Department of English, University of North Bengal

EDITORIAL

The issue of gender as a socio-cultural trope is a much-explored one; but, it is still relevant as a site of trichotomy involving sex, gender constructions, and subjectivity. As a discipline of the social sciences, Gender Studies is invested in meaningful intersections with literature and arts that produce fresh approaches to cultural production and capital. Beginning with the various waves of feminist movements that gradually opened into gay/lesbian consciousness and masculinity studies or queer theories, the issue of gender in our socio-cultural and political matrices is an ever-evolving phenomenon. Recent trends in gender studies proffer a contest between heteronormativity as a matrix and the reality of sexual desires (dreams and fantasies) that often are transgressive or subversive. This contestation factors in the relevance of 'queer' existence and performativity. Interestingly, the idea of the queer deconstructs the notion of identity and 'category' politics that have come to rule our contemporary patterns of established and normative meaning-making ways.

Gender Studies commits to contesting the hierarchy of the legitimate and the rationale of the deviant. The celebration of personal sexual desires besides, issues related to women's liberation and the struggle for identity remain remarkable areas of negotiations within our socio-political and cultural circulations. With the rise of the Third World feminist movement, the recent trends in feminist discourses, and the politics of representation have undergone a new critical reception. With ‘Gender Imaginaries’ as the theme, this volume of Negotiations seeks to address a host of questions, and bring new approaches into the existing interpretations of gender related issues.

We are happy to bring out the 3rd Vol (March 2020) of Negotiations: An International Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies (NIJLS) published by the Department of English, University of North Bengal. The peer-reviewed articles published here raise a whole host of questions that confront established patterns of reception; they critique constructivism in critical understanding and the politics of transcendence that our 'embodied' existence has come to trigger and test. We are profoundly thankful to all the contributors, reviewers, members of the advisory board, the in-house editorial team, departmental staff, and the students without whom it would not have been possible to see the volume come to life. We are thankful to the administration of the University of North Bengal for their constant support especially when the trials of the pandemic have reset our life buttons.

As for now, over to the readers.

Dr. Zinia Mitra, Dr. Pradipta Shyam Chowdhury
Editors

ARTICLES

EDITORIAL

We are pleased to present the March, 2019 issue of Negotiations: An International Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies published by the Department of English, University of North Bengal. With new members joining the editorial team, we hope to embark on an intellectual journey that will not only be intellectually stimulating but satisfying as well. We welcome you all aboard. Our ambition is to set the highest standards for academic ingenuity and respectability through this annual journal of ours.We are profoundly grateful to those who have made this publication possible. We thank the in-house as well as the consultant members of the Editorial board whose constant guidance and suggestions have shaped it into what it is. We would also like to thank all the respected academics and scholars from India and abroad who have contributed to this volume. Last but not the least, we express our gratitude to the students of the department who are the springboard of all our intellectual aspirations.

The research articles in this issue have a strong leaning towards South Asian literature which is perhaps one of the most dynamic zones in World Literature today.

We hope this issue provides new insights and enriches our readers. Happy reading.

Dr. Binayak Roy, Mr. Sumit Ray
Editors

EDITORIAL

The Department of English, University of North Bengal, is as old as the University itself. Established in 1962, the Department has brought out magazines and bulletins from time to time to showcase the works of its faculty, students and scholars. It has long felt the need for a peer-reviewed journal so as to be able to contribute substantially to global scholarship. Born of this resolve, Negotiations: An International Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies is devoted to literary and cultural studies international in scope and interdisciplinary in method. Negotiations encourages scholarly submissions on diverse fields of literature, theatre, performance art, cultural history, politics, film, and media. The journal will be published annually.

Etymologically, “negotiation” (Latin negotiationem) means “business” with a significant accent on “no-leisure “ or “lack of leisure” and “bargain.” “Negotiation” in lived life means to bargain for an advantage, individual or collective, and also a loss born of certain modes of reification and “unhinging” which are clearly enriching. It aims more at an agonism whose ferment should touch all margins and centres, and be beneficial to all interactive communities. The negotiation the journal envisages looks to a collective, continuous engagement, and exchange (a non-aggressive argumentation) where there may not be a consensus, or the resolution of differences as such, but which ensures “pleasure” in the unstoppable pursuit of interlocking goals. Negotiations, therefore, sponsors “with-against” fashions of reading, envisages “punctuations” in thoughts and processes where if anything, as Derrida has noted, is “passed over in silence it is I.” The journal has been visualized as a forum for all communities cutting across nations, disciplines and institutions. The goal is to have a dialogue between seemingly incompatible bodies of knowledge and systems of practice and explore the points of intersection that demonstrate a mutual “profit” in an endless epistemic cross-communication. Negotiations aims to carve out more space for an inseparable circulation of literary and nonliterary “texts,” create a network of “competing [literary-cultural] representations” (Greenblatt) and indulges in “the impossibility of […] settling in a position” (Derrida). The “no leisure” or “un-leisure” in such intermittent “shuttling” between “positions” and “stations” will surely not be “fatiguing,” though; rather, as Jean-Luc Nancy observes, “there must be a dwelling [demeure]: sojourn, lateness, remaining, repose, and even reserve, delay.” This negotiation is expected to arrive at new destinations of newer dimensions, continually reinventing and expanding the areas of exchange and engagement. It combines vacationing with work, ushering a “play” in both; it is about vacationing out of a thought and paradigm into another, Negotiations, thus, accommodates both leisure and un-leisure, marching through knots and paces with deliberation, initiation, communion, fragmentation, distraction and felicitation. Negotiations, in its inaugurality, activism and unfoldment, takes a close call on our institutional positions and positionalities and makes us rethink the space we choose to speak from – a democratic anarchism, productive, proliferating and protean.

The inaugural issue, which consists of solicited articles by eminent scholars from across the world, reflects, in a most fitting manner, the spirit of the journal. The essays published here cover a wide range of topics and issues, collapsing traditional borders and boundaries in terms of discipline, genre, and methodology: public pedagogy and the politics of humiliation; an ethics of literature that sees art as more than a mere description of possible lives; “influence” in terms of a transatlantic poetics; the linguistic dilemma that plays an important role in decolonization; and the construction of the “middle-worlder” subjectivity in transnational films. The current issue of the journal serves as a meeting ground for an enormous and scintillating array of ideas in multiple literary-cultural contexts.

We take this opportunity to put on record our sincerest thankfulness to the contributors and hope that the standard they have set for the journal will be maintained in the days to come. Our special thanks are also due to our department colleagues and to the University of North Bengal authorities for all kinds of support to the project.

Happy reading!

Dr. Ashis Sengupta, Dr. Ranjan Ghosh
Editors

ARTICLES