The visceral logics of decolonization /
Neetu Khanna.
Description
- Language(s)
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English
- Published
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© 2020
Durham ; Duke University Press, 2020.
- Summary
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"The visceral logics of decolonization offers a question that shapes Khanna's primary decolonial intervention in this book: "What would it mean to undo the visceral lessons of colonialism in the habits of mind and emotive reflex of the postcolonial subject?" For Neetu Khanna the answers to this question are lodged within the artistic renderings of the Progressive Writer's Association, an anti-colonial, anti-orthodox Muslim writer's collective. Drawing on the work of Fanon, as well as queer and feminist theory, Khanna thinks through how affect circulates within anti-colonial struggle. Using the archives of Indian Marxist movements between the 1930s and the 1960s, Khanna theorizes the concept of "the visceral" as an embodied habit and feeling that emerges at the juncture of colonialism and nationalist movement. She argues that this affective corporeality shapes utopic visions of freedom for the gendered, colonial, Indian, citizen subject as they are imagined in the artistic experimentation of Indian progressive political movements. In chapter 1, Khanna begins describing the visceral inquiries of the book to explore the form and phenomenology of nationalist emotion as it emerges in Indian struggles for decolonization. Khanna locates the somatic unconscious in the tensed musculature of the politically agitated revolutionary subject and sets up this framework that is used throughout the rest of the book. Chapter 2 brings into focus the revolutionary promise of "the visceral" within the internationalist imaginary, which makes possible the transformation of feeling and consciousness. The female body comes into focus in chapter 3, highlighting how women's bodies become the focal objects of violent subjection by both colonial and anti-colonial nationalist regimes of discipline. Khanna discusses writer Ahmed Ali and The All-India Progressive Writers Association in chapter 4, and shows how visceral eruptions propel the engine of the national teleology of the progressive novel moving through mourning, grief, nostalgia, melancholy, and lamentation - necessary elements for revolutionary transformation. The book ends with a chapter about Fanon, returning to the anti-colonial theories of the most canonized figure in postcolonial studies and studies of decolonization through the alternative genealogy of the visceral opened up by the Progressive Writers movement. This book will be of interest to scholars in South Asian studies, post-colonial theory, and history"--
- Physical Description
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xii, 183 pages ;
23 cm
- ISBN
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1478008172
9781478008170
1478007737
9781478007739
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