Dr Arka Chattopadhyay - orcid.org/0000-0001-5897-878X
Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow, May - July 2023
Home Institution: Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar
Arka Chattopadhyay is assistant professor, Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Gandhinagar, India. He has been published in books like Deleuze and Beckett, Knots: Post-Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film, Gerald Murnane: Another World in this One etc., and journals such as Textual Practice, Interventions, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, Sound Studies and The Harold Pinter Review. He has co-edited Samuel Beckett and the Encounter of Philosophy and Literature (2013) and guest-edited the SBT/A issue Samuel Beckett and the Extensions of the Mind. (2017). Arka is the founding editor of Sanglap and a contributing editor to Harold Pinter Review. He is the author of Beckett, Lacan and the Mathematical Writing of the Real (Bloomsbury Academic UK, 2019). He has co-edited a volume on Nabarun Bhattacharya (Bloomsbury India, 2020) and is working on a monograph on Posthumanism (Orient Blackswan) and two edited volumes on Affective Ecologies and Badiou and Modernism (Orient Blackswan and Bloomsbury).
Project Title: The Bengali Avant-Garde Novel and World Form: Re-Inventing Modernism
The project approaches ‘world form’ in Bengali-Indian avant-garde novels within Global Modernist studies by considering the European influence on the experimental Bengali novel-form in the 20th century. It explores decoloniality as a dialectical structure that absorbs colonial literary and cultural forms and reinvents them through a situated cultural politics. Within Global Modernist studies, this project locates a notion of ‘world-form’ in the 20th century Bengali-Indian avant-garde fiction (Manik Bandyopadhyay, Jibanananda Das, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Sandipan Chattopadhyay, Subimal Mishra, Nabarun Bhattacharya and Mahasweta Devi). It decolonizes Modernist epistemes by vernacularizing the globalist critical trend. These vernacular contestations are crucial in unsetting what Mignolo and Walsh call the constitutive continuities between coloniality and modernity (2018). Over-emphasis on the Indian-English tradition poses a problem for Indian Modernisms, considering its multilingual manifestations (e.g., The Vintage Book of Indian Writing 1947-1997). To address this shortsightedness, I argue for a ‘local-world form’ in the experimental Bengali novels that invoke Modernist forms like ‘stream of consciousness’, ‘cut-up’, ‘constrained writing’ and ‘parable’, but re-invent them in a ‘localist’ mode. From this dialectic of European Modernist forms and their vernacular appropriation in the Bengali avant-garde, there emerges a mixture of derivative, provincial and coeval ‘local-world-forms’ that become indigenous by positing their contrapuntal Other in the European counterpart.