Last updated on Nov 24, 2017.
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Of late, much has been written about the so called ‘crisis of Humanities’ in a Digital Age. A sizable chunk of such articulations look at the literary as essentially an analog experience and thus pits the digital as its proverbial other. As the dusted literary tropes, notions of territoriality, tools and skill sets grudgingly make their way into the digital space, their efficacy in providing analytical framework is contested by rising quantitative evidence, visual representation, surplus of information (often information contradicting hard physical evidence, cynically termed ‘alternative facts’), re-orientation of archives. Being online prioratises a movement from close to distant reading, engages big data, text mining, employs strategies to accord meaning to numbers, all of which make it imperative to renegotiate offline habits of reading, writing and analysing discourses. Grappling with what Mark Algee-Hewitt calls the ‘disorder of discourse’, one has to examine the lasting impact of this ‘disorder’ on the received units of interpreting discursive formations such as class, gender, ethnic or linguistic identity. In the face of such paradigmatic shifts, one wonders how to set the contours of the discursive, to evolve new analytical tools that can meaningfully engage with both the online and the offline spheres.
This panel intends to set itself at the crossroads of the online and offline worlds to examine the contexts of emerging questions regarding discursivity in the digital age. The papers of this panel deal with with various discourses, literary, journalistic, cultural or sociological, each involving an interface of online and offline, each foregrounding new intersectionalities; of languages, of media, of notions of textuality.
Our session would include separate academic papers as well as an open discussion among the presenters and the audience. Each of the five individual papers would engage with the idea of the ‘literary’ from five different angles – the ‘literary’ as cultural memorialisation, ‘literary’ as an intersection of various genres, ‘literary’ as a journalistic expression, ‘literary’ as a gendered expression and ‘literary’ as criticism. In the second part of the session we would like to bring all these aspects together in our effort to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the changing nature of the ‘literary’ as a discourse, how the digital experience has affected those changes and consequentially how the offline discursive practices have absorbed/appropriated/resisted those changes. In this segment we would like to discuss particular case studies and share our personal experiences of literary engagements that require constant negotiations between online and offline worlds.
Shinjini Basu - Bichitra: Cultural Memorialisation of Tagore in the Age of Digital Memory
The Bichitra Tagore Online Variorum Project is a digital undertaking sanctioned by the Government of India as part of its programme to celebrate Rabindranath Tagore’s 150th Birth Anniversary. It is an ongoing project executed by the School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University. The Project Coordinator, Prof. Sukanta Chaudhury, Professor Emeritus at Jadavpur University, claims that it is by far “the world's biggest database of a major author's writings. It contains images of 47,520 handwritten and 91,637 printed pages (and counting) of Tagore's works” [Source]. Bichitra contains digital images of virtually all his manuscripts, authoritative print version of books and journals, transcriptions of manuscripts, and various versions of the texts.
Any variorum offers multiple annotations and commentary. However, the sheer number of revisions done by Tagore to his texts turns them into travaux en cours. As Prof. Chaudhury points out, by lining up different versions and offering a collation of texts Bichitra does more than archiving manuscripts, it archives the dynamic nature of Tagore’s oeuvre, creating a visual palimpsest. In my paper I would like to investigate how the oxymoronic nature of such a project reconstructs the offline object-life of texts. This digital archive attempts to approximate the material texture of the manuscripts while at the same time makes them malleable. Keeping the scholarly value of such a project aside, what role does it play in the institutional memorialisation of Tagore? This brings one to the related problem of citation. In the performance of an ‘authentic’ Bengali literary identity, Tagore’s place as the veritable point of reference has been consolidated through persistent citations. Even subversive citations, in films, music or poetry draw their legitimacy from the inviolability of the written words. But when texts are rendered in the public domain as texts-as-process in Barthes’ sense of the term, what happens to the authenticity of citation?
Dhrupadi Chattopadhyay - The many lives of food: blogs to books and back
The digital age, among other things was supposed to have sounded the death knell for books— the end of books as Robert Coover would put it—and for once (un)settled the hierarchies of textual knowledge production. With the advent of the born digital genres, offline modes of production and dissemination were deemed to have run their course. However, quite contrary to initial estimates, one of the earliest born digital genres, the blog, has often spawned the publication of books. A lot of questions in recent years have been centered around the sociological context of the book, readership etc. Of particular interest has been the text’s “trajectory of internal progression” (an intricate construct of basic formal units) and its outer trajectory of “delivery and reception”. These readings have kindled debates around hybrid forms in relation to the metaphysics of the text.
With these frames in mind, this paper will examine contexts of digital Indian diasporic food writing and their offline avatars. Posited at the intersection of a long history of women’s food writing and discourses on domesticity and non-linear modes of storytelling these blogs and their print avatars raise certain fundamental questions about the aesthetics of reading recipes. Formalistically speaking the blog appears to be an antithesis of the book: upsetting the formal expectations of publication, censorship, permanence etc. In terms of intellectual history, however, it seems to be in sync with the genres often used to identify women’s writing. I will use two diasporic women’s blogs and their books as a case in point to tease out the possibilities of reading new female subjectivities in the in-between spaces of the Blog (online) and books (offline).
Akshata Pai - Slow journalism and the temporalities of the offline
As a kind of journalism that emerges in response to and within the digital media ecosystem, slow journalism is seen as a disruption of the temporal regimes of digital journalism. Breaking away from the radically accelerated time cycle of online journalism, it is associated with journalistic forms, genres and publications like narrative journalism, documentaries, features, portraits, magazines, that are, as Henrik Bodker argues, at a “greater temporal distance” from the present. Slow journalism grounds itself in a sense of commensality, intending to pay close attention to people’s stories, often taking participatory and collaborative forms. Matt Norman writes that slow journalism is not merely a reaction to “toxic speed” but emerges at “the complex intersection of speed and slowness that’s emerging in our dizzying, contemporary world.”
Pulitzer winning journalist Paul Salopek’s ambitious, decade-long, multimodal Out of Eden project, invariably mentioned in any analysis of slow journalism, engages with and manifests the intricate and layered temporalities of media production and consumption in the digital age. Salopek’s project aspires to take digital storytelling to epic dimensions. He traces, on foot, one of the earliest routes of human migration from Ethiopia to Chile and narrates the stories of the communities that he encounters on his way. His narrative combines long-form with short-form, and verbal elements with images, videos, podcasts, interactive maps, virtual walks, and other tools in order to create an ‘immersive’ experience.
In its attempt to adjust online writing to offline temporality, his work is situated at the cusp between a corporeal experience of the material world and the virtuality of the digital space. His representation of the inhabitants of the global south as participants in the digital revolution takes into consideration disparities of access but also rewrites the general discourse of the ‘temporal lag’ between the global north and south. This paper intends to perform a postcolonial reading of Salopek’s travel narrative to probe at questions of representation, address and appropriation that are thrown up as it attempts to capture ‘offline’ rhythms in a digital narrative.
Putul Sathe - Feminism in Digital Age
The tools provided by the digital age have unfolded a huge potential for feminist scholarship and the movement. Defined by some feminist as the “4th Wave”, digital feminism has created a new body of feminist genealogies harvested from metadata from different search engines and databases and has employed tools provided by the digital age to reach out to heterogenous audiences. The creation of the digital women’s archive in this context has raised vexing questions about the role of traditional and digital archives and the impact of technology on serious scholarship as not a simplistic progressive affair. The creation of digital women’s archive came from the desire to transmit knowledge and create awareness about women’s history in the broadest sense , to expanding the public sphere and innovate debates on digital canon and availability of women writers . Unlike the brick and mortar offline archive, the digital archive enabled by technology has allowed for a kaleidoscopic view, which Donna Haraway has defined to be the maintenance of “contradictory locations and heterochronic calendars”. The ‘difference’ introduced by digital is not simply applying the additive approach to resolve issues around systematic exclusion and mere ‘recovery’. Digital archive located within the feminist space are both repositories and sites of translation. The archiving of unfamiliar voices has not only brought texts into cultural view but has also blurred traditional boundaries. The texts therefore fall into various categories to decolonize grand narratives. The convergence of digital humanities with library science in this case and other expertise has raised questions about production and consumption of texts. The text will now access rare materials and on the same page will juxtapose different viewpoints visually and enable a seamless online presentation. Finally in the age of digital humanities, the project of digital women’s archive will raise questions about women to be equal partners when critical dialogues around collaboration, critique and engagement with new developments are happening.
The paper will focus on the case study of Dr. Avabai Wadia and Dr. Bomanji Khurshedji Wadia Archive for Women housed at Research Centre for Women’s Studies, S.N.D.T. Women’s University, Mumbai. The purpose of the archive is to archive lives of women, who have left an indelible mark in history. The digital archive will one of the many digital historical resources, containing what Antoinette Burton has described as “archive stories”. The digital archive is a cultural object created using algorithms and the process of “digital mediation” has raised questions around information age, archiving women’s voices and enlarging the scope of the public domain. The paper will seek to interrogate the new methods of understanding culture, production of new knowledges and methods of controlling the archive.
Rajashree Patil - Marathi literary criticism in the era of social media
Criticism and literary criticism in particular have often enjoyed being the preserve of the privileged few. Unlike reading, criticism expects the critic to have been part of polite learning and have mastered the art of grammar and rhetoric. Apart from these prerequisites, it also harbours the reputation of being largely closed owing to its proclivity towards jargon and inbreeding. So critics speak to critics and continue to write in a language often impervious to the people outside its chain of signification.
In Marathi literature, colonial modernity has set certain rules of propriety as it were for criticism which includes the use of a standardised (often ornamental) language and host of literary terms (borrowed from both European and Indic sources). The digital world’s engagement with criticism seems to have upset most of the rules that one has held dear to Marathi criticism. Not only has it upset hierarchies of canon, language, spaces etc., it has altered the role and scope of literary criticism. Online literary criticism seems to veer away from questions of form and aesthetics, and instead seeks to politicise the text. Written in a language that draws upon colloquialisms and popular knowledge, such works of criticism are often excluded from institutionalised literary studies. It can however be argued that such online criticism is drastically transforming offline literary studies. The space of the classroom, for example, is now a site of contested meaning-making rather than a sanctum of canonized and authorized knowledge.
This paper will examine the role that digital media, especially in the form of social media has played to work around certain fundamentals of literary critical practices that have governed Marathi literature since the nineteenth century. It seeks to examine the growing gap between offline and online literary criticism and its interface with the changing nature of Indic literatures.
Shinjini Basu, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Sir Gurudas Mahavidyalaya (affiliated to the University of Calcutta). She has been trained in literary studies from Lady Brabourne College, Kolkata and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her area of interest includes colonial and post-colonial studies, digital humanities, literary and cultural theory. She has published on a range of topics related to literature and allied arts.
Dhrupadi Chattopadhyay is an Assistant Professor at the Department of English, SNDT Women’s University, Mumbai. She has been trained in literary studies at Lady Shri Ram College, New Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and Ruprecht Karls Universitat, Heidelberg. Post-colonial studies, culture studies, Digital humanities and emerging literatures are her areas of interest.
Akshata Pai is an assistant professor at the department of English, SNDT Women’s University Mumbai. She counts St. Xaviers College, Mumbai and Mumbai University as her alma mater. Her interests include digital literature, cultural studies, new media and post-colonial studies.
Putul Sathe, currently an Associate Professor with the Research Centre for Women's Studies, S.N.D.T. Women's University, Mumbai. Her research interests include Gender, Women's Writing with special focus on Indian literature and Dalit Women's autobiographical writings. She has widely published on gender issues ranging from Candian women’s writing to Dalit narratives in India. She is currently involved in instating the Dr. Avabai Wadia and Dr. Bomanji Khurshedji Wadia Archive.
Rajashree Patil is currently an assistant professor with the department of Marathi, SNDT Women’s University, Mumbai. Her interests span across traditional academics associated with literature and allied arts. Apart from having widely published research papers on contemporary Marathi literary practices she has also been trained in Indian aesthetics. She has been a new reader, reviewer and translator for Akashvani, Mumbai. ‘Waman Malhar te Shirish Gopal’ is her published monograph and ‘Aahuti’ a translated book. She is also a regular contributor to the Marathi periodical ‘Shabda Ruchee’.