Event
Ayelet Ben-Yishai
Genres of Emergency: Forms of Crisis and Continuity in Indian Writing in English
The State of Emergency declared by Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in June 1975 lasted a mere 20 months, and was soon after relegated to the status of anomaly in India’s democratic history. All but forgotten in public and academic discourse for many years, the Emergency continued to feature significantly in literary fiction, resurfacing more widely in recent years. Reading a wide-ranging Emergency archive – from prison memoir to popular magazine, from film to literary fiction – this talk argues that these texts work through their respective genres to recognize the Emergency as both a crisis and a continuity with India's past, all the while anticipating its political future. I further claim that the Emergency itself needs to be understood in terms of genre, as a structure or template which each iteration modifies. My talk thus ends by offering genre as a way to understand and negotiate the varied states of emergency and crisis that have become a fixture of our contemporary world.
Ayelet Ben-Yishai is Associate Professor of English at the University of Haifa, where she specializes in postcolonial and Victorian literature and culture, and in the history and theory of the novel, with particular focus on questions of realism, genre, and literary epistemology, most recently in the study of the Indian novel in English. She is the author of Common Precedents: The Presentness of the Past in Victorian Fiction and Law (Oxford, 2013) and Genres of Emergency: Crisis and Continuity in Indian Writing in English (forthcoming Oxford, 2023). Her new book, Genres of Emergency: Crisis and Continuity in Indian Writing in English has just been published by the Oxford University Press (2023).
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