quite useful were the Marxist and Structuralist theories at that time.

That’s how I got into this area, and then of course I discovered the work of Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak.

Even at that time, Said had been known for his work on Orientalism – the idea of postcoloniality emerged only later.

My own journey started through English literature. But then, when I started reading texts from the colonial world and the postcolonial world, I began to see the kind of critical apparatus of European literary theory didn’t quite answer the questions I was asking. It didn’t look at the history of literature from the perspective that I wanted to. And Naipaul for me was very important.

Because if you think of one of his famous books, A House for Mr. Biswas, you begin to see the tensions or paradoxes I’m taking about. The book is avowedly a kind of Dickensian novel. Naipaul was a great admirer of Dickens, and so he wrote a kind of 19^th century Dickensian style of novel full of anecdotes, full of characters, depth of perspective on the society of the Caribbean, Trinidad in particular from which it came. It was saturated with the spirit of the 19^th century novel, partly a historical novel, partly a novel of everyday life.

But at the centre of a 19^th century novel, is the notion of a hero, that’s why they call it a Bildungsroman – a character whose biography as it were, works through the novel, creating a sense of accommodation to his or her society although there are moments of dissatisfaction with that society.

At the end of the day, the Bildungsroman is a novel of coming to terms with your society, coming to terms with your fate. And here at the heart of this novel, you have this tragic-comic character Biswas who never felt accommodated!

That’s why the title – A House for Mr. Biswas! Right through the novel, he lives is various people’s houses, he builds his own houses, but he never has a sense that he really belongs – that he’s really been able to occupy a space that he feels at home in!

And so I thought how interesting that the formal apparatus of a bildungsroman or a 19^th century European form is being used to tell the story of a figure from a colonial world, a descendant of indentured labour, - a novel which looks at slavery and indentured labour, huge forms of displacement and diasporic upheavals after all the families like the one that Naipaul describes, came in the 1850s, from India and settled in the Caribbean, and the Indian indentured labourers were also misfits between the black slave society and the white slave owners.

So these kinds of social and cultural conflicts made me think about what we then began to formulate as ‘postcolonial critical thought’.

Question: So we can say that this was a very specific event or incident that actually led to an orientation towards this theory –

Homi K Bhabha: In my case, yes! I remember a whole summer sitting in my room at Oxford trying to write my dissertation and not being able to find any theoretical framework which I could adopt, and therefore I felt for myself at least that I needed to create a kind of an approach to this body of work. And then of course, I extended it to look at a number of other problems, a number of other writers and artists.

So I’ve been writing as much about artists as I do about writers, and hence my writing is very much trans-disciplinary and intersectional.

Question: Thanks to that dissertation and that day in Oxford, that we have so many books by you… Coming back to your work, how do you think an author’s idea, and relationship with Utopia, get shaped with the changing trajectory of postcolonial literatures?

Homi K Bhabha: That’s a very interesting question. I don’t believe that in the main, the ideal of utopianism is the foundation of at least the postcolonial writers and thinkers that I myself focus on or work with.

I think, first of all, let’s talk about utopia. When you have utopian thinking, you naturally have dystopian thinking. Utopia and dystopia they come together, they work together. So it’s a kind of binary formation.

And I think, that the form of historical struggle, resistance and survival that afflicts many postcolonial societies does not simply give them the privilege of either Utopianism, which is a certain kind of historical vanity, however good it might be, to assume that you can have a Utopia depends upon a certain sense of sustainability, a certain sense of confidence in the world.

And dystopia, sometimes can be an indulgence, that you think everything is falling apart, and the two are continually balancing each other. I think the many parts of the world that I’m interested in, balance somehow between the two.

There are often these writers who come from these countries, and in their works they reflect these societies where the utopian ideal is very difficult to envisage, and because they have to survive on a day to day basis, against the asymmetries of power, against forms of domination, against forms of oppression, they cannot afford to be dystopic – to put it in a metaphoric phrase – however melancholic, they have to get up and work – they have to do what they have to do – they’ve to face reality. So I don’t think utopia and dystopia are the major forms I have detected in these fictions.

Now it is the case that in the immediate moments after anticolonial struggle has succeeded, and you have confronted your own freedom, the hour of midnight as Nehru put it, then there are moments where you do feel, the whole future is yours, the world is yours.

But as the great writer and thinker and political revolutionary Frantz Fanon was able to see very quickly, - and Fanon has been a great influence in my own life, and in my own work, - as soon as you emerge into this world of what you think is freedom and autonomy, you begin to see the problems outside because as a new postcolonial, independent country, you have suffered 200 years and more of colonialism, then you become dependent on the IMF, the Washington consensus, on huge loans to make your own society, to rebuild and shape your own society the way in which you want it.

Almost at the very moment in which freedom comes at midnight, you begin to see the high noon of difficult decisions and complex decisions and particularly at that time, at that historical moment, you had a cold war going on!

So new nations either had to align themselves with the socialist societies or with the capitalist liberal societies. You became a victim in their war as much as you kept saying, we are non-aligned nations. It was not realistic to be non-aligned. And Fanon also says, as soon as you begin to have a national bourgeoisie that is dependent on foreign aid, on foreign powers, then you also have a conflict of loyalty, you have corruption emerging into those systems partly because they are systems that do not have their own economic sustainability that is being depleted through the long years of colonialism.

So these are very complicated situations which is why I don’t think the utopian and the dystopian are models that in my view have been illuminating for me.

What has been illuminating for me is the way in which a lot of postcolonial literature has made very powerful critiques of the vanity of notions of western progress, western success, western notions of consent, western notions of citizenship, western notions of sovereignty.

Many diasporic writers, even as they emigrated to these great metropolitan centres, began to see the shortfall between what these once imperial metropolitan centres claimed for themselves and how they actually practiced their ideals on which they were based.

So I see the notion of critique, both formal and ideological, as being very important. But more recently, in thinking about the space between utopia and dystopia, I’ve been fascinated by the thoughts of Locke and Adorno!

To be continued…