16433

SoSe 16: All about the Post/Colony: South Asian Literary Detectives

Gautam Chakrabarti

Information for students

The course will be offered as a Blockseminar from 16.6.- 21.7.16 (ab 16.6.16: 4 -stündig, Do.12-14h in JK 31/125 und Do 14-18h in K 31/201) Evaluation: Regular and interactive participation in class-activities, verbal presentations, also mutually-negotiable, and a mandatory end-semester essay/Hausarbeit (for the grade); regular and active attendance will factor as a positive incentive, in terms of grade-weightage for active regularity, and there is a minimum attendance-requirement. close

Additional information / Pre-requisites

Course Language/Unterrichtssprache: English & German

Comments

Despite the genre of detective fiction being rooted in modernist Euro-American articulations of the Self, it is characterised by a wide-ranging global reach. The global South in general, and South Asia in particular, have seen a steady and growing interest in the genre throughout the twentieth century. While a critical microhistory of the genre needs to look at the modern (and postmodern) human subject as an alienated, individuated Self, the role of globalised political-ideological discourses in structuring global attitudes to crime and punishment cannot be denied. These discursive hierarchies and their colonial-imperial charges, which have had immense juridical and ethical impact in colonial (and postcolonial) societies, do still determine literary-cultural priorities and choices in the global South. Literary detectives and their escapades are, in a world shaped by popular culture and mass media, a crucial link in the conceptual chain of the understanding and analysis of the transcultural diffusion of experiential norms. This course will seek to locate South Asian detective fiction in a locus of literary-cultural engagement with the historical singularities of the second half of the twentieth century through the selected exemplars. It seeks to engage with the contested selfhood that is so very characteristic of a highly-networked, post/modern, global society through a close critical reading of selected works by the Indian writers Sharadindu Bandopadhyay and Satyajit Ray, the Pakistani Ibn-e-Safi and the Bangladeshi Humayun Ahmed, creators of South Asia's best-loved literary detectives. These South Asian literary sleuths, when seen as intercultural figures, appear to be somewhat-mediated versions of their Euro-American, especially British prototypes. However, when viewed as fictive embodiments of South Asia's societal response to her precarious role in the arena of global power-politics, they provide a hybrid understanding of the post/modern South Asian Self. This should facilitate the nuanced understanding of contemporary tensions, disparities, contestations and even frictions within the various social spaces of South Asian nation-states. We will study selected works by these writers-- cf. texts mentioned below-- and watch films based on their works. In the process, key concepts of Culture Studies will be discussed and debated, locating the course within the domain of interdisciplinary literary-cultural historiography. close