Posthumanist Nomadisms across Non-Oedipal Spatiality

As an epistemological perspective, ‘nomadism’ is an emerging field of scholarship, offering intersectionality with eco-criticism, feminism, post-colonialism, migration studies, and translation. Much of the scholarship that uses the precepts of nomadism to read cultural texts and phenomena is scattered as separate articles in academic journals or as single chapters in books wherein the primary focus is the intersectional fields. Few book-length publications solely focus on the ramifications of nomadism; Posthumanist Nomadisms across non-Oedipal Spatiality fills that void.

The fifteen chapters in this volume explore the possibilities offered by the nomadic perspective to explore a wide range of literary and cultural texts; organized into three sections, “Nomadic Assemblages,” “Non-Oedipal Cartographies”, and “Space-Time Montages”, that work as one to negate absorption into the interiority of sovereign territory. These sections are not an attempt at corralling the nomadic spirit into separate enclosures; instead, they are bands of warriors that operate the violence of the hunted animal, dehumanized human others, and earth others. The chapters are in constant multi-vocal conversations with narratives that camp on the turbulent weathers of global transitory spaces. They charter real or intellectual turfs of interstitial/rhizomatic nomadic epistemologies as political resistance to the exclusionary practices of a violently wired world.

This book will appeal to post-graduate students, researchers, and faculty in the departments of literature, comparative literary and cultural studies. Researchers in sociology, cultural anthropology, gender studies, and migration studies will also find the material applicable to the expanding approaches available in their fields.

List of figures and table

Acknowledgement

Preface by Walter Mignolo

Introduction

NOMADIC ASSEMBLAGES

Chapter 1
Ambiguous mobilities: Nomadism, interpretation and action
Didier Coste
Université Bordeaux-Montaigne, France

Chapter 2
The little grain that could: Nomadic incursions of amaranth in hegemonic territories
Java Singh
Doon University, India

Chapter 3
The Serengeti-Mara ecosystem: Interactions between human and non-human species
Olivia A. Kurajian
Michigan State University

Chapter 4
Adda as a cultural discourse of the Bengali Bhadralok’s provincial cosmopolitanism
Prantik Banerjee
Hislop College, Nagpur, India

Chapter 5
Language (E)scapes: Linguistic diversity and integration of South Asian migrant women in Barcelona, Spain
Swagata Basu
Doon University, India

MAPS IN NON-OEDIPAL CARTOGRAPHIES

Chapter 6
Becoming a phantom people: Non-Oedipal spatialities, the Sunderbans and the bhadralok gaze
Tonisha Guin
Forum on Contemporary Theory, India

Chapter 7
Postcolonial “Geography Lessons” from Sri Lanka: Travel, globalization, and diaspora
Shelby E. Ward
Virginia Tech; Tusculum University

Chapter 8
The remnant of the journey’s anguish: Homelessness and errantry in the poetry of Nasir Kazmi
Hamza Iqbal
University of Texas at Austin

Chapter 9
A woman’s ‘place’: How the domestic space shaped the Victorian travelers’ vision of the British Raj
Ruth Prakasam
Suffolk University, Boston

Chapter 10
Towards a self-critical subjectivity: Tsewang Yishey Pemba’s White Crane, Lend Me Your Wings
Sushmita Sihwag
Independent scholar

Chapter 11
Killing time: Boredom and violence in Natalia Almada’s cinema
Debra A. Castillo
Cornell University

Chapter 12
Always explorers, never refugees: Adventure and manifest destiny amongst the stars
Leigh E. McKagen
Virginia Tech; Virginia Military Institute

Chapter 13
Cosmopolitanism in the face of im/migration
Antara Mukherjee
Independent scholar

Chapter 14
Chicana Poetry and activism via digital communities in “Poem 25 ~ Giving Voice”
Nicole Crevar
University of Arizona

Chapter 15
Chambal as nomadic in global and local narratives on Putli and Phoolan
Sanghita Sen
University of St. Andrews
Indrani Mukherjee
Jawaharlal Nehru University, India

Afterword: Nomadic theory, again?
Didier Coste
Université Bordeaux-Montaigne, France

Contributors

Index

Java Singh is a Lecturer at Doon University, India. She earned her Ph.D. at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and she also holds an MBA from the Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. Dr. Singh co-edited Gendered Unbelonging with Prof. Indrani Mukherjee, and has also published widely in international journals.

Indrani Mukherjee is Professor in the School of Language Literature and Culture Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Professor Mukherjee’s most recent book is Gendered Ways of Transnational Un-belonging (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019), and she has published extensively in international journals.

Post-humanism, reconstitution, post-colonialism, honey-pot effect, transvestism, nomadism, bioethics, cosmopolitanism, opacity, oedipal, exile, errantry, imperialism, diaspora, slow cinema, displacement, mestiza, dacoits, infra-nomads, hyper-nomads, modernity, pastoralism