Imaginary Maps Research Articles

The Significance of a Feminist Geopolitical Analysis in Mahasweta Devi’s The Hunt and Douloti the Bountiful

In the inspiration of bringing alternatives to Critical Geopolitics and Subaltern Geopolitics, Feminist Geopolitics has been employed in this paper. Feminist geopolitics traverses upon the discriminated, marginalized community’s lives and events as well as it connects their exploitation with power production. This feminist geopolitics’ analytical approach demonstrates connections of geopolitics power production with everyday life of Indian tribal people. While reading Indian Tribal community as a subaltern in the works of Mahasweta Devi, through feminist geopolitics we have analyzed violence, displacement, and resistance of tribal women. In geographical imaginaries, the land of tribal protects and strengthens women; simultaneously the tribal land displaces and destroys. The article investigates two questions, 1. What is the role of land in the lives of tribal women? 2. What is the need of mother land for tribal women? It also focuses on two women, whom the dominant geopolitics had marginalized once, but then, the research gap states, how one (woman) could survive through epitomic influence on geography and another could not survive due to displacement. Moreover, the gap insists on how the power relation operates inside and outside the tribal border as well as the interest, knowledge and power of elite’s invades the tribal community after the independence. The qualitative method (textual analysis) is used for research analysis, and Arya (2020) defines that “textual analysis is a type of qualitative analysis that focuses on the underlying ideological and cultural assumptions of a text” (Arya, 2020, p. 173). Hence, this method utilizes the theoretical approaches of the feminist geopolitics theory for the study of the two short stories of Mahasweta Devi. In this article, Imaginary Maps (1995) a collection of short stories by Mahasweta Devi, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak from which The Hunt (1995) and Douloti the Bountiful (1995) (two stories) have been analyzed for discussion.

On the Edge of the Perceptible: Microacting, imaginary worlds and cognitive estrangement in virtual performance

Microacting is a performance technique originated by the author in 2009 in collaboration with the jazz vibraphonist/actor Krystof Krasa, with subsequent contribution from neuroscientist Inna Tsirlin. It plays with the irregularities in human perception to build collectively imagined spaces, usually in a domestic setting. This text – part scholarly article, part research-as-practice reflection – contextualizes the latest series of experiments in perception and microacting brought about by the framework of the COVID-19 pandemic. We build imaginary worlds by inducing processes of cognitive deterritorialization. In the absence of normally available techniques due to the pandemic, we have been experimenting with how far our audience can carry the imaginative process on their own. During a series of virtual workshops conducted during the pandemic, the participants were guided via Zoom by an unseen voice through a perceptional de/reconstruction of their homes. The resulting observations along with the imaginary maps created by the participants are presented in the article.

Positioning the Gendered Subaltern: Body, Speech and Resistance in Mahasweta Devi’s Narratives

The postcolonial theory locates subaltern women as ‘doubly effaced’ and distanced from achieving agency to speak and participate in resistance. Due to her diversified colonized identity, much of the critical thought does not see any possibility for subaltern women participating in resistance. This line of argument implies a critical space in which the engagement with problematics inevitably leaves out subaltern women in the emergent resistance discourse. Moreover, such a position is suggestive of perceiving human activity and experience in closed terms and an intent to preserve subalternity. The present paper argues that, if perceived through a wider understanding of the concept of resistance, subaltern women may be seen to achieve agency as they communicate their plight vocally or silently and participate in resistance. Taking inferences from the literary narratives of Mahasweta Devi like Imaginary Maps, Breast Stories, the paper examines the strategies Devi employs to bring marginalized women into resistance and establishes that the ‘body’ emerges not only as a site of oppression but also as an important trope of power and resistance in her stories.

Reflecting on the purpose of mapwork in primary schooling

ABSTRACT Two purposes have dominated map teaching in primary education. First is the focus on map skills which enables, secondly, younger children to begin to read maps for place information to appreciate what is shown on a paper or digital map. This article extends these purposes by recognising other aspects of children’s map learning which usually remain implicit or are rarely countenanced. One concerns primary children’s out-of-school mapping in their daily lives, the ways they make sense of the places they engage with through their personal geographies. Rather than an adjunct in map teaching, younger children’s mental mapping can be engaged and enhanced through conscious use and reflection throughout primary schooling. Two further important contexts involve children using local large-scale maps and atlas maps. Children encounter imaginary maps in stories and games providing a role for such maps in fostering children’s map learning. These map learning contexts and maps have emotional connections for children. This is that mapping at local and national scales fosters their senses of local belonging and national identity. Drawing on these contexts, 12 purposes are identified for primary map learning.

Classifying the Imaginary: An Expansion of Library of Congress’ Subclass G9930 for Local Use

Class G provides granular classification for most cartographic materials through a well-established and expanded Cuttering system, maps of imaginary places are classified under G9930 which has no formal expansion. With the creation of a collection of imaginary maps at the Texas A&M University Libraries, the lack of expansion under G9930 created access and filing complications. This case study describes the problem that growing a collection under the unexpanded classification system posed and the solution that was found through the creation of an in-house expansion for G9930.

Divine Journeys: Geographical Catalogues in Ovid’s Fasti 4

This paper examines the geographical catalogues that describe the journeys of the goddesses Cybele and Ceres in Fasti 4. Looking beyond their narratological function as transitional devices and as displays of erudition, it seeks also to show how geography intersects with and further illustrates the poem’s interest in religious innovation, generic experimentation and imperial expansion. The journeys of the two goddesses, which are notable as the only geographical catalogues of the poem, provide imaginary maps of both the previous literary tradition and of the Roman empire.

Drawn for the Mind's Eye: Map Metaphors in Early Modern English Literature

ABSTRACTCuriosity about imaginary thematic maps described in The Consolidator, Daniel Defoe’s 1705 satirical fantasy about a trip to the Moon, inspired research into the early modern English public's knowledge of maps. The Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Eighteenth Century Books Online (ECCO) databases of digitized early modern literature were employed. A full-text EEBO search of 1600–1700 found the word ‘map’ and its variants in 3382 records. A similar search in ECCO of 1701–1710 yielded results in 1425 records. About half of the results are printed map illustrations and mentions of actual maps, while the remainder are map metaphors in sermons, poems, plays, etc. The metaphors can be classified using Oxford English Dictionary definitions of ‘map’. This literary use of map metaphors arguably prepared the public to accept maps as tools for the visualization of invisible or intangible physical and cultural phenomena, when thematic maps began to develop in the mid-eighteenth century.

Re-Creation of Tribals: Debt, Bonded Slavery and Bonded Prostitution in Mahasweta Devi’s Imaginary Maps

Bonded labor or bonded slavery and bonded prostitution in India is a legacy left by British colonialism. Under this system, a person has to fall into servitude to whomever he or she has loaned money from with no means of repaying that debt. Mahasweta Devi has raised this social phenomenon in her writing, demonstrating that tribal people are those who have been victimized by this system. This study explores the issue of bonded slavery and bonded prostitution by analyzing two stories from Devi’s Imaginary Maps. This literary work depicts the plight of tribal communities as a result of the exploitation of their natural and human resources by colonizers and domestic capitalists. Those exploiters have alienated themselves from nature, considering themselves not to be part of nature but people who can use nature to increase their wealth. The depletion of nature leads to the victimization of the tribal communities. Through the lens of Postcolonial Ecocriticism, Imaginary Maps condemns the colonizers and domestic capitalists for destroying the tribes’ forests which serve as a motherly provider for their communities. This destruction forces communities to change their way of life. Money becomes a necessity and causes many tribal members to borrow money from moneylenders. Unable to repay the debt, they become bonded laborers and bonded prostitutes and are seriously exploited and abused. Imaginary Maps serves as a channel through which the tribal voice is heard, depicting the relationship between colonialism, neocolonialism, domestic capitalists, ecology and the tribal communities. From being free subjects, both nature and the tribes are re-created as bonded slaves.

Imaginary Maps: Ecocritical Reading of Mahasweta Devi's Works

When the Sagwana, or the saga forests, were felled, the Korjus, who were food gatherers, became a condemned people....The Korjus ate reori seeds, tuber, roots, fruits, nuts, deer, birds, hares and monitor lizards. Their brains ceased to function when the forest died.

Tortured bodies, rape, and disposability in Mahasweta Devi’s “Giribala,” “Dhowli” and “Douloti the Bountiful”

This article offers a close reading of Mahasweta Devi’s ethnographic reportage in her short narratives “Giribala” and “Dhowli,” in Women, Outcastes, Peasants and Rebels and “Douloti the Bountiful” in Imaginary Maps to show how ecological marginalization, reproductive rape and unequal resource access have depleted Adivasi female reproductive spaces, disposing them to sexualized and commodified sites of exploitative ideological values. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, I argue that Devi’s cultural production provides an ethnographic venue for examining how power relations shape reproduction and reproductive decisions and how women struggle daily to reproduce their livelihoods under local levels of political duress.

Douloti the Bountiful

Douloti the Bountiful Mahasweta Devi Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (bio) —Where have you come from, Somni? —They brought me from Barha village. —Did they say they would marry you? —Why should they? I was already married. —Already married? —Yes yes. And I have my man at home. —How did you come? —Was there another way? My man took two hundred rupees from him, to get land. Hoo, in a year it became four thousand rupees. Then the god said to my man, You won’t be able to repay, you are a kamiya. Send your wife. Your debt will be repaid in five years, your wife will return home with money in hand. I kept my son with my husband and came here. —And the boy? —He is in Barha. The god has lots of land in Barha. —How many children do you have here? —Three. Somni put her hand to her cheek and said, “See what a strange thing. I was married in childhood, and I stayed with my man for so long. I had only one son. And Latia made me the mother of three sons in a row. —Those sons? —They lie around in the marketplace. They beg. They don’t let you live with your child, and clients come up to one month before birth. Then I can’t for three months. —Then? —The god lends money. [End Page 109] —Doesn’t he let you keep them? —No no, would he? When I am burnt up, I go see them. Rooti’s son too is Latia’s son. And it was Latia’s truck that hit him and crippled him. As a cripple he gets more begging. He got a shirt too. —How long will you stay? —Who knows. As long as it pleases the god. —Then? —Then I’ll beg. There’s nothing in my body anymore. Will I be able to work hard anymore? For four-five years thirty clients a day. I’ll beg. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is university professor at Columbia University. Her most recent books are Other Asias and An Aesthetic Education in an Era of Globalization. She was the 2012 Kyoto Prize laureate in Art and Philosophy and a Padma Bhushan awardee for 2013. She trains teachers and guides ecological agriculture in western Birbhum District, West Bengal, India. The daughter of a feminist mother, she is involved in feminism across the spectrum. Acknowledgments This excerpt from Mahasweta Devi’s short story “Douloti the Bountiful,” translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, is from Imaginary Maps: Three Stories by Mahasweta Devi (New York: Routledge, 1995), 63. Published by permission of the translator. All rights reserved. [End Page 110] Copyright © 2014 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Rethinking Working-Class Literature

Rethinking Working-Class Literature Ulka Anjaria (bio) Sonali Perera, No Country: Working-Class Writing in the Age of Globalization. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. xiv + 230 pp. $50. Sonali Perera’s book No Country: Working-Class Writing in the Age of Globalization offers a compelling reading of the nature of working-class literature in a putatively postclass era. Perera offers a third way between, on one side, scholarship on the literatures of migrancy and diaspora that focuses on cultural hybridity and textual difference rather than class and, on the other, criticism that offers a historicist critique of postcoloniality, but in order to do so mobilizes a universal (European) understanding of class.1 Perera argues that we neither have to do away with the category of “working-class writing” in this globalized age nor cling to it nostalgically, as the expression of the “true” subject of revolutionary history. Rather, she says, we must see how writings on class from the colonized and postcolonial world are working to rethink what class is in the first place. Thus we might find novels in which the building of working-class solidarity fails, or texts deliberately resistant to the progressive telos of subaltern awakening. These are [End Page 792] not, Perera argues, failures in writing revolution, but representations of the difficulty of doing so under conditions of colonialism, uneven development, or globalization. Rather than looking for a more perfect representation of working-class solidarity, we should read these texts wisely for what they say about the reality of difference, even as they add to our understanding of the constantly shifting parameters of the very categories of class. Perera’s introduction sets out her theoretical framework, which is refreshingly lucid: taking her title from Karl Marx’s injunction that “the working men have no country,” Perera traces how Marx himself is ambivalent about what class is in his unfinished writings, especially in Capital, volume 3. She reads Marx’s elliptical texts as an allegory for the perennially incomplete project of defining class, despite the fact that later Marxists have taken from his writings a fixed sense of the “proletariat” and “bourgeoisie.” Those attempts Perera sees as damaging to Marx’s original—ambivalent—project. Using Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s work on Mahasweta Devi in Imaginary Maps,2 Perera shifts this ambivalence around the content of class into the positive notion of ethics, which she claims is a way of thinking about “social justice in the absence of guarantees” (20). A focus on ethics “carr[ies] over the idealism of the revolutionary moment into the transformative task-oriented daily work that can only take place in the everyday” (20). This strategy allows Perera to consider class not only as a masculine project of progressivist history but also as a gendered imaginary of vulnerability and even love, whose future directions are as yet unknown. Chapter 1 presents a beautiful reading of Mulk Raj Anand’s 1936 novel Coolie that exhibits precisely the theoretical vision advanced in the introduction. Rightly arguing against the various readings of Coolie that fixate either on its postcolonial “writing back” to Rudyard Kipling’s Kim or on its “failed” revolutionary potential (the protagonist Munoo dies before he can join the workers’ movement), Perera begins her analysis at this point of “failure” and considers what Anand might have been trying to say by means of it. Using this putative lack as a guide through the text—which she reads, I [End Page 793] think absolutely convincingly, as a text primarily of gaps rather than certainty—she interprets the novel as the story of the disjuncture between a universalized account of working-class progressivism and the everyday reality of colonial subjection. Thus when Munoo finds himself unable to comprehend the political economy of the products he carries on his back, or when he is summarily shooed away from a conversation among the factory bosses, these moments of “scripted silence” (46) write the unmaking of class solidarity which, Perera argues, reveals the disjuncture between the rhetoric of class empowerment and the experience of subaltern subjectivity. In thus invoking both the colonial Bildungsroman and the revolutionary tract, Anand writes the story of the misfit between them. This is...

Through secret alliance to public Great war

Before the World War One, there were many secret alliances, but there were also reciprocated suspicions among some European powers during a few former decades (since 1876). These were alliances and suspicions involving their plans for geopolitical recomposition of the Balkans, where interests of the Balkan states and peoples were marginalized and to a great extent instrumentalized. Smoldering disagreement of non-Balkan hegemons regarding the drawing of imaginary maps of the Balkans, according, of course, to the wishes of each of them, was sometimes openly expressed and resulted in uprisings and local wars. However, the outcome of these types of violence had never fully satisfied the ambitions of each of the interested non-Balkan hegemons. It particularly disagreed with the ambitions of the Berlin-Vienna axis regarding the 'vital importance' of its extending towards Thessaloniki and Baghdad. An attempt in 1941 to achieve its breakthrough by force led to aggression against the Kingdom of Serbia, which triggered the World War One.

Undergraduate Geography Students Define Aesthetic Maps

Several aesthetic map definition approaches aim to describe the components, concepts and aspects of aesthetic maps. While the discussion is mostly conducted by mapping professionals and researchers, one may wonder how naïve map users would define an aesthetic map. Thirty-four undergraduate geography students answered a short questionnaire in which they defined an aesthetic map, and identified the most aesthetic map along with the reasons why they liked that particular map. Preliminary findings indicate that two important concepts for aesthetic maps are clarity and being visually pleasing/attractive. Favorite aesthetic maps ranged widely from reference to thematic to imaginary maps. Questionnaire results also indicate the emerging importance of and possible aesthetic paradigm shift towards mobile and other interactive, web-based spatial representations. Naïve aesthetic map definitions could provide an important insight into current and future aesthetic map trends.

Comparative Literature/World Literature: A Discussion with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and David Damrosch

Research Article| December 01 2011 Comparative Literature/World Literature: A Discussion with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and David Damrosch David Damrosch; David Damrosch David Damrosch is Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature in the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, and is a past president of the American Comparative Literature Association. His books include The Narrative Covenant: Transformations of Genre in the Growth of Biblical Literature (1987), We Scholars: Changing the Culture of the University (1995), What Is World Literature? (2003), The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (2007), and How to Read World Literature (2009). He is the founding general editor of the six-volume Longman Anthology of World Literature (2004) and of The Longman Anthology of British Literature (4th ed., 2009), editor of Teaching World Literature (2009), and coeditor of The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature (2009). He is also the founding director of the Institute for World Literature (www.iwl.fas.harvard.edu). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is University Professor at Columbia University. She is the translator of Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology (1976) and of Mahasweta Devi's Imaginary Maps and the author of, among others, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987), Thinking Academic Freedom in Gendered Post–Coloniality (1993), Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (1999), Death of a Discipline (2003), Other Asias (2005), and An Aesthetic Education in the Age of Globalization (forthcoming). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Literature Studies (2011) 48 (4): 455–485. https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.48.4.0455 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation David Damrosch, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak; Comparative Literature/World Literature: A Discussion with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and David Damrosch. Comparative Literature Studies 1 December 2011; 48 (4): 455–485. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.48.4.0455 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressComparative Literature Studies Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2011 by The Pennsylvania State University. All rights reserved.2011The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Mapping the Imaginary—Maps in Fantasy Role-Playing Games

This paper deals with cartographic representations as means of communicating the imaginary using maps in fantasy role-playing games as an example. Drawing on SCHUTZian accounts of intersubjectivity and communication we understand maps as one of many strategies to deal with the problem of medium transcendencies posed by communicating with others. The methodology of sociological hermeneutics (SOEFFNER) is introduced as means of approaching maps and the interactions they are involved in. In our analyses of maps used in role-playing games we can then show that maps are not only a means of locating oneself but also a means of actively creating a meaningful place in which we are entangled. Thus, maps help to form a sense of belonging in (imaginary) territories which are only given to us in mediated form.

Everywhere and nowhere

This article discusses fan pilgrimage, using as a case study the city of Vancouver, Canada — a location that has been used as the basis for several cult television series. It draws on theories of urban geography, particularly of postmodern suburbia (Edward Relph, Jean Baudrillard, Umberto Eco, Fredric Jameson, Edward Soja) to argue that while Vancouver may be valued by film and television producers as a generic, anonymous, `flat' environment, to fan pilgrims who bring their own imaginary maps (based on the fictional geographies of Smallville, The X-Files and Battlestar Galactica ), the city is a rich intersection of possible worlds. The article uses science fiction and superhero metaphors of parallel universes and `infinite earths' to explore this fan experience, arguing finally that pilgrimage can be an act of creation, performance, disguise and carnival that symbolically transforms the location in question, temporarily inverting social structures and making the city into a liberating, playful space. •

Transcribing Resistance: Cartographies of Struggling Bodies and Minds in Mahasweta Devi's Imaginary Maps

Transcribing Resistance: Cartographies of Struggling Bodies and Minds in Mahasweta Devi's Imaginary Maps

Consuming the Past

This chapter reports preliminary findings from case studies of two heritage-based sites in north west England: Wigan Pier and The Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester. The research has involved examining both the production and consumption processes at work at these sites. The author focuses here on the area of consumption and presents data, collected in interviews with visitors to the two sites which suggest that visitors use emotional, imaginary and bodily maps to make sense of the past. The authenticity of the experience is sustained by an ‘emotional realism’ which enables and enhances the process of consumption. The author also argues that the manner in which these sites are consumed supplies one way of understanding the definitions and significance of the concept of heritage articulated by the visitors.

Street Theatre in Pakistani Punjab: The Case of Ajoka, Lok Rehas, and the Woman Question

The Parallel Movement, or Street Theatre as it is loosely called, in province of Punjab, Pakistan, emerged during repressive era of General Zia-ul-Haque's Martial Law regime (1979-1989).' This form of theatre raises several questions about nature of relationship between Pakistani Islamic state and society. The most pertinent of these for my project is question of state's coercive relationship with its female citizenry. Related to this is issue of male-female relationships in society and how these relationships are complicated by class stratifications that inevitably affect way gendered politics (and policies) actually get played out. There is also increasingly vexed issue of national versus ethnic identity-a conflict which is reflected through language politics of theatre groups; linguistic choices reveal groups' conflicting and often self-contradictory ideological stands on this question. In choosing to focus on such an area of inquiry for a (so-called) postcolonial project, I am seeking to re-site question Who decolonizes? that Gayatri Spivak insists we confront in her afterward to Imaginary Maps (1995). This question forces us to reevaluate the task of post-colonial, which, as Spivak sees it-and I agree-ought to involve a rigorous moving away from conflating Eurocentric migrancy with post-coloniality (Spivak 1995:203). In words, let us, as postcolonial critics and scholars, turn our attention to other sites of enunciation, as Walter Mignolo has urged (1993:120). This elsewhere is really a turning inward toward postcolonial nationstate in order to cast a critical gaze at a decolonizing process that has simultaneously constructed a normative constitutional subject of new nation (Spivak 1995:2o3): in Pakistan's case, middle class, urban and male, or upper class, feudal and male. Within last decade or so, Ajoka (the major Parallel group in Pakistan) as well as its regional spin-offs, notably