2010 Winter Newsletter - South Asian Literary Association

PAGE 16 NEWSLETTER
tive to new use, setting up the personal confession as a way of
“confessing” to racial anger at discrimination as well as racialized
desire.
Scott Teal, Wolfson College, Oxford University, UK
Three Emergencies: Nayantara Sahgal, Rohinton Mistry,
and Salman Rushdie’s Representations of the 1975 Indian
Emergency'
Situating the representations of the 1975 Indian Emergency in
the works of Salman Rushdie, Nayantara Sahgal, and
Rohinton Mistry, this paper seeks to inspect the different registers
of realism in Midnight's Children, Rich Like Us, and A Fine
Balance. It attempts to question the efficacy of reading Rushdie
against social realist modes, and to put forth a more continuous
and comparative framework of realisms at work in the
novels.
Pennie Ticen, Virginia Military Institute, VA
Skeptical Belief and Faithful Questioning: Interrogating
Realism and Bolstering Mythology in The Satanic Verses
The 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie appears to have cemented
an irreconcilable division between the novelistic world
of Ovidian refashioning and the material world of death-threat
-driven seclusion brought about by religious/spiritual dogmatism.
But does The Satanic Verses itself recognize an absolute
division between the worlds of mythology and realism? Or
does it posit places where, in Rushdie’s words, a “third principle
[exists] that mediates between the material and spiritual
[mythological] worlds…[and can] offer us something new—
something that might even be called a secular definition of
transcendence?”
Stephanie Yorke, Wolfson College, Oxford University, UK
Materiality, Construction, and the Disabled Body in
Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey and A Fine Balance
In my presentation, I will apply a disability studies framework
to consider the internal tensions between a realistic construction
of the disabled body and Rohinton Mistry’s metaphorical,
anti-materialist use of that body. While Mistry’s ablebodied
characters are developed as both material and symbolic
beings, disabled characters are often marginalised in a purely
symbolic realm, and the symbolic role of their disability
supersedes their role as embodied players. Disabled characters
are valorised in the novel, but at the expense of their exclusion
from normative material life.
Brian Yothers, University of Texas at El Paso, TX
Diasporic Realisms, Hybrid Genres: The Social Texture of
Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate
Realism has often seemed to be far removed from verse, but
the verse novel has offered an opportunity for poets to create
realist texts that examine the social texture of the cultures that
they represent. Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate is a powerful
example of the realist potential of verse. Seth provides a layered
representation of the realities of class, race, gender, and
sexuality in 1980s San Francisco. Seth’s transnational positioning
means that he is able to narrate the social, artistic, and
sexual milieu of 1980s San Francisco with the transparency of
perspective associated with realist paradigms.
Abdollah Zahiri, Seneca College, Toronto, Canada
Bhakti Realism
This paper seeks to investigate the Bhakti movement’s efforts
to dismantle the ‘reality’ that guaranteed the perpetuation of
the hegemonic power structure in the caste-ridden India. This
utopic yearning to topple domination betrays a yearning for
inventing a subaltern reality that supersedes the tyrannical
reality. This subaltern reality seeks to establish egalitarianism,
social justice and tolerance. It is a demand for a ‘better ‘ reality.
This paper seeks to investigate this potential embedded in
the rich poetry of the Bhakti movement. This paper also seeks
to investigate this poetic justice that laid the foundations for
future change and social mobility to come.
Bonnie Zare, University of Wyoming, and Afsar Mohammed,
University of Texas
Burning Saris and Houses: Activism through Poetic Discourse
One way in which bodies are disciplined to perform gender is
through clothing. Two contemporary Telugu poems, Jayaprabha’s
“Burn the Sari” (1988; English 2002) and Jupaka
Subadhra’s “Kongu, No Sentry on my Bosom” (2007; 2009),
unpack the function of a particular piece of clothing, the sari,
and consider the degree to which it and the female body are
confining to women. This talk compares the two poems’ activist
goals and explores how one poem may offer an alternative
way of thinking about the daily work of household and family
preservation and the sari’s aid as a tool for survival in that
work.