Abstract: Kathakali is a traditional Indian dance native to the southern state of Kerala. To perform it, artists deck out in elaborate costumes and colourful makeup to tell stories from Hindu epics. A Kathakali performance, like all classical dance arts of India, synthesises music, vocal…
Abstract: The paper explains the concept of ‘Sahrudaya’ by drawing on the principles of Kashmir Shaivism and Rasa-Dhvani. The discussion does away with some of the misconceptions regarding ‘Sahrudaya’. Rasika, Buddha and Vibuddha are some of the words used in lieu…
Abstract: This paper argues that in naatyam (dramatics) the actor’s body produces aesthetic cadence that peaks as emotional experience for the sahrudaya. The affect that a Kathakali performance produces is a state of sublimity of the mind, unattached to the…
Abstract: The paper connects affect studies with Indigenous Studies, Science and Technology Studies, and the emergent field called extinction studies or climate change studies. Claire Colebrook’s two 2014 Deleuzean books on extinction argue for a “theory beyond theory,” where affect…
Abstract: Embarrassment, shame and humiliation form a spectrum of negative emotions that are both self-conscious and other-regarding. This paper studies this spectrum to understand humiliation. Conventional studies on humiliation presuppose intersubjective mediation between the self and the other and a visceral…
Abstract: The Tamil writer P. Sivakami’s sequential novels The Grip of Change (Pazhaiyana Kalithalum, 1989) and Gowri: Author’s Notes (Gowri: Aasiriyar Kurippu, 1999) were written in the wake of the Bodi caste riots in Tamil Nadu between Pallars (a Dalit caste…
Abstract: This paper will concern itself with a close reading of a novel (Sunflowers in the Dark) by one of India’s most revered contemporary women writers – Krishna Sobti (1925-). Through a reading of this novel, I will try and…
CAROLYN PEDWELL Abstract: Opening up modes of political thinking and feeling take us beyond Euro-American calls to ‘put oneself in the other’s shoes’, this article explores how empathy is generated within, circulated through, and productive of transnational power relations. It…
Abstract: Postcolonial studies has often figured colonialism as trauma and the “post” as an unresolved spectral remainder of that initial violence. In what ways does the critical turn to affect reshape this analysis of colonialism and open up alternative archives…
Abstract: The discourse on emotions, one learns, has mostly not fared well in the conceptual history of the Western philosophers. The problem arises because this discourse has always been made within the rhetoric of rationality, and emotion and reason have…
Abstract: Political solidarity confounds our political theory when the latter is grounded in economies of interest, cultures of responsibility or instruments of rights. The gratuitous materialisation of solidarity might be rethought from the perspective of affect if by the latter…
