Revolution in Space: A Lefebvrian Analysis of Spatial Production in Meena Kandasamy’s <i>The Gypsy Goddess</i>

Creating Trauma-Informed Long-Term Care Organizations

Мета дослідження – проаналізувати основні підходи до інтерпретацій поняття «історична травма», й окреслити основні виміри історичних колективних травм і підходів до їх подолання. Наукова новизна. Визначені основні інтерпретації поняття «історична травма» та спорідненого поняття «історична пам’ять»; окреслені міждисциплінарні підходи до вивчення історичних колективних травм; проведено порівняльну характеристику основних наративів, пов’язаних з історичними колективними травмами в європейському та російському суспільствах. Висновки. Виявлено, що дослідження «історичних травм» є відносно новим для істориків і має міждисциплінарний характер. Це поняття має численні варіації («культурна травма», «колективна травма», «міжгенераційна травма», «колоніальна травма»). З одного боку, це ускладнює його чітке визначення, а з іншого – дозволяє усвідомити важливі нюанси та певну спеціалізацію досліджень колективної травми в рамках власних підходів соціології, психології, філософії, культурології, історії та навіть біології. Визначено, що існують різні стратегії подолання історичних колективних травм. Виявлено, що європейські країни демонструють конструктивний (історична колективна травма перетворюється на історичний наратив) підхід, а Росія – деструктивний (формування агресивної ідеології). В європейських країнах здійснюються спроби подолати історичні колективні травми через створення відповідного історичного наративу без уникнення «незручних» тем. Виявлено, що російське суспільство, замість конструктивного опрацювання історичних колективних травм, пов’язаних з Другою світовою та Холодною війнами – націлено на формування образу нового/старого зовнішнього ворога (США, колективний Захід, НАТО, а тепер і Україна), що не тільки не сприяє компенсації старих травм, а й формує нові. Запропоновані приклади подолання історичних колективних травм в європейському та російському суспільствах ілюструють не стільки різноманіття підходів і стратегій «роботи над травмою», скільки специфіку цих суспільств. Фінансування. Статтю підготовлено в рамках проекту Європейського Союзу за програмою Еразмус+, напрям Жана Моне 620386-EPP-1-2020-1-UA-EPPJMO-MODULE TEMPUS (“Tailoring European Memory Politics for Peacemaking in Ukrainian Society”).

Meena Kandasamy is a versatile writer from India who writes poetry, essays and fiction. She was born to Tamil parents in 1984. Meena Kandasamy completed a doctorate of philosophy in socio-linguistics from Anna university, Chennai. She was very interested in writing from her childhood and even wrote her first poetry at the age of 17 before translating books by Dalit writers. Kilvenmani, an obscure village in the Nagapattinam taluk of erstwhile Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu, shot to significance in 1968, forty-four Dalit were, locked in a hut and burnt alive because they demanded for hike in wages. This study is an attempt to analyze the events, looking at it not in isolation, but by placing it in the larger socio – political scenario, by examining the various narratives of the incident itself, the aftermath, and the emotions and movements it spurred among the people based on the novel The Gypsy Goddess by Meena Kandasamy taking Marxism and communism as its main theme.

In the rich landscape of contemporary Tamil literature, two distinctive voices emerge with powerful stories of resistance and marginalization. Perumal Murugan's "Seasons of the Palm" offers an intimate portrait of a young Dalit bonded laborer through naturalistic prose, while Meena Kandasamy's "The Gypsy Goddess" reconstructs a historical massacre using experimental narrative techniques. Despite their contrasting approaches, both authors successfully challenge dominant narratives and amplify historically silenced communities in modern Indian literature. This research explores how their divergent literary techniques serve a common purpose: to illuminate the persistent realities of caste oppression and celebrate the enduring spirit of resistance in Tamil Nadu.

Social realism, as derived from the Marxist ideology, is something which adheres to reality, avoids romantic embellishments, and creates truthful portraits of life that expose human flaws. In it, we find characters with genuine jobs and problems. It records the life of an average farmer or labourer. The novel the Gypsy Goddess by Meena Kandasamy is an indictment of Communism and atrocities inflicted upon untouchable coolies and paddy workers. Mena Kandasamy presents the fictionalized version of the tragedy, portrayed on the documents taken from history and interviews of people who faced that actual incident. The landlords murder a communist leader. After that, the Dalit labourers go on strike, Dalit workers are forced to work back on farms, and those who refuse are assaulted and punished by the police. The democratic demand for justice by the untouchables farmers of Kilenmani, Tamil Nadu, are faced with a terrible series of actions which prove ‘might is right’, and the poor, helpless farmers are only left to suffer and die due to hostile conditions. The novel is a fine narrative of their plight and the traumatic conditions caused by the violence inflicted upon them. In brief, it is a fictionalized work on social realism. The present paper is a brief study of events that occur in the lives of Dalit, unprivileged paddy workers and their exploitation by so-called Upper Caste or Landlords and their realistic representation.

Meena Kandasamy’s The Gypsy Goddess (2014) and Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness (2004) are both novels based on historical events. While the former chronicles the 1968 massacre of Dalit agricultural workers in Kilvenmani (Tamil Nadu, India) by upper-caste landlords due to caste and class conflicts, the latter thematizes the production and reception of the testimonio in the context of a genocide of Indigenous people in Guatemala that lasted more than thirty years. This essay attempts to read both texts dialogically to offer insights into the epistemic interactions between two parts of the Global South through formal experimentations around ethics, justice, and truth. I argue that both texts use “novel” means to assemble real events from within a testimonial impulse. This unconventional and self-reflexive metafictional mode enables the retrieval of subaltern histories and the assertion of indigenous non-Western perspectives of historical events.

Resistance literature, like any socio-political praxis, is a subaltern resistance against the hegemonic structures of oppression and inequality. It acts as a counter-discourse that subverts the dominant linguistic and socio-cultural codes to regain lost identity, space, and voice. Being double marginalized, Dalits and women in the postcolonial world consider writing to be an emancipatory strategy to ascertain one’s position in a rigid, patriarchal society. But their experience and expressions have often been relegated to chimeric and overstatements. Meena Kandasamy’s poetry intervenes in the intersectionality of both mental and physical feminine and post-colonial experience. Her work emphasises a decolonial Dalit and feminist consciousness, confidently affirming the cultural peculiarity and integrity of her ‘being’ and as a marginalised. Through her use of disruptive allegories, non-linear narrative structures, and transgressive linguistic practices, Kandasamy challenges the dominant narrative styles and hegemonic ideas that exist in the society. Her choice of words and themes orchestrate a rebellion of the silenced by reinstating her resistance to mental colonialism and the social hierarchy. She portrays the outcasts’ world as an active site of resistance and re-inscription. Her refusal to conform to normative linguistic and aesthetic conventions affirms the politics of difference. This paper studies the select poems of Meena Kandasamy and explores how her works become a politicized activity and an integral part of resistance literature.

A country's constitution serves as fundamental law regulating relationships between government and citizens in various aspects including state form, institutions, human rights, citizenship rights, and national ideals. This study compares the Indonesian constitution with that of the United States through a citizenship education lens, examining how constitutional frameworks shape citizenship knowledge and civic participation. The research focuses on state structure and government systems, state institutions, human rights arrangements, citizenship provisions, and constitutional amendment mechanisms. Using a normative juridical approach with statutory and comparative methods, data is collected through literature study and presented qualitatively with descriptive-analytical approach. Results indicate that Indonesia and the United States share similarities in government form, several state institutions, human rights regulations, and constitutional amendment mechanisms, while differences emerge in state form, certain institutions, citizenship conceptualization, gun ownership rights, and judiciary involvement in constitutional amendments. The findings contribute to strengthening constitutional literacy and citizenship education, particularly relevant for Pancasila and Civic Education pedagogy in Indonesia.

IntroductionThe wandering narrator is a familiar figure in contemporary literature. This narrator is often searching for something abstract or ill-defined connected to the past and the traces it leaves behind. The works of the German writer W.G. Sebald inspired a number of theories on the various ways a writer might intersect place, memory, and representation through seemingly aimless wandering. This article expands on the scholarship around Sebald’s themes to identify two modes of investigative wandering: (1) wandering “in place”, through a city where a past trauma has occurred, and (2) wandering “out of place”, which occurs when a wanderer encounters a city that is a holding place of traumas experienced elsewhere.Sebald’s narrators mostly conduct wandering “in place” because they are actively immersed in, and wandering through, locations that trigger both memory and thought. In this article, after exploring both Sebald’s work and theories of place in literature, I analyse another example of wandering in place, in the Paris of Patrick Modiano’s novel, The Search Warrant (2014). I conclude by discussing how I encountered this mode of wandering myself when in Moscow and St Petersburg researching my first novel, The Memory Artist (2016). In contrasting these two modes of wandering, my aim is to contribute further nuance to the interpretation of conceptions of place in literature. By articulating the concept of wandering “out of place”, I identify a category of wanderer and writer who, like myself, finds connection with places and their stories without having a direct encounter with that place. Theories of Place and Wandering in W.G. Sebald’s WorkIn this section, I introduce Sebald as a literary wanderer. Born in the south of Germany in 1944, Sebald is perhaps best known for his four “prose fictions”— Austerlitz published in 2001, The Emigrants published in 1996, The Rings of Saturn published in 1998, and Vertigo published in 2000—all of which blend historiography and fiction in mostly plot-less narratives. These works follow a closely autobiographical narrator as he traverses Europe, visiting people and places connected to Europe’s turbulent twentieth century. He muses on the difficulty of preserving the truths of history and speaking of others’ traumas. Sebald describes how “places do seem to me to have some kind of memory, in that they activate memory in those who look at them” (Sebald quoted in Jaggi). Sebald left his native Germany in 1966 and moved to England, where he lived until his untimely death in a car accident in 2001 (Gussow). His four prose fictions feature the same autobiographical narrator: a middle-aged German man who lives in northern England. The narrator traverses Europe with a compulsion to research, ponder, and ultimately, represent historical catastrophes and traumas that haunt him. Anna MacDonald describes how Sebald’s texts “move freely between history and memory, biography, autobiography and fiction, travel writing and art criticism, scientific observation and dreams, photographic and other textual images” (115). The Holocaust and human displacement are simultaneously at the forefront of the narrator’s preoccupations but rarely referenced directly. This singular approach has caused many commentators to remark that Sebald’s works are “haunted” by these traumatic events (Baumgarten 272).Sebald’s narrators are almost constantly on the move, obsessively documenting the locations, buildings, and people they encounter or the history of that place. As such, it is helpful to consider Sebald’s wandering narrator through theories of landscape and its representation in art. Heike Polster describes the development of landscape from a Western European conception and notes how “the landscape idea in art and the techniques of linear perspective appear simultaneously” (88). Landscape is distinguished from raw physical environment by the role of the human mind: “landscape was perceived and constructed by a disembodied outsider” (88). As such, landscape is something created by our perceptions of place. Ulrich Baer makes a similar observation: “to look at a landscape as we do today manifests a specifically modern sense of self-understanding, which may be described as the individual’s ability to view herself within a larger, and possibly historical, context” (43).These conceptions of landscape suggest a desire for narrative. The attempt to fix our understanding of a place according to what we know about it, its past, and our own relationship to it, makes landscape inextricable from representation. To represent a landscape is to offer a representation of subjective perception. This understanding charges the landscapes of literature with meaning: the perceptions of a narrator who wanders and encounters place can be studied for their subjective properties.As I will highlight through the works of Sebald and Modiano, the wandering narrator draws on a number of sources in their representations of both place and memory, including their perceptions as they walk in place, the books they read, the people they encounter, as well as their subjective and affective responses. This multi-dimensional process aligns with Polster’s contention that “landscape is as much the external world as it is a visual and philosophical principle, a principle synthesizing the visual experience of material and geographical surroundings with our knowledge of the structures, characteristics, and histories of these surroundings” (70). The narrators in the works of Sebald and Modiano undertake this synthesised process as they traverse their respective locations. As noted, although their objectives are often vague, part of their process of drawing together experience and knowledge is a deep desire to connect with the pasts of those places. The particular kind of wanderer “in place” who I consider here is preoccupied with the past. In his study of Sebald’s work, Christian Moser describes how “the task of the literary walker is to uncover and decipher the hidden track, which, more often than not, is buried in the landscape like an invisible wound” (47-48). Pierre Nora describes places of memory, lieux de memoire, as locations “where memory crystallizes and secretes itself”. Interest in such sites arises when “consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with a sense that memory has been torn—but torn in such a way as to pose the problem of the embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists” (Nora 7).Encountering and contemplating sites of memory, while wandering in place, can operate simultaneously as encounters with traumatic stories. According to Tim Ingold, “the landscape is constituted as an enduring record of—and testimony to—the lives and works of past generations who have dwelt within it, and in doing so, have left something of themselves […] landscape tells – or rather is – a story” (153). Such occurrences can be traced in the narratives of Sebald and Modiano, as their narrators participate both in the act of reading the story of landscape, through their wandering and their research about a place, but also in contributing to the telling of those stories, by inserting their own layer of subjective experience. In this way, the synthesised process of landscape put forward by Polster takes place.To perceive the landscape in this way is to “carry out an act of remembrance” (Ingold 152). The many ways that a person experiences and represents the stories that make up a landscape are varied and suited to a wandering methodology. MacDonald, for example, characterises Sebald’s methodology of “representation-via-digressive association”, which enables “writer, narrator, and reader alike to draw connections in, and through, space between temporally distant historical events and the monstrous geographies they have left in their wake” (MacDonald 116).Moser observes that Sebald’s narrative practice suggests an opposition between the pilgrimage, “devoted to worship, asceticism, and repentance”, and tourism, aimed at “entertainment and diversion” (Moser 37). If the pilgrim contemplates the objects, monuments, and relics they encounter, and the tourist is “given to fugitive consumption of commercialized sights”, Sebald’s walker is a kind of post-traumatic wanderer who “searches for the traces of a silent catastrophe that constitutes the obverse of modernity and its history of progress” (Moser 37). Thus, wandering tends to “cultivate a certain mode of perception”, one that is highly attuned to the history of a place, that looks for traces rather than common sites of consumption (Moser 37).It is worth exploring the motivations of a wandering narrator. Sebald’s narrator in The Rings of Saturn (2002) provides us with a vague impetus for his wandering: “in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that had taken hold of me after the completion of a long stint of work” (3). In Vertigo (2002), Sebald’s narrator walks with seemingly little purpose, resulting in a sense of confusion or nausea alluded to in the book’s title: “so what else could I do … but wander aimlessly around until well into the night”. On the next page, he refers again to his “aimlessly wandering about the city”, which he continues until he realises that his shoes have fallen apart (35-37). What becomes apparent from such comments is that the process of wandering is driven by mostly subconscious compulsions. The restlessness of Sebald’s wandering narrators represents their unease about our capacity to forget the history of a place, and thereby lose something intangible yet vital that comes from recognising traumatic pasts.In Sebald’s work, if there is any logic to the wanderer’s movement, it is mostly hidden from them while wandering. The narrator of Vertigo, after days of wandering through northern Italian cities, remarks that “if the paths I had followed had been inked in, it would have seemed as though a man had kept trying out new tracks

Violence remains one of modern society’s most pressing global public health issues. As a result, the current study’s objective is to examine the text, The Gypsy Goddess, in the concept of Structural Violence, which is one of the most lethal forms of violence, from a broader perspective in terms of political, economic, gender and health aspects. The methodology of the study incorporates a documentary text, The Gypsy Goddess by Meena Kandasamy, which aids with the illustrations of actual records and a survey of the victims of the Kilvenmani massacre, which happened in the state of Tamil Nadu, India, in which poor agricultural peasants were burned alive by wealthy landlords. The study’s major findings offer a comprehensive look at the physical and psychological causes and consequences of underlying Structural Violence processes worldwide with reference to the select text. According to the text, the study’s findings suggest that structural violence contributing factors are multifaceted and systemic. Besides, it reveals that people’s collective efforts, combined with modified legal interventions, can help combat Structural Violence by creating awareness and providing impoverished communities with adequate services and resources.

<p>Because monuments, memorials and other 'sites of memory' privilege particular collective interpretations of the past over others, they represent inherently contentious and political spaces. Contention over representing the past is particularly resonant in Korea, where sites of memory are imbued with strong, often polarised meanings. By focusing on two such sites in Korea, this thesis seeks to discuss the wider implications of the ongoing conflict over what representations of the past should be privileged. In Gwangju, the area surrounding the former provincial hall (docheong) is being redeveloped, part of the city's attempts to become 'reborn' as a capital city of human rights and democracy in Asia. However, to many citizens in Gwangju, this new image ignores the meaning that the city's dissident past holds for local communal understandings of identity. Conflict arose as citizens protested to keep the symbolism of the docheong intact, thus, helping to maintain local narratives of the past. In Seoul, Myeongdong Cathedral, a key symbol of protest and democracy in the 1970s and 1980s, is now having its meaning re-interpreted, as the Catholic Church de-couples religion from socio-political concerns. The conflicting meanings of Myeongdong Cathedral are representative of a wider divergence in Korean society, as apathy towards Korea's past grows among society at large while other segments appropriate the past to protest contemporary socio-political concerns. Ultimately, these Korean case studies emphasise that the meanings sites of memory convey are not fixed, and that groups are often able to appropriate sites to affirm their own narratives of the past and to emphasise their own collective voice. Therefore, sites that represent particular understandings of the past, while contentious, also provide a space for debate and, thus, help to understand ongoing concerns within wider society.</p>

<p>Because monuments, memorials and other 'sites of memory' privilege particular collective interpretations of the past over others, they represent inherently contentious and political spaces. Contention over representing the past is particularly resonant in Korea, where sites of memory are imbued with strong, often polarised meanings. By focusing on two such sites in Korea, this thesis seeks to discuss the wider implications of the ongoing conflict over what representations of the past should be privileged. In Gwangju, the area surrounding the former provincial hall (docheong) is being redeveloped, part of the city's attempts to become 'reborn' as a capital city of human rights and democracy in Asia. However, to many citizens in Gwangju, this new image ignores the meaning that the city's dissident past holds for local communal understandings of identity. Conflict arose as citizens protested to keep the symbolism of the docheong intact, thus, helping to maintain local narratives of the past. In Seoul, Myeongdong Cathedral, a key symbol of protest and democracy in the 1970s and 1980s, is now having its meaning re-interpreted, as the Catholic Church de-couples religion from socio-political concerns. The conflicting meanings of Myeongdong Cathedral are representative of a wider divergence in Korean society, as apathy towards Korea's past grows among society at large while other segments appropriate the past to protest contemporary socio-political concerns. Ultimately, these Korean case studies emphasise that the meanings sites of memory convey are not fixed, and that groups are often able to appropriate sites to affirm their own narratives of the past and to emphasise their own collective voice. Therefore, sites that represent particular understandings of the past, while contentious, also provide a space for debate and, thus, help to understand ongoing concerns within wider society.</p>

This article theorizes the relationship between trauma and translation through a close reading of Han Kang’s <i>Human Acts</i> (2016) and its complex narrating of the Gwangju Democratization Movement of 1980. I engage with the novel through scholarship on state-sanctioned violence, the politics of memory and Korean and Black literary and cultural studies. I do this to consider how the massacre of Gwangu's residents by their own government is made possible by earlier histories of occupation and imperial violence in the Korean peninsula. I then turn to the Korean edition of the novel to address what emerges outside of the English translation. Here, I rely on my own language skills to read, translate and direct attention to what is lost in Deborah Smith's published translation of Han’s novel. Specifically, I argue that Smith’s version of <i>Human Acts</i> actively works against Han’s subversive articulation of the elusiveness of subjectivity, the rending of the world vis-à-vis violence, the possibilities afforded by opacity and the dilemma of what it means to write about "one's own" historical trauma. In an attempt to reflect critically on what it might mean to live in the ongoing ripples of such traumas, I offer a text that blurs autobiography, travel writing, Black Studies, and literary analysis, crafting something that may be situated under the aegis of cultural studies and alongside what Gloria Anzaldúa names an autohistoria-teoría and what Crystal Baik calls a diasporic memory work.

Mapping Jewish American Literary Studies in the New Century

Based upon a ‘performative’ interpretation of royal charters, The Politics of Memory and Identity offers a new and surprising narrative of West Frankish history from the death of Louis the Pious in 840 to the demise of the Carolingian dynasty in 987. The key is a carefully contextualised analysis of the circumstances in which kings issued charters and an alert examination of the charters’ verbal and visual semiotics. For which monasteries and cathedrals did kings issue diplomas and under what conditions? Who were the patrons who interceded for the recipients of diplomas and what titles were they given? Which kings were named as predecessors and which were omitted? Such clues allow us to recover the meaning of events whose significance was concealed by chroniclers, and to find unsuspected continuities in 150 years of West Frankish politics. They allow us to see a ruthless exercise of power in the use of forgeries and a commitment to political reform in the reform of monasteries. They reveal the long shadow cast by the reign of Charles the Bald in West Frankish history and the importance of a handful of monasteries as ‘sites of memory’. Above all, an intertextual reading of diplomas shows that political leaders in the kingdom made decisions based on policy, where the policy was articulated in terms of lessons drawn from their understanding of the past, and diplomas were the records that conveyed the lessons.