Nabarun Bhattacharya: Aesthetics and Politics in a World after Ethics

(Hardback)

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The book aims to introduce the Bengali writer (1948-2014) to a global audience through some of his short stories and poems in English translation and a series of critical essays on his works. A political commitment to literature frames Nabarun Bhattacharyas aesthetic project and the volume wishes to tease out the various perspectives on this complex meeting of politics and aesthetics. Be it the novel on dogs or those on petro-pollution and the machine, the political question in Nabarun echoes significant contemporary issues, such as animal rights, global warming and techno-capitalism. This opens up the possibility of questioning the traditional paradigm of humanist values in a world of catastrophic and violent encounters such as nuclear war or holocaust, which keeps returning in Nabaruns works.

Reviews

This is an exceptional and painstaking work of rare dedication that is structurally expansive and conceptually rigorous. Most significantly, the editors and the team of translators, interviewers and critical essayists have elegantly woven a complex tapestry of aesthetics, politics and ethics that marks one of the most involved, committed and intricate authors of our time. The book radiantly brings to light the myriad trajectories through which Nabarun Bhattacharya was able to catch and express the deepest undertones of our overwrought times. Beneath that tale lies another layerthat, like all true political prophets, Bhattacharya could presciently prefigure and predictan ominous and macabre sublunar future, the contours of which continue to remain spectral and contingent. * Professor Prasanta Chakravarty, Department of English, University of Delhi *
This is a timely introduction to Nabarun, a major activist writer of minor literature, inhabiting the borderlands of the ubiquitous modern order of capital, in the space-time of contemporary Kolkata. The book contains short stories, poems, an interview with the writer and essays on hima well-curated collection, offering a rounded representation of Nabarun. As the book highlights, the deep subaltern denizens of Nabaruns world may be voided of agency and use but cant be voided of the imagination of freedom. Through the intervention of this text, Nabarun's radical insight and technologies of posthuman praxis will be available widely, inspiring many versions of another kind of life, a plural participatory anarchy of friendship. * Debashish Banerji, Haridas Chaudhuri Professor of Indian Philosophies and Cultures and Doshi Professor of Asian Art, California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), San Francisco, CA *

Author Bio

Sourit Bhattacharya is Lecturer in Postcolonial Studies in the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow. Arka Chattopadhyay is Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, India. Samrat Sengupta is Assistant Professor and Head, Department of English, Sammilani Mahavidyalaya, Kolkata, India