Mission Statement: ‘Decolonisation’
The need for the kind of rethinking suggested by the word ‘decolonisation’ is urgent because of the opportunistic, constricted versions of history...
The need for the kind of rethinking suggested by the word ‘decolonisation’ is urgent because of the opportunistic, constricted versions of history...
Hosted by Ashoka University, in partnership with TORCH, Oxford University, the India Oxford Initiative, and the India International Centre...
The subject of the symposium is ‘de-professionalisation’ – the urge, as a creative practitioner, or, indeed, a practitioner of any kind, not to be identified with one genre or activity, and to be, in general, a critic of specialisation and a champion of dabbling...
The second symposium in what came to be called the ‘literary activism’ series of symposia was on ‘deprofessionalisation’. By this I meant, among other things, a ‘critique of specialisation’ – to express...
Though my intention is to talk about the function of the little magazine at the present time, I should begin by discussing a bit the little magazine where I am an editor, and what I perceive its particular role to be...
Staring at you from innumerable photographs, their glossy hair combed back, writers can seldom be mistaken for hobos or tramps. If anything, they look more like men of action than men of contemplation, more men of the mechanized army than of the manual typewriter...
The subject of the symposium is ‘de-professionalisation’ – the urge, as a creative practitioner, or, indeed, a practitioner of any kind, not to be identified with one genre or activity, and to be, in general, a critic of specialisation and a champion of dabbling...
I’m not an expert on Adorno; indeed, my approach to Adorno here shall embody today’s theme, in that I shall be ‘dabbling’ in areas that do not strictly belong to those I consider my own...
I find myself here at this very interesting symposium thanks to Amit’s most generous invitation and also to, I expect it follows, Amit’s reckoning that in some measure or form I exemplify the sort of persona that is referenced in the symposium’s title...
I first heard the word ‘deprofessionalised’ from Ashis Nandy, about a decade ago. In the course of conversation, he had said amiably, ‘Mushirul Hassan calls me a “deprofessionalised intellectual”.’..
From the mid-1990s onwards, we witnessed a convergence between literary language and the language of publishing, for it was publishers, increasingly, who told us about the ‘masterpieces’ they were publishing (the word, like the literary itself, had by then been disowned by most literature departments).
In his mission statement, Amit Chaudhuri identifies what he calls ‘market activism’ primarily with publishers and literary agents, or, perhaps more specifically, with the large publishing corporations and ‘super-agents’ who began to reshape the literary world during the early 1990s. But he also looks briefly askance at universities in order to point out an implicitly fatal coincidence.
I would like to evoke the extraordinary work, life, and career of the bilingual English-Marathi poet Arun Kolatkar (1931-2004) and of his generation of poets, writers, publishers, and artists who started producing their work in the 1950s and 1960s, mostly in Bombay, and which I designate here as the little magazine ‘conspiracy’.
It was 1989. I was a graduate student at Oxford. I had made little progress with my doctoral dissertation and I had written a novel that had almost, but not quite, found a publisher. One of the routes that had taken me in my fiction towards Calcutta was Irish literature – its provincialism and cosmopolitanism, its eccentricity and refinement.
Many years ago – in the days before email – I found myself engaged in correspondence with the postcolonial critic Benita Parry. She had visited Rutgers University, where I was teaching, and had given a paper on the fiction of J.M. Coetzee, in which I too had an interest. We had a friendly disagreement about the question of silence in Coetzee’s novels...
I am a market activist. I make no apology for that – though I may apologise for some of the unintended consequences of my activity. I’ve worked in publishing all my adult life and, for the past fifteen years or so, have managed independent publishing companies that have – to a greater or lesser extent – been engaged in the pursuit of trying to make a business out of literary activity. In this respect, I think, I am perhaps an outsider at this symposium.
The English translations below, of three poems by the 19th-century Bengali poet Iswar Gupta, are part of an ongoing project.
We live in a time when the main cultural events of the year are marked in advance on the calendar: like the Booker Prize ceremony when it comes to the novel.
The impetus for writing this book was an invitation I received in 2017 from Ronald Schuchard, the Director of the London T. S. Eliot Summer School, to give the annual address at Little Gidding, on the fourth of the Four Quartets, which bears that title.
