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SOAS LITERARY REVIEW ISSUE 4 (Spring 2005)
Contents
INTRODUCTION
This issue of the SOAS Literary Review
has been almost two years in the making, and it bears the
traces of the institutional problems of the journal, of
both disruptions and continuities. Since its creation in
1998, the journal has strived to provide research students
with a space for critical reflection and debate that cuts
across the institutionalised, regional boundaries of area
studies, in order to move beyond the philological and descriptive
discourse on literature such divisions of knowledge tend
to generate. Together with the AHRB Centre for Asian and
African Literatures, the SOAS Literary Review has
been encouraging work which explicitly rejects the limited
Orientalist perspective and brings the insights of critical
theory into the discussion of non-Western literary and cultural
texts. The new Review will also expand its disciplinary
focus to include work on cultural practices such as film,
media, visual and performing arts, which employs the theoretically
informed perspectives of cultural studies and engages with
issues of power, culture and representation.
A version of Hima Raza's article 'Unravelling
Sharam as a Metaphor for Mohajir Identity
in Salman Rushdie's Shame' has already appeared in
Wasafiri. We are publishing the article because it
was submitted to the journal two years ago - and as a tribute
to the author and her tragic and untimely death. Hima Raza's
incisive reading of Shame seems to exemplify Fredric
Jameson's dictum (from The Political Unconscious)
that the political is the ultimate horizon of interpretation
of any literary text. The article employs the figure of
the mohajir as a trope which embodies the ambivalence
underlying Rushdies's imaging of migrant identity. Raza
argues that in Rushdie's writing the mohajir operates
as a political device which subverts the fixity of nationalism
and negotiates a perpetually fractured, yet potentially
empowering diasporic subjectivity.
Hisako Takahashi's exploration of the
intersections between literature and the visual arts is
focused on Natsume Soseki (1867-1916), Japan's exemplary
modern writer, and the use of Symbolism in his work Sanshiro.
Through a careful examination of diaries, notes and the
exhibition catalogues Soseki owned, Takahashi builds a complex
picture of the role of painting in Sanshiro, not only as
an inspiration and a source of symbolist allusion, but as
a practice of representation which challenges the fundamental
elements of fiction.
Daniel Taghioff's article on the reporting
of The World Social Forum (held in Mumbai in 2004) in the
Indian press, puts forward a powerful argument against the
hegemony of Western-based, English-language debates on globalization,
their underlying paradigm of enlightenment liberalism, and
their various constructions of a predominantly liberal subject.
Taghioff contrasts the reporting of the The World Social
Forum in the Indian media to commentary in the local vernacular
press in the state of Karnataka, in order to show that other
debates, with other subjects, are possible.
Kyoo Lee's text blurs the boundaries
between strictly academic inquiry and creative writing to
present an original introduction to the Korean poet Ch'oe
Young-Mi (1961-). Lee's translations of the poems are interspersed
with illuminating analyses of Ch'oe's complex poetics: her
postmodern urban despair and her feminist aesthetics of
the body. Lee's reading emphasises both the lyrical beauty
of the poems and their forceful political charge.
Irena Hayter
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