Pavan Kumar Malreddy

The transatlantic novel and the war on terror

Even before American literary critics began to concede the “closed” or rather “failed imagination” of the “9/11 novel” as a genre for its obsession with domesticity, insularity, spectrality, nation...

“Even the dead have human rights”: A conversation with Homi K. Bhabha

Abstract This conversation with the renowned critic and theorist Homi K. Bhabha took place in Frankfurt/Main on November 2, 2016, on the occasion of the Third Annual Conference of the Africa’s Asian Options (AFRASO) project at Goethe University titled “Afrasian Transformations: Beyond Grand Narratives”, where Homi Bhabha delivered a keynote lecture, “Intimations of the Afterlife: On Migration, Memory and the Dialectics of Translation”. Here, he elaborates on the themes of that keynote, which had drawn on the work of Walter Benjamin, V.S. Naipaul and Hannah Arendt to capture the migratory affects of the Syrian refugee crisis. He discusses the enabling impact of anxiety, the dialectics of its translation, and the polarity of the contemporary migrant condition best described in the Benjaminian language of history as montage, or, in Bhabha’s own coinage, as a “camera mortis”. He refers throughout to key concepts in his recent thinking, such as “scales of affect”, “natality/fatality” and “camera mortis”.

Solidarity, Suffering and ‘Divine Violence’: Fictions of the Naxalite Insurgency

After the killing of the high-ranked police officer K.S. Vyas in Hyderabad in January 1993, the People’s War squad member Mohammed Nayeemuddin alias Nayeem was offered a deal by the Andhra Pradesh police department, allegedly under the orders of the then Home Minister A. Madhava Reddy: to buy his freedom he was to organize the murders of top Maoist leaders with the help of a criminal gang run by his brothers. Even before his release, Nayeem’s gang would mastermind a spate of killings under police protection, but the most shocking of them was the brutal murder of a Maoist sympathizer and a revolutionary singer called Belli Lalitha in 1999, whose body was cut into 17 pieces and thrown into wells and lakes around the Bhonagir district (Sridhar 2012). Buoyed by the ruthlessness of Nayeem’s gang, during the 1990s the state of Andhra Pradesh would go on to fund and sponsor a number of anti-Maoist groups with names like Fear Vikas, Green Tigers, Narsa Cobras and Nallamalla Nallatrachu, among others, which would inspire the Salwa Judum (‘Purification Hunt’)—a private army of anti-Maoists—in Chhattisgarh a decade later. When the Maoists finally captured the Salwa Judum’s founder, Mahendra Karma, a local legislator, in October 2013 in an ambush near the town of Dharba, they ‘fired 30 to 40 bullets’ into his body and ‘smashed his head with the butt of their guns after killing him’ (Singh 2013, para. 5; italics added).

Labour, Pleasure and the Sublime: The ‘Work’ of the Dalitbahujans

In her Introduction to Omaprakāśa Vālmīki’s autobiography Joothan: An Untouchable’s Life (2003), Arun Mukherjee ruminates on the vexed relationship between Marxism and anti-caste1 politics in India: Theorists like Limbale feel that Dalit literature and literary theory should not reject Marxism just because Indian Marxists have completely ignored caste-based oppression, forgetting the truth of Ambedkar’s observation that caste creates a division of workers. Nevertheless, many Dalit writers harbor considerable suspicion vis-a-vis Marxist theory and Indian Marxists. (xxxv)

Writing Now Review Essay

David Foster Wallace’s essay, ‘Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky’ (in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, Abacus, 2005), is notable for its praise of both the achievements of Dostoevsky-critic Joseph Frank and those of Frank’s object, Dostoevsky himself. Where Frank is primarily exalted for his dedication, including the heroic ‘library time’ put into penning four thick volumes on the Russian writer’s life (257), Foster Wallace holds Dostoevsky up higher, far above his biographer, as a model literary figure. The author is admirable, in Foster Wallace’s eyes, for the compelling nature of his stories, his mastery of characterisation, and his weighty subject matter. Dostoevsky wrote ‘about identity, moral value, death, will, sexual vs. spiritual love, greed, freedom, obsession, reason, faith, suicide’ (265). Thus the novelist’s greatest strength for Foster Wallace is his commitment * not his commitment to this or that political stance or to the simple act of writing itself, but his commitment to understanding the demands of being; his commitment to his characters and through them an assessment of life; his commitment to exploring, directly and unflinchingly, questions ‘about the stuff that’s really important’ (265). These days, the essay concludes: