Is There an Indian Way of Thinking about Comparative Literature?
E. V. Ramakrishnan
In her book, Playing in the Dark Tony Morrison argues that noble ideas of American democracy were outlined in relation to the slave’s black body: “What Africanism became for, and how it functioned in, the literary imagination is of paramount interest because it may be possible to discover, through a close look at literary ’blackness’ the nature−even the cause of – literary ’whiteness’“ (Morrison 1992: 9). She demonstrates how “whiteness“ becomes a diffuse value system suggesting individualism, mobility, equality, freedom, modernity, goodness and competence in the narrative of developed societies. “Whiteness“ may be substituted by similar dominant ideologies in the case of Asian or African societies. The inherent ethnocentrism in colonial and imperial narratives that parades as ’cosmopolitanism’ needs to be tracked to their sources. In the binaries of the universal and the local, the international and the national/regional and the univocal and the pluralistic, Comparative Literature studies need to resist hegemonic tendencies inherent in the universal, international and the univocal. Chinua Achebe puts it in unequivocal terms in the following statement: “I should like to see the word ’universal’ banned altogether from discussion of African literature until such time as people cease to use it as a synonym for the narrow, self-serving parochialism of Europe, until their horizon extends to include all the world“ (Achebe 1988: 51-52) By emphasizing the social in the construction of the literary, we demystify the very idea of literature. However this may not be true of all cultures. The shared world of ideas, collective ways of seeing and worldviews has a bearing on the material world we inhabit. Imagination cannot be conceived in individual terms alone. There can be no consciousness without image-making. It is this constitutive and constructive role of imagination that is foregrounded by terms such as “imagined communities,“ or “imagining desire,“ etc. in recent critical discourse. Issues of representation, language, memory, experience and desire are inherent in probing the nature of the relation between subject- formation and collective experience. Appadurai suggests that the moment of globalization has affected imagination as it “has broken out of the special expressive space of art, myth and ritual and has now become part of the quotidian mental work of ordinary people in many societies.“ (Appadurai 1997: 5). Though Appadurai’s context is different, there is no denying the fact that the relation between art and life has altered in a fundamental sense that invalidates several of the universalist discourses and assumptions. The formalist schools of criticism tended to attribute all imaginative functions only to individual acts of creativity. The manner in which literary forms emerge or decline, literary texts are received and internalized by society, language functions as a site of legitimating creative acts of sublimation or subversion or social/political movements capture the imagination of an entire generation, a larger participatory space of inter-subjective communication can be located in society. In his book, Social Imaginaries, Charles Taylor says: By “social imaginary“ I am thinking of the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations (Taylor 2007: 23). In his path-breaking treatise, The Imaginary Institution of Society, Cornelius Castoriadis who was the first to propose the idea of ’social imaginary’ defines it in terms of something fundamental and radical: The imaginary of which I am speaking is not an image of. It is the unceasing and essentially undetermined (social-historical and psychical) creation of figures/forms/images, on the basis of which alone there can ever be a question of something. What we call a “reality“ and “rationality“ are its works (Castoriadis 1987: 3) Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 |
Essays in this Forum
Rethinking the Global South
by Mukoma Wa Ngugi From Indian Literature to World Literature: A Conversation with Satya P. Mohanty by Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar and Rajender Kaur Asia in My Life by Ngugi wa Thiong'o The Global South and Cultural Struggles: On the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization by Duncan Mceachern Yoon The Fault Lines of Hindi and Urdu by Sanjay Kumar Reframing Colonialism and Modernity: An Endeavour through Sociology and Literature by Gurminder K. Bhambra Varieties of Cultural Chauvinism and the Relevance of Comparative Studies by Tilottoma Misra Literature to Combat Cultural Chauvinism: A Response by Shivani Jha Is There an Indian Way of Thinking about Comparative Literature? by E. V. Ramakrishnan Modernity and Public Sphere in Vernacular by Purushottam Agrawal West Indian Writers and Cultural Chauvinism by Jerome Teelucksingh Oral Knowledge in Berber Women’s Expressions of the Sacred by Fatima Sadiki |