| My dissertation looks at discourses generated around moments of historical crisis in the authority of the colonial and the postcolonial State. I look at narratives about the 'Sepoy Mutiny' (1857) and the 'Partition' of India (1947). I argue that all the narratives under analysis are engaged in instituting disciplinary regimes at the very site of violence, enacted both upon an Other, as well as the self. The politics of containment articulated by such inscriptions is especially significant because they are all involved in constructing the national imaginary, as well as the 'ideal' citizen-subject. Narratives about violent events therefore 'create' a textual space for violence, while institutionalizing certain kinds of "difference", they enable a particular narrativization of History.; My work is centrally concerned with the historical revisionism inaugurated in the aftermath of 'crisis' and in how 'meaning' gets constructed within the sphere of violence. I am also interested in marking the resistance to, and subversion of, available cultural scripts by individual authors and the ways in which the binary between self/other gets destabilized in such fiction. 'Women' and 'gender' are analytical categories at the heart of my critical project, as I argue that both the 'events' were written upon the bodies of women.; My project uses a strategy of reading which mediates between post-structuralist and Marxist inflected modes of analysis within postcolonial theory influenced by the work of Homi Bhabha and the Subaltern Studies Group respectively. I focus upon the work of lesser read, popular authors. I also work within Sara Suleri's idea of an 'English India' which asserts that writers on both sides of the colonial divide collude in producing master-narratives. Using literary texts as a mode of cultural analysis, the dissertation engages with critical questions about representation and alterity. |
