The Visceral Logics of Decolonization.
Author | Sarmah, Jayanta Krishna |
Khanna, Neetu. The Visceral Logics of Decolonization. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2020. xii+ 174 pages. Paperback, $24.95.
"The body is a site where regimes of discourse and power inscribe themselves, a nodal point or nexus for relations of juridical and productive power." (1) Heavily inspired by previous studies of power and the body, The Visceral Logics of Decolonization is a postcolonial feminist study of the "dense and knotted set of relations between embodied experience and political feeling"--what Khanna terms as the "visceral." This is the latest book from Neetu Khanna, who is an academic engaged in theories and literatures of decolonization, global Marxisms, postcolonial literature and theory, materialist aesthetics, and queer and feminist theory. It is an expansion of her thought-provoking article "Poetics of progressive feeling: The visceral aesthetics of Mulk Raj Anand" published in Journal of Postcolonial writing, in 2015. (2)
Khanna herself begins the book with an emotive, hopeful feeling; one that is characteristic of feminists and emancipatory theorists, by quoting Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable: "We can feel new feelings. We can learn to be aware with a new awareness." (3) In Visceral Logics, Khanna argues that this claim by Anand is achievable and that the act of "feeling" has deeper colonial, political and gendered power connotations that the act of mere affect. The book centers on the work of internationalist literary work and art of Indian Marxist Muslim scholars from the 1930s to 1950s, such as Ahmed Ali, Rashid Jahan, Sajjad Zaheer, and Mahmudazzafar Khan; who collectively came to be organized under the banner of the Progressive Writers' Association. Based on the work of the above artists, Khanna makes the following central arguments. Firstly, Khanna contends that the "visceral," which she uses in a broad sense to refer to the inward feelings of the subdued--whether she be the colonial subject or a person of gender or of the black race, and consequent bodily actions manifest due to such emotive sensibilities; is a response to the torment and oppression experienced by the subdued subject. Such visceral responses according to Khanna have an "involuntary nature" (p. 59) and we have little control over it; and "cannot be interrupted by a psychic intervention" (p. 7) of the subject's own consciousness. Khanna further goes on to argue that such visceral responses of the subdued subject inform and define the...
To continue reading
Request your trialCOPYRIGHT GALE, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.