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http://localhost:8080/jspui/handle/123456789/4692| Title: | The Strange Homeliness of the Night: Spectral Speech and the Dalit Present in C.Ayyappan 's Stories |
| Authors: | Kumar, Udaya |
| Keywords: | Fiction -- C. Ayyappan |
| Issue Date: | Jun-2010 |
| Publisher: | Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla |
| Description: | Udaya Kumar is Professor of English at Delhi University, and formerly Professor of Cultural Studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. His recent work has focused on questions of autobiography, literary history and cultural configurations of the body in the context of Kerala. He has authored The Joycean Labyrinth: Repetition, Time and Tradition in Ulysses (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), and several papers on literary and cultural theory and modern Malayalam writing. He is currently completing a book on modes of self-articulation in modern Kerala. The short fiction of C. Ayyappan (1949-2011), one of the most significant Dalit* writers from the south Indian state of Kerala, reveals an innovative exploration of contemporary subaltern memory. Ghosts –often authors of their own deaths – are the protagonists in many of Ayyappan’s stories, where they elaborate fraught ‘autospectrographic’accounts that insistently explain the logic of their actions and passions to those haunted by them. These narratives of ghostly inhabitation are paralleled by another group of stories in Ayyappan’s work which tracks the instability of Dalit subjects who have seemingly found accommodation under modern developmental regimes. The paper regards these two lines of narrative articulation as closely intermeshed: together, they form a fictional machine that disrupts familiar orientations of agency and resistance to open up the fault lines of gender and caste in the making of subjects in present-day Kerala.The paper will examine the complex textuality of Ayyappan’s work, his use of elements from religious and spiritual practices of Dalit communities, and the modality of the shock central to his conception of the autobiographical, against the historical backdrop of masculine and lower caste selfhood in Kerala. |
| URI: | http://localhost:8080/xmlui/handle/123456789/4692 |
| ISSN: | 0972-1401 |
| Appears in Collections: | Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences (SHSS) Vol.17, No.1-2, (2010) |
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