what i'm listening to

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Winter Break

Today I completed my first semester in graduate school, which means that for the next month I get to read whatever I want!

Here's what I'm thinking:
The History of Love, Nicole Krauss
Tamas, Bhisham Sahni
The Life and Times of Michael K, J.M. Coetzee
Freedom Song, Amit Chaudhuri
The Moor's Last Sigh, Salman Rushdie

Comments and suggestions are welcome.

A Cinematic Master

With each viewing of Shyam Benegal's Bhumika (The Role), I am filled with a sense of grief that I was not alive during heyday of Indian 'parallel' cinema. Benegal (along with Mrinal Sen, Govind Nihalani, Amol Palekar, and Girish Karnad) is a true cinematic pioneer who moved away from the glamorous commercial musical that has stereotypically come to represent Indian cinema. Bhumika was one of the high points of the parallel cinema movement that favored aesthetic realism, narratives of class, caste and gender inequality, and the (re)building of a postcolonial nation. These politically charged films were acted by a pseudo-repertory company of accomplished actors--among them, Shabana Azmi, Naseerudin Shah, Om Puri, Kulbhushan Kharbandha, Amrish Puri, Smita Patil and Anant Nag.

The national award-winning Bhumika, released in 1978, is the story of film-actress Usha (Smita Patil) and her search for freedom. As in the courtesan narrative, Usha is essentially "sold" to a film studio at a young age, only to become the most popular actress of her time. The film follows Usha through a series of failed romantic and familial entanglements that leave her painfully alone, though ultimately wiser.

Alongside the narrative of the public performing woman's desire for private happiness and social freedom, is the story of Indian cinema itself. Benegal, due to a limited availability of film stock, chose to shoot Bhumika with black and white, sepia, and Eastman color film to reflect the modes of production from the early 1930s through the early sixties--the timeframe of Usha's film stardom. It's a startling effect, and brings a level of visual richness usually absent from commercial films of the time. Further, Benegal exploits the possibilities of the film-within-a-film convention, and allows the viewer to witness Usha's acting prowess first-hand, again commenting on representations ("roles") of women and Indian womanhood in the cinema. We see Usha playing the devoted wife, the sacrificing mother, the sexually suspect economically independent single woman--all loaded figures in the history of Indian cinema.

The film is superbly acted by Amol Palekar, Amrish Puri, Naseerudin Shah, Anant Nag, and the incomparable Smita Patil, who tragically died in her early thirties, long before she reached her true greatness.

Benegal, too, was at the peak of his career as a director. His later work, though still of the highest quality, has lacked the political charge of his early days. Bhumika may well be his masterwork.

A true classic.

I am currently reading Edward Said's Orientalism, one of the most influential and groundbreaking texts on postcolonial studies. It's dense as hell, and deserves more thoughtful posting than I've done so far on this blog.

So. Keep an eye out. Postings soon to come.

Read this please.

Culture of Fear: Poetry Professor Becomes Terror Suspect

News from Joliet, IL

Sepia Mutiny recently posted this.

It's a sad, sad story.

Enough fiction; back to the theory.

Today I read the introduction to David L. Eng's Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America, a text that, I think, will prove incredibly useful in my future work.

Eng's purpose is to make use of psychoanalytic theory in the study of Asian American male subjectivity. This is completely new terrain for me as a student of theory. I had, until today, written off psychoanalytic theory as something inherently homophobic, sexist and racist, and therefore not terribly useful to narratives of transcontinental migration, diasporic nostalgia, and subject-formation of American queers of color.

David Eng is a very convincing writer, one completely invested in the resurrection of psychoanalysis in studies of intersecting and mutually constitutive notions of race and sexuality--moving away from strict sociological study to a more thorough inquiry into the effects of institutional racism and emasculation on the Asian American male psyche.

In his reading of David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly, Eng argues that Gallimard's inability to see Song as a man works as a revisionist example of Freud's notion of fetishism:

In his 1927 essay 'Fetishism,' Freud states that the man, traumatized by the sight of female difference--of castration--creates a fetish--a surrogate penis--and projects it onto the female body in the guise of a substitute object: a plait of hair, an undergarment, a shoe. From a slightly different perspective, fetishism describes a psychic process whereby the man attempts to obviate the trauma of sexual difference by seeing at the site of the female body a penis that is not there to see.

A psychoanalytic reading of M. Butterfly would seem, then, to insist upon an analysis of the drama through the logic of fetishism. While Gallimard's misrecognition of Song's anatomy indicates the white diplomat's abiding psychic investment in the protocols of the fetish, Hwang's drama also resists, reverses, and ultimately revises Freud's traditional paradigm by opening it upon a social terrain marked not by singular difference but by multiple differences. That is, rather than seeing at the site of the female body a penis that is not there to see, Gallimard refuses to see at the site of the Asian male body, a penis that is there to see. The white diplomat's 'racial castration' of Song thus suggests that the trauma being negotiated in this particular scenario is not just sexual but racial difference. As such, Gallimard's psychic reworking of fetishism challenges our conventional interpretation of the Freudian model by delineating a crossing of race with what is traditionally seen only as a paradigm of (hetero)sexual difference.

Through this racial castration, Gallimard need not see Song as anything other than a woman. Through this distinct refashioning of fetishism, Oriental 'could never be completely a man.' And through this elaborate exercise of mental gymnastics Gallimard can strive to maintain the tenuous boundaries of his own assaulted white male (hetero)sexuality. Hence, in Gallimard's orientalist world fetishism cannot be understood as a scandalous perversion of the social order. Indeed, fetishism is naturalized, functioning as a normative psychic mechanism by means of which a ubiquitous sexualized and racialized vision of the feminized Asian American male emerges and takes hold.

The Namesake

Mira Nair's adaptation of The Namesake does exactly what I think cinematic adaptations of literature should do--it uses Jhumpa Lahiri's novel as a starting point, then asserts its own artistry by reimagining the characters from an alternate perspective, one that is no longer literary but inherently cinematic. Whereas Lahiri's focus is Gogol, the first-generation Indian-American son, Nair (and scriptwriter Sooni Taraporevala) intelligently shift the focus to Ashima and Ashoke, the Bengali parents (achingly well played by Tabu and Irrfan Khan).

As such, Nair's film works as a wonderful complement to Lahiri's novel. I can't imagine one without the other.

Did i mention Tabu and Irrfan Khan?

Writer to watch

Dinaw Mengestu's debut novel The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears marks the emergence of a vital new voice in what I will precariously call "immigrant fiction." Mengestu, a recent graduate of Columbia's MFA fiction program, writes prose that is at once urgent and reflective, beautifully and painfully exploring issues of migration, race, love, and the American Dream.

In the following passage, Sepha Stephanos, a shop-owner from Ethiopia, travels to visit his only relative in America--an uncle to whom he rarely speaks:

There are twenty-eight floors to the building, and of those twenty-eight floors, at least twenty-six are occupied exclusively by other Ethiopians who, like my uncle, moved here sometime after the revolution and found to their surprise that they would never leave. Within this building there is an entire world made up of old lives and relationships transported perfectly intact from Ethiopia...Living here is as close to living back home as one can get, which is precisely why I moved out after two years and precisely why my uncle has never left. Hardly a word of English is spoken inside of these doors. The hallways on every floor smell of wat, coffee and incense. The older women still travel from apartment to apartment dressed in slippers and white blankets that they keep wrapped around their heads, just as if they were still walking through the crowded streets of Addis. The children keep only the friendships sanctioned by their parents.

...Sometimes I think of my decision to leave this building as an escape, while at other times it seems more like an abandonment. I try not to take the thought too seriously, but when every eye you catch seems to hold an accusation or question behind it, a decision has to be made. Either I left to create a new life of my own, one free from the restraints and limits of culture, or I turned my back on everything I was and that had made me.


Comments?

Tabu, actress extraordinaire

Tabu has the stuff of screen legend. She is absolutely radiant in Mira Nair's adaptation of The Namesake.

Here is a fabulous interview from rediff.

The photo is a still from Vishal Bhardwaj's Maqbool, an adaptation of Macbeth, with Irrfan Khan and Tabu in the lead roles. Highly recommended.

More to come on The Namesake.

Controversy, come my way...

Of late, I have been questioned about my use of the word queer, most notably in a paper titled 'Bollywood Screen Queens: Indian Popular Cinema's Construction of Queer Diasporas.' While I could ramble on about the appropriation of derogatory language for the sake of empowerment, I choose instead to offer what I consider to be a brilliant working defintion of queer, at least, in regard to my usage of the word.

In a recent interview, my friend, Liz Tymus, defined queer as follows:

“Queer is a socio-political/personal identification. It’s a commitment to nonconformity to heteronormative society. In short, to identify as queer is a rejection of social binaries, ‘straight-gay,’ ‘male-female,’ ‘man-woman,’ ‘prude-promiscuous,’—queer identity explodes the assumption of ‘one or other,’ but rather sees folks as numerous and infinite.”
(Madison Post, February 21, 2007)

Also, UC Berkeley's Gender Equity Resource Center offers a set of basic defintions to words often associated with the queer community.

Please make note, I do not claim that these definitions are fixed or universal. They do, however, provide an accessible point of departure for ongoing conversation(s) about the limitations of linguistic identification.

Shakespeare Wallah

Highly interesting article from the BBC, about an all-Indian touring company of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6453489.stm

What inspres me...

New art my by bestie, imin yeh.

HOT NEWS!

The Bag Lady, herself, Erykah Badu is set to release 3 albums in 2007. See here.

Currently reading...

I recently purchased a beautiful volume of essays edited by Amitava Kumar, Away: The Indian Writer as an Expatriate. Included are essays and selections from the writings of M.K. Gandhi, Amitav Ghosh, Rabindranath Tagore, A.K. Ramanujan, Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Meera Syal, Anita Desai, and Pankaj Mishra, among others. Highly recommended.

Below is an extract from Bharati Mukherjee's brilliant piece, "Two Ways to Belong in America."


Like well-raised sisters, we never said what was really on our minds, but we probably pitied one another. She, for the lack of structure in my life, the erasure of Indianness, the absence of an unvarying daily core. I, for the narrowness of her perspective, her uninvolvement with the mythic depths or the superficial pop culture of this society. But, now, with the apegoating of ‘aliens’ (documented and illegal) on the increase, and the targeting of long-term legal immigrants like Mira for new scrutiny and new self-consciousness, she and I find ourselves unable to maintain the same polite discretion. We were always unacknowledged adversaries, and we are now, more than ever, sisters.

“I feel used,” Mira raged on the phone the other night. “I feel manipulated and discarded. This is such an unfair way to treat a person who was invited to stay and work here because of her talent. My employer went to the INS and petitioned for the labour certification…I’ve obeyed all the rules, I’ve paid my taxes, I love my work…I love the friends I’ve made. How dare America change its rules in midstream? If America wants to make new rules curtailing benefits of legal immigrants, they should only apply to immigrants who arrive after those rules are already in place.”

To my ears, it sounded like the description of a long-enduring, comfortable yet loveless marriage, without risk or recklessness. Have we the right to demand, and to expect, that we be loved? (That, to me, is the subtext of the arguments by immigration advocates.) My sister is an expatriate, professionally generous and creative, socially courteous and gracious, and that’s as far as her Americanization can go. She is here to maintain an identity, not to transform it.

...

Mira and I differ, however, in the ways in which we hope to interact with the country that we have chosen to live in. She is happier to live in America as expatriate Indian than as an immigrant American. I need to be part of the community I have adopted…I need to put roots down, to vote and make the difference that I can. The price that the immigrant willingly pays, and that the exile avoids, is the trauma of self-transformation.


Comments?

Currently reading...

Again, Zadie Smith; again, White Teeth:

We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.

Shout out to Imin Yeh.

Comments?

I couldn't resist...

Nun asked for a fun post.

Years too late.

Ever behind the times, I am currently reading Zadie Smith's White Teeth. Standard reactions being had: the book is brilliant; Smith is wise beyond her 30-odd years (White Teeth was published when she was just 24).

Most fascinating to me, though, is Smith's useful critique of multiculturalism, the commodification of culture and beauty, and the skewed histories of colonialism that continue to reach well beyond South Asian borderlines. In short, White Teeth is an intensely theoretical novel. We no longer need to search for narratives on which to superimpose our disembodied theories. Smith has done it for us: here is a narrative written of the theory, of the body--concisely, eloquently, organically.

To set up the passage below: Millat, the UK-born son of a Bangladeshi Muslim, reacts to the publication of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. Notice how Smith delineates the complexities and interactions between the postcolonial, the migrant, and the diasporic, all in the last few phrases:

To be more precise, Millat hadn’t read it. Millat knew nothing about the writer, nothing about the book; could not identify the book if it lay in a pile of others; could not pick out the writer in a lineup of other writers (irresistible, this lineup of offending writers: Socrates, Protagoras, Ovid and Juvenal, Radclyffe Hall, Boris Pasternak, D.H. Lawrence, Solzhenitsyn, Nabokov, all holding up their numbers for the mug shot, squinting in the flashbulb). But he knew other things. He knew that he, Millat, was a Paki no matter where he came from; that he smelled of curry; had no sexual identity; took other people’s jobs; or had no job and bummed off the state; or gave all the jobs to his relatives; that he could be a dentist or a shop-owner or a curry-shifter, but not a footballer or a filmmaker; that he should go back to his own country; or stay here and earn his bloody keep; that he worshipped elephants and wore turbans; that no one who looked like Millat, or spoke like Millat, or felt like Millat, was ever on the news unless they had recently been murdered. In short, he knew he had no face in this country, no voice in this country, until the week before last when suddenly people like Millat were on every channel and every radio and every newspaper and they were angry, and Millat recognized the anger, thought it recognized him, and grabbed it with both hands.

Comments?

In case you missed this...

Mary J. Blige is the truth.

Queer Stuffs

Nepal has granted citizenship to a transwoman. Chanda Mausalman was issued official citizenship papers in which the gender M/F option was crossed out, replaced by the word "both."

Below are two links on the story. The first is from Advocate.com, the second from Yahoo-India News.


http://www.advocate.com/news_detail_ektid41771.asp


http://in.news.yahoo.com/070205/43/6bsxc.html

Currently reading...

From Sarah Waters' The Night Watch:

The house was perfectly dark after that, and the darkness, and the silence, made Helen feel worse than ever. She had only to reach for the switch of the lamp, the dial of the wireless, to change the mood of the place, but she couldn’t do it; she was quite cut off from ordinary habits and things. She sat a little longer, then got up and began to pace. The pacing was like something an actress might do in a play, to communicate a state of despair or dementedness, and didn’t feel real. She got down on the floor, drew up her legs, put her arms before her face: this pose didn’t feel real, either, but she held it, for almost twenty minutes. Perhaps Julia will come down and see me lying on the floor, she thought, as she lay there; she thought that if Julia did that, then she would at least realize the extremity of the feeling by which she, Helen, was gripped.

Then she saw at last that she would only look absurd. She got up. She was chilled, and cramped. She went to the mirror. It was unnerving, gazing at your face in a mirror in a darkened room; there was a little light from a street-lamp, however, and she could see by this that her cheek and bare arm were marked red and white, as if in little weals, from where she’d lain upon the carpet. The marks were satisfying, at least. She’d often longed, in fact, for her jealousy to take some physical form; she’d sometimes thought, in moments like this, I’ll burn myself, or I’ll cut myself. For a burn or a cut might be shown, might be nursed, might scar or heal, would be a miserable kind of emblem; would anyway be there, on the surface of her body, rather than corroding it from within. Now the thought came to her again, that she might scar herself in some way. It came, like the solution to a problem. I won’t be doing it, she said to herself, like some hysterical girl. I won’t be doing it for Julia, hoping she’ll come and catch me at it...I’ll be doing it for myself, as a secret.
...

She proceeded, now, as if she’d planned the entire operation in advance. She opened the neck of the sponge-bag and drew out the slim chromium case that held the safety-razor she and Julia used for shaving their legs. She took the razor out, unwound its screw, lifted off the little hub of metal, and eased out the blade.
...

She was left with two short crimson lines, such as might have been made by a hard but playful swipe from the paw of a cat.

She sat down on the edge of the bath. The shock of cutting, she thought, had produced some change in her, some chemical change: she felt quite unnaturally clear-headed, alive and chastened. She’d lost the certainty that the cutting of her leg was a sane and reasonable thing to do...And, yet— She kept looking at the crimson lines, in a half-perplexed, half-admiring way. You perfect fool, she thought; but she thought it almost jauntily. At last she took up the blade again, washed it, screwed it back beneath its metal hub, and put the razor back in its case. She switched off the light, allowed her eyes to grow used to the darkness, then let herself into the hall and went up to the bedroom.

Mira Nair + Jhumpa Lahiri + Irfan Khan + Tabu = Yes, please!

Here is the trailer for Mira's Nair's adaptation of The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri. This is the movie to watch for in 2007.

Namaste/Namaskara/Hello

Dearest Reader,

Welcome to Bag Ladies & Black Tea, a brand new blog by a co-founder of the PLAN 2008 diversity triumvirate. This space will function mainly as a journal of my reading habits--look out for emotionally resonant quotations, politically charged idea-thinking, and vitally important social commentary. Keywords to consider include the following: diaspora, queer, feminist, brown, south asia, grad school, indian cinema, bestie, imin, diana, justine.

Very best wishes, and happy reading.

a.kini