My paper examines Geetanjali Shree's That Empty Space (2011) as a representative case of the novel's contribution to the emergence of Indian public sphere, functioning as a mediator among a variety of cultural and political realms. More specifically, I suggest that descriptions of bodies and spaces sustain an affective charge which relies on a wider process reinscription and remediation in the contemporary Indian mediascape. The paper moves from the assumption that postcolonial epistemologies' reliance on the colonizer/colonized model of power and cultural interaction have often led to a levelling out of our awareness of the changes occurred in over six decades of post-independence cultural politics in India. Indeed, according to Homi Bhabha, sidelining the ideologies behind subaltern identities and competing affiliative processes of social action poses the danger of creating "a hasty equivalence between public spheres, normalising forms of social difference, and 'moralising' divergent strategies of subordination, oppression, or resistance into a hasty and homogenous interpellation of shared victimage" (Bhabha 1997:123). As a consequence, this critical trend has often mistaken public sphere as a whole for its domain of representational techniques, thus continuing in the vein of previous institutional critiques insofar as it has resulted in the simplistic demand for the unbiased and proportionate display of images of women and other oppressed subjects among different media. Operating between the binaries of master and slave, this cultural practice aims at drawing hidden bodies and their histories out into the 'public', refusing to acknowledge what Bhabha has termed the intimate betweenness which both unites and separates private and public. In partial contrast to this approach, I discuss how Shree's dwelling on the connections between bodies, places, textual production and media in her works does not serve the purpose of providing a mere representation of private stories otherwise striving to be brought out into the light. On the contrary, her novels originate from the necessity to delve into the location of writing conceived as a 'field of forces' fuelled by the interaction between bodily practices, affects and media representations, in print and on television in particular. I draw my use of the term field in part from Pierre Bourdieu's idea of literary field as a nexus binding authors, readers, texts and discourses (Bourdieu 1992), and partly on Brian Massumi's concept of field of exteriority (which is in turn indebted to Michel Foucault's principle of esteriority) whereby the novel and other media can be said to engage in a process of mutual remediation which brings about their own conditions of possibility (Massumi 2002). If, as Derrida argues in his ten-word telegram in Specters of Marx, the public sphere is both organized and disturbed by "techno-tele-media apparatuses and new rhythms of information and communication" (Derrida 1994:79), the notion of literary field acquires its particular force for its ability to point out the distinctive accelerations and dislocations experienced by bodies and subjects as they are caught and remediated in the movement of media images. From this perspective, I argue that Shree's novels in the Indian public sphere can be seen not only as a medium for stories and meanings to circulate and be remediated by or from other media. On the contrary, here literature becomes the place providing readers with an experience of liminality for a 'lived' relationship between bodies, practices, social institutions and different media. The novel becomes thus an active agent in a public sphere where constituencies or subjectivities are not simply 'represented', but dynamically transformed in the flow of politics which 'creates' them, articulating bodies, affects and desires.

Bodily Remediations in Geetanjali Shree's The Empty Space

Giuseppe De Riso
2016-01-01

Abstract

My paper examines Geetanjali Shree's That Empty Space (2011) as a representative case of the novel's contribution to the emergence of Indian public sphere, functioning as a mediator among a variety of cultural and political realms. More specifically, I suggest that descriptions of bodies and spaces sustain an affective charge which relies on a wider process reinscription and remediation in the contemporary Indian mediascape. The paper moves from the assumption that postcolonial epistemologies' reliance on the colonizer/colonized model of power and cultural interaction have often led to a levelling out of our awareness of the changes occurred in over six decades of post-independence cultural politics in India. Indeed, according to Homi Bhabha, sidelining the ideologies behind subaltern identities and competing affiliative processes of social action poses the danger of creating "a hasty equivalence between public spheres, normalising forms of social difference, and 'moralising' divergent strategies of subordination, oppression, or resistance into a hasty and homogenous interpellation of shared victimage" (Bhabha 1997:123). As a consequence, this critical trend has often mistaken public sphere as a whole for its domain of representational techniques, thus continuing in the vein of previous institutional critiques insofar as it has resulted in the simplistic demand for the unbiased and proportionate display of images of women and other oppressed subjects among different media. Operating between the binaries of master and slave, this cultural practice aims at drawing hidden bodies and their histories out into the 'public', refusing to acknowledge what Bhabha has termed the intimate betweenness which both unites and separates private and public. In partial contrast to this approach, I discuss how Shree's dwelling on the connections between bodies, places, textual production and media in her works does not serve the purpose of providing a mere representation of private stories otherwise striving to be brought out into the light. On the contrary, her novels originate from the necessity to delve into the location of writing conceived as a 'field of forces' fuelled by the interaction between bodily practices, affects and media representations, in print and on television in particular. I draw my use of the term field in part from Pierre Bourdieu's idea of literary field as a nexus binding authors, readers, texts and discourses (Bourdieu 1992), and partly on Brian Massumi's concept of field of exteriority (which is in turn indebted to Michel Foucault's principle of esteriority) whereby the novel and other media can be said to engage in a process of mutual remediation which brings about their own conditions of possibility (Massumi 2002). If, as Derrida argues in his ten-word telegram in Specters of Marx, the public sphere is both organized and disturbed by "techno-tele-media apparatuses and new rhythms of information and communication" (Derrida 1994:79), the notion of literary field acquires its particular force for its ability to point out the distinctive accelerations and dislocations experienced by bodies and subjects as they are caught and remediated in the movement of media images. From this perspective, I argue that Shree's novels in the Indian public sphere can be seen not only as a medium for stories and meanings to circulate and be remediated by or from other media. On the contrary, here literature becomes the place providing readers with an experience of liminality for a 'lived' relationship between bodies, practices, social institutions and different media. The novel becomes thus an active agent in a public sphere where constituencies or subjectivities are not simply 'represented', but dynamically transformed in the flow of politics which 'creates' them, articulating bodies, affects and desires.
2016
978-88-430-7544-7
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11574/171320
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