Fantasy as Subversion in South Asian Literature, Film and Media
Special Issue of Critical South Asian Studies
Guest Editor: Binayak Roy
In his magnum opus Aesthetic Theory Adorno asserts that “[w]hat is social in art is its immanent movement against society, not its manifest opinions” (Aesthetic Theory 297). The nature of art, authentic and autonomous, is never overtly social, believes Adorno; it is inherently social: “Social struggles and the relations of classes are imprinted in the structure of artworks; by contrast, the political positions deliberately adopted by artworks are epiphenomena and usually impinge on the elaboration of works and thus, ultimately, on their social truth content” (303). Art becomes social by its opposition/resistance to society, and it claims this position with its autonomy “[b]y crystallizing in itself as something unique to itself, rather than complying with existing social norms and qualifying as ‘socially useful’, it criticizes society by merely existing, for which puritans of all stripes condemn it” (296). Fredric Jameson, in his Political Unconscious, considers the individual literary work to be a symbolic act, “which is grasped as the imaginary resolution of real contradiction” (77). Writing, in fact the process of writing itself is immediately perceived as a part of a social process, a kind of intervention in a debate, and conflict about power and social relations. For Jameson ideology is not something “which informs or invests symbolic production”; rather “the aesthetic act itself is ideological, and the production of aesthetic or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in its own right, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal ‘solutions’ to unresolvable contradictions” (77). The narrative and story-forms play a dominant role in mediating individual experience and social totality, Jameson argues in The Political Unconscious, according to a process that he calls transcoding – the translating into an accepted code (which consists of certain narrative patterns and expectations) of social and historical reality to make it accessibly mediated for the individual. For Jameson “mediation is the classical dialectical term for the establishment of relationships between, say, the formal analysis of a work of art and its social ground, or between the internal dynamics of the political state and its economic base” (39). It is ‘dialectical’ because it has to shuttle between two very different or even contradictory entities. For the Marxist Jameson, explains Adam Roberts, the ‘seemingly disparate phenomena’ of life “are only seemingly
disparate: in fact they are all expressions of an underlying totality. It is the fragmentation that is illusory” (77):
were it not understood that social life is in its fundamental reality one and indivisible, a seamless web, a single inconceivable and transindividual process, in which there is no need to invent ways of linking language events and social upheavals or economic contradictions because on that level they were never separate from one another. (39)
Contemporary thinkers like Jacques Rancière and Isobel Armstrong deliberate on the political import and the inherent radicalism of literary aesthetics.
“It is through fantasy that we have always sought to make sense of the world”, claims Jack Zipes, “not through reason. Reason matters, but fantasy matters more” (“Why Fantasy Matters Too Much Too Us”, 78). Fantasy tales lay bare the mysteries of life and “compensate for the constant violation of nature and life itself and for the everyday violation of our lives engendered through spectacle. They contest reality and also become conflated with reality” (78). Zipes invokes Adorno in his thoughts on the subversive potential for fantasy and enunciates that for Adorno, two things were of paramount importance: first, fantasy as a capacity “which enables us to transform existing conditions into the negation of material reality” and fantasy as the result “that is, the product of the transformative capacity of the imagination” (80). Adorno emphasizes that" fantasy is also, and essentially so, the unrestricted availability of potential solutions that crystallize within the artwork. It is lodged not only in what strikes one both as existing and as the residue of something existing, but perhaps even more in the transformation of the existing” (Aesthetic Theory, 173-174). Art is not illusionary, it has agency. Rancière asserts that “art and politics do not constitute two permanent, separate realities whereby the issue is to know whether or not they ought to be set in relation. They are two forms of distribution of the sensible, both of which are dependent on a specific regime of identification” (Aesthetics and its Discontents, 25-26). If aesthetics has any agency in relation to change, contends Miles, “it is probably in critical acts of re-distribution and re-identification, within but beyond the regime of the art-world” (Eco-Aesthetics: Art, Literature and Architecture in a Period of Climate Change, 70). Admitting the fact that art cannot transform the world since it is part of the world itself and “the conditions of its production are always present in an artwork, Miles claims that art “contributes to facing the forces and trajectories which appear to bring the world to the edge of destruction” (158). Literary
fantasies are indeed emancipatory tales as “they bring undesirable social relations into question and force readers to question themselves” Jack Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, 188).
This Special Issue solicits articles which will explore this intricate relationship between literary art and society. The issue intends to analyze how fantasies are not simply situated in a rarefied atmosphere but are determined by a number of socio-political events which intersect and interact in myriad ways leading to the establishment of aesthetics of resistance in South Asian literature, film and media. Interested contributors may investigate representations, accounts, theorizations, and other textual explorations based on the concepts outlined above with respect to, but certainly not limited to:
Terrorism and Fantasy
Cosmopolitan Science Fiction
Cultural Politics of Popular Fantasy
Fantasy of Feminist History
Magic realism and the national imaginary
Cinema and Fantasy
Fantasy and Poetics of Literary/Cinematic Utopia
The politics of fantasy
Fantasy and Resistance in Literature/Cinema
Authoritarian regime and fantasy.
Please submit a 200 word abstract with 5 keywords and a short bio of 120 words (maximum) to Binayak Roy (binayak_roy@hotmail.com) by September 30, 2023. Notification of acceptance status will be sent by October 15, 2023. Completed essays of 4500 – 7000 words will be due by January 15th, 2024, with an anticipated publication date of March 2024. For more details, visit the journal’s website: https://journals.tplondon.com/csas/about/submissions