Citation:
Date Published:
5 Jan, 2020Abstract:
This paper posits that Esther Syiem’s poem, “To the Rest of India from Another Indian” (2013) engenders a subnational discourse that, by interrogating the national status of a privileged pedagogy, opts for a confederal political imagination of multiple and equal centers. It fosters this desire by modulating a counter imagination in two strategic ways — foregroundong its strangeness and implanting its own subnational pedagogy which constitutes its imagination. The subnational discourse, then, homogenizes the national imagination, and sets it in binary opposition to the modulated counter imagination which is also homogenized. It proceeds, after setting up a binary opposition, to contradict, delimit, and alienate itself in order to be recognized as another authentic and central entity parallel to the pedagogy that is deemed to be national. This paper concludes that Syiem’s subnational discourse, considered as a form of minority discourse, goes against the grain of Homi K. Bhabha’s view of minority discourse.
October 2019:
Muthukumar Manickam is a Research Scholar working on Nationalism with a focus on the representation of the North-East. He studies the points of intersection between Nationalism and Subnationalism. He has published an article titled “Historicising the Banal: Media Representation of India’s North-East as Discriminatory Pedagogy Begetting Subnational Discourse” in Archiv Orientalni, Published by Oriental Institute Czech Academy of Sciences
Vinod Balakrishnan teaches Creative Writing and Communication. He is a motivational speaker, practising poet, and yoga enthusiast. He reads on Life Writing, Nation, Indian Writing in English, Cultural Representation. He has published articles in journals such as a/b, Pragmatism Today, Journal of Somaesthetics, Dharmaram University Journal of Religions and Philosophies, Journal of Creative Communication, and Lit Crit. He has also contributed chapters in various edited volumes published by Springer, Bloomsbury, and Brill.