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- Hospitality and Re-Orientalist Thresholds: Amit Chaudhuri Writes Back to IndiaPublication . Lau, Lisa; Mendes, Ana CristinaIn times of heightened, no-longer-linear migratory flows, when migrations oscillate and even double back on their own routes, this article interrogates the unwritten social contract of hospitality between host and guest. Taking as a case study Amit Chaudhuri’s returnee narrative, Calcutta: Two Years in the City (2013)—his personal account of relocation to India—this paper juxtaposes the mismatch between hospitalities assumed and experienced, from India’s lukewarm hospitality to the expectations of its elite (even celebrity) sojourner authors, now diasporic returnee migrants. The article highlights the tensions in negotiating host–guest roles, particularly when insider–outsider, stranger–native boundaries blur. It also raises the question of whether some degree of re-orientalism is therefore inevitable in the cosmopolitan returnee’s perceptions and subsequent representations of what was once ‘home’ and now is ‘home again’.
- Romancing the other: Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost HappinessPublication . Lau, Lisa; Mendes, Ana CristinaArundhati Roy’s second and latest novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness — which took her 10 years to write — is crammed full of misfits and outsiders, the flotsam and jetsam of India’s complex, stratified society. The novel is inhabited by cohorts of others: hijras, political rebels, the poor, women who will not “know their place”, and abandoned baby girls. The narrative of Roy’s latest political romance shows these others carving out new spaces for themselves, defying convention, trying possible new lives, and testing out new roles. This article aims to look at the texture of romance in Roy’s novels. Set within the narrative of Roy’s romance with India’s others, the article focuses on the Tilo–Musa romance in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and compares it with the Ammu–Velutha romance in the author’s first novel, The God of Small Things, published in 1997. Romance in Roy’s novels serves multiple purposes, as this article argues and unpacks. Mapping out the patterns of romance which Roy creates in both her novels, this analysis employs the trope of romance as a lens through which to offer a postcolonial reading of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, which interpenetrates intimacy and desire and the political. Deconstructing the (remarkably similar) romances at the heart of both of Roy’s novels reveals that her romances may not just be her rebuttal to India’s wrongs, but may even constitute a form of political rescue. We conclude that although Roy is purposeful in identifying and avoiding reorientalist representations, her rejection of abjection and victimhood, and her overt celebration of larger-than-life others, may have subverted the inferiorizing of the other, without, however, decreasing the process of othering.
- Sunjeev Sahota’s fictions of failed cosmopolitan convivialityPublication . Mendes, Ana CristinaSunjeev Sahota’s postcolonial fiction explores why and how young, male, working-class British Asians in post-industrial urban spaces in the Midlands of the UK are drawn to radicalization and militant interpretations of Islam. Sahota’s writings emerge from a young but remarkably dynamic literary subgenre of British Asian literary fiction which surged onto the literary scene in the wake of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981). Sahota’s work is set in Sheffield; his debut novel, Ours are the Streets (2011), which clinched him a place on the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list, was inspired by the 7/7 bombings and narrated the disaffection of Imtiaz Raina, a would-be suicide British bomber of Pakistani ancestry; his second novel, The Year of the Runaways, was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize. Sahota’s novels stand as a critique of cosmopolitanism, portraying a ‘crisis of conviviality’ (Georgiou 2017) within the metropolis. In ways that will be detailed through close reading of Ours are the Streets, Sahota’s 2011 novel mediates and explores the opacities and inconsistencies of present cosmopolitan experiences, anachronistically highlighted by the United States presidential election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the current post-Brexit cultural shock. This failed cosmopolitan conviviality is deeply tied up with issues around political literacy and class, as well as intolerance and Islamophobia, which have given rise to new-old forms of right-wing extremisms invested in combating neoliberal globalism (visible, for example, in the manifesto of the Traditionalist Worker Party in the US). The Trump election and Brexit, which came after the publication of Ours Are the Streets, should be situated in the same cultural-political milieu that brought in the ‘crisis of conviviality’ that Sahota details in the novel. In effect, these events can be interpreted as mainly an angry, white and downwardly social mobile response not only to the perceived hypocrisy of neoliberal politics (anti-establishment politics combined with the argument that transnational corporate free trade has not served anyone but corporations and their shareholders), but also the failure of cosmopolitan conviviality (the alleged ‘flatness’ of ostensible cosmopolitanism and political correctness, the protectorate and corrosive product of the liberal left).
- Wither the plurality of decolonising the curriculum? Safe spaces and identitarian politics in the arts and humanities classroomPublication . Mendes, Ana Cristina; Lau, LisaContributing to the debate on decolonising the curriculum, this reflective article questions: What does a safe space in a decolonised classroom mean? For whom is it safe? And at what cost? Must we redraw the parameters of ‘safe’? Prompted by a real-life ‘n-word incident’ in the classroom, this article unpacks the collision of decolonising the curriculum to continue making teaching and learning more pluriversal and inclusive, with the enactment of the ‘wounded attachments’ of identitarian politics and the playing of ‘Privilege or Oppression Olympics’. Using snippets from British parody and satire on decolonising the university, we query how far wokeness in a university setting can become political correctness taken to extremes that threaten decolonising efforts. In its concluding reflections, the article makes tentative recommendations for setting up safe spaces, away from self-silencing or censoring, and backing away from contention and provocation in the classroom.
- Decolonising English Studies from the Semi-PeripheryPublication . Mendes, Ana CristinaThis book investigates how decolonising the curriculum might work in English studies — one of the fields that bears the most robust traces of its imperial and colonial roots — from the perspective of the semi-periphery of the academic world- system. It takes the University of Lisbon as a point of departure to explore broader questions of how the field can be rethought from within, through Anglophone (post)coloniality and an institutional location in a department of English, while also considering forces from without, as the arguments in this book issue from a specific, liminal positionality outside the Anglosphere. The first half of the book examines the critical practice of and the political push for decolonising the university and the curriculum, advancing existing scholarship with this focus on semi-peripheral perspectives. The second half comprises two theoretically-informed and classroom-oriented case studies of adaptation of the literary canon, a part of model syllabi that are designed to raise awareness of and encourage an understanding of a global, pluriversal literary history.
- Salman Rushdie and Visual Art and CulturePublication . Mendes, Ana CristinaIn The Moor’s Last Sigh, Vasco Miranda describes the artist Aurora Zogoiby’s work as an ‘Epico-Mythico-Tragico-Comico-Super-Sexy-High-Masala-Art’ in which the unifying principal was‘Technicolor-Story-Line’ (Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 1995). Arguably this seems also like a fitting description for Rushdie’s own form of writing. This chapter considers Rushdie’s visual style of story-telling, by using, for example, ekphrasis. It also highlights the wider context of how his work engages with art and visual culture, for example, the intertextual relationship in The Moor’s Last Sigh between Aurora Zogoiby and the artist, Amrita Sher-Gill. Beyond this, Rushdie has collaborated with artists such as Anish Kapoor and Tom Phillips and engaged with the issues of portraiture. Linking debates around visual representation and celebrity, this chapter explores the wider context between Rushdie’s own forms of writing and their engagement with visual storytelling and visual aesthetics.
- Hospitality and Amnesty: Aravind Adiga’s Narrative of Legal LiminalityPublication . Mendes, Ana Cristina; Lau, LisaAmnesty continues several of the social justice themes of precarity and subalternity (at times, a violent subaltern agency) of Aravind Adiga’s fiction, and its literary narrative centres again on criminal acts and the moral dilemma the protagonist faces over whether to report a murder and expose his illegality to do “the right thing.” Offering a postcolonial reading of Amnesty supported by concepts from migration, citizenship, and human rights studies, this essay discusses the novel’s representation of the inhospitable conditions experienced by migrants victimized by the precarity of their status, whether discursively categorized as illegal, irregular, undocumented, unauthorized, or unlawful; by the consequent exploitations and abuse without recourse to justice; and by the suspension of their human rights. The theme of illegality is approached in Adiga’s narrative from a more radical perspective of liminality – the state of “legal liminality” in which irregular migrants find themselves when longing to belong in the host country, or at least be legalized, while gripped and besieged by myriad daily fears and anxieties that their legal status will be discovered, compounded by a resolute refusal to leave the host country. Adiga forces this theoretical question of legal liminality to an extreme by presenting a protagonist who, as an irregular migrant, has committed the political crime of illegally overstaying in the host country. The central question of amnesty is raised when the protagonist faces the dilemma of stepping up to civic responsibilities without having been conceded participatory rights.