Suchergebnisse

Exploding bombs embedded with catastrophic potential have remained central to our eschatological conceptualizations for more than a century. Future war fiction—a key sub-genre of speculative fiction—in building upon this obsession introduces us to unforeseen apocalyptic settings, which are brought forth through a nexus between gendered bodies and destructive military machinery. In underscoring the decidedly masculine nature of future war fiction, this article explores depictions of anxious postcolonial masculinity within the little-explored terrain of Indian speculative fiction. Apocalyptic settings in these texts, I argue, provide a topos for enacting postcolonial masculine anxieties, which are subsequently countered through making male bodies contingent on the volatile performances of destructive military technology. In utilizing R.W Connell's conceptualization of "hegemonic masculinity," I explore the reasons behind the emergence of postcolonial masculine insecurities, which, I argue, results from India's colonial history and its continued legacy within the subcontinent. Finally, my examination of representative Indian speculative texts, namely Mainak Dhar's Line of Control (2009) and Sami Ahmad Khan's Red Jihad (2012) emphasizes that making hegemonic postcolonial masculinity contingent on the destructive capabilities of military technology results in unstable and threatening masculine performances; much like the unpredictable nature of war machinery highlighted in these texts.

The political partition of India in 1947 into a truncated India and the dominion of Pakistan witnessed a wave of forced migration, hitherto unseen in human history. The alteration of a singular national space into two separate nation-states based on religious identities forced the movement of almost twelve million people, in search of a new homeland. Although this exodus was experienced differently based on socio-economic backgrounds—unfortunately in ways akin to any violent transition—women formed the most susceptible ground to the rigours of the Partition. Gross and barbarous acts of violence perpetuated against women were derived from a hypermasculinized nationalist ideology: one that perceived women's bodies as sites where national and religious identities needed to be forcibly inscribed. Partition historiography, however, has frequently privileged only the political circumstances and elided the traumatic human micro-histories, which dominated and continue to impinge on postcolonial subjectivities. This article explores a key facet of Partition history, which has often been relegated to the footnotes of both political and social narratives: transitory rehabilitation camps established primarily for the recovery of female refugees. Through an analysis of non-fictional testimonies and selected Partition fiction, I demonstrate how the transformation of these refugee rehabilitation camps—from transitory non-places into referential spatial locations or places—was facilitated through the quotidian performances of the female Partition Refugee.

Abstract
The absence of an entry on digital humanities in the last volume of The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory due to the Covid-19 pandemic as well as the exacerbation of academic precarity (that was acknowledged in the editorial preface of the last volume) predicates that this chapter develop a narrative bibliography of notable scholarship in the digital humanities from both 2021 and 2022. Therefore the unprecedented circumstances that have extended the scope of scholarly review for this chapter beyond a single chronological year also provide the unique opportunity to not only 'trace and expand upon currents in critical and cultural theory, and to engage in [the] areas' key debates' (Quinn and Ghosh, 'Preface' to YWCCT 2022) but also (and more importantly, one might argue) understand some of the radical thematic transformations brought about and anticipated by the legacies, presents, and futures of digital humanities within the supposedly 'new normal' of a post-Covid world.
Through consolidating diverse conversations from varied contexts that are shaping contemporary digital humanities and in anticipating the futures of the discipline, this chapter locates scholarship in the digital humanities and related fields from the years 2021 and 2022 within the interconnected themes of resistive ontologies, organizations, and new directions in the digital humanities. While the focus remains on the scholarship produced within the aforesaid chronological period, our methodological attempt in this intervention has been to acknowledge and put into dialogue relevant contributions related to the three primary themes of analysis that may fall beyond the ambit of a specific period.