Kairos: A Journal of Critical Symposium

Introduction: Unfamiliar Objects, Dialogic Translations

Priyam Goswami Choudhury — 2023-12-31

This essay offeres an introduction to the special issue by the guest-editiors.

The Formality of Form: Reading Ghazal as a Contact Zone

Abiral Kumar — 2023-12-31

The near impossibility of translating or reproducing the ghazal within the context of American-English modern poetry has resulted in several prefixes and adjectives that claim an innovative break from the form of the traditional ghazal. While Aijaz Ahmad’s project of translating Ghalib into English operated on the principle that true translations of the ghazal could only be made possible by sacrificing its formal sturdiness, Agha Shahid Ali, writing almost thirty years later, criticised these attempts as failed imitations of the form that disqualified them as ghazals. While Ahmad and Ali both act as carriers of the form of the ghazal from one culture to another, the contact zone between these cultures could not be spatially or temporally located. Instead, in this article, I read the ghazal itself as a contact zone — as the site of translation, negotiation, and adaptation between distinct cultures, languages, and contexts — that has created the possibility for fresh expressions within the traditional strictures of the poetic form while also keeping alive the playfulness that the form of the ghazal inspires in its practitioners.

Making Brecht UnBrechtian But Is that a Good Thing? Brechtian Epic as Alienated Melodrama in India

Souradeep Roy — 2013-12-31

This paper looks at the practice of rupantor in the Bengali group theatre movement as a process of translation in which “the original text, as well as the recipient tradition in which it is being adapted undergoes a transformation” (Roy 2000, 320). I analyse Ajitesh Bandyopadhyay’s adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s

The Good Person of Szechwan as Bhalomanush. This adaptation is read alongside the contemporary critical reaction to these adaptations in Bengali by theatre critics like Samik Bandyopadhyay, directors and playwrights like Utpal Dutt, as well as newspaper reviews, and recent reactions to archival remnants of the play on YouTube. I argue that the critics’ disavowal of the adaptation fundamentally misunderstands the role of theatre translation where the theatre must speak to a public audience in the here and now of the performance and its audiences. A fundamental departure from the original in stage adaptations is necessary for this audience and, following Fredric Jameson’s reading of Brecht, a “useful” process. This is inevitable under the material conditions of practising theatre in Bengal where conditions were very different from the one Brecht was facing when working with the Berliner Ensemble.

Banality of Violence: (Mis)Remembering the Past

Sainico Ningthoujam — 2023-12-31

The interaction between dissimilar cultures, languages and traditions is a fertile site to evaluate how identities, borders and belonging is defined. The literary representation of these spatial and temporal negotiations provides an insight into the narrativization of the past, present and future. By critically examining Temsula Ao’s short story “Soaba”, I will interrogate the portrayal of a contact-zone that is steeped in conflict and quotidian violence. Here, Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of contact-zone becomes a crucial tool to evaluate the encounter between competing claims to authority and authenticity. I suggest that Ao’s narrative departs from normative anticolonial narratives of national identities to illuminate the distinct confrontations between “metropolitan” and “peripheral” lives and life-worlds. Yet, I propose that Ao recreates hierarchical binaries in her representation of the past, and risks reproducing the “noble native” trope that obscures the complex and dynamic history of negotiating modernity in the postcolony. Through this paper, I reassess Ao’s authorial intention and execution of the act of remembering and representing a past before the consolidation of a nation-state. Drawing on the notion of necropolitics and slow violence, I demonstrate that Ao’s story highlights the banality of both slow and spectacular violence in the quotidian life of the local inhabitants. By doing so, her short story interrogates the normative ideals of progress, development and modernity, and foregrounds the coercive manner of assimilating indigenous populations.

“I Was Taken as a Child. Stolen”: Narrating Automobility, the Stolen Generations and Environmental Justice in Mad Max: Fury Road

Michelle Stork — 2013-12-31

In George Miller’s post-apocalyptic film, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), issues concerning automobility, Indigeneity and environmental justice are inextricably intertwined. The depiction of vehicles and mobilities needs to be understood in the cultural and historical context the film draws on, such as the history of the Stolen Generations. This article aims at addressing the representation of the Stolen Generations in Fury Road in order to add another layer to previous readings of the film. Although the representation of Indigeneity in the film is problematic in several respects, the implications of such a reading of the female protagonist Furiosa and the elderly women called Vuvalini as Indigenous are intriguing, particularly when taking into account that Immortan Joe and his War Boys stand for a white masculinity. So far, readings of Indigeneity in current scholarship on the film are limited to criticising shortcomings. I want to suggest that paying attention to Fury Road’s Indigenous coding allows for two significant (re)interpretations of the film: firstly, it is possible to read the upending of Immortan Joe’s regime as Indigenous and feminist resistance to colonial and patriarchal legacies; and secondly, Furiosa’s and the Vuvalini’s participation in automobility balances their stereotypical proximity to the land. Indeed, neither Furiosa nor the elderly women are victimised; instead, they oscillate between being the harbingers of hope and the perpetrators of violence.

Translation and Memory in the Humboldt Forum: The Alternative Museum Space in Priya Basil’s Film Essay “Locked In and Out”

Rita Maricocchi — 2023-12-31

The film essay “Locked In and Out” by Priya Basil, created for and premiered at the digital opening of the Humboldt Forum in December 2020, reflects on Basil’s own positionality in relation to the contested museum project, situating the Forum within a transnational framework. Basil’s text creates an alternative museum space in which she not only intermingles colonial histories with narratives of resistance across time and space, but also exposes the mechanisms of curation behind the museum, and memory cultures more broadly. Reading the film essay at the intersection of Michael Rothberg’s concepts of multidirectional memory (2009) and the implicated subject (2019), I observe how it challenges the selective memory of the museum, and of the nation, particularly as regards German colonialism. As a series of translations across multiple positionalities, between German and English, and through time, the text facilitates a meditation on the instabilities of national and singular frameworks for approaching colonialism, which are often propagated by museums and the narratives they construct. This paper seeks to untangle the translations and memories in Basil’s film essay, bringing it into conversation with the contemporary debate on museums and (de)colonisation in Germany to consider how the text complicates national memory discourses which are re-emerging and being re-evaluated in the wake of the Humboldt Forum.

Essays towards Dialogicity: Response to Abiral Kumar, Souradeep Roy, Sainico Ningthoujam, Michelle Stork and Rita Maricocchi

Priyam Goswami Choudhury — 2024-01-17

This is essay offers a response to the individual contributions in the special issue.