Interpretive Elements
Post-national, Global, or Local: Literary and Cinematic Responses
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Naresh Kumar Vats
The term globalization brings to mind the conflict of hybridization and homogenization, exclusion and inclusion, global and local. And what should be the concept of nationalism? As a critique of nationalism, post-nationalism rejects the idea of nation as the central organizing principle. It also calls into question the concept of identity by looking beyond the idea of nation as a homogenous collective. In fact post-national as a discourse implies going beyond, transcending and escaping the boundaries of master-discourses such as nationalism that presupposes nation as a monolithic structure that does not allow space for plurality. Indian cinema has responded to globalization in its own way. Instead of telling stories carrying lofty ideas and ideals today’s cinema has shifted its tone and texture in alignment with everyday experience of individuals who are struggling with day-to-day realities. “Newton” (2017) depicts a young man’s struggle to accomplish his responsibilities/duty despite the odds. “Hindi Medium” (2017) too depicts the everyday reality of India where people are busy bettering their life according to the needs of globalization, i.e. attaining fluency in English which is a status symbol not only in India but in the entire third world. “Dangal” shows the struggle of a man against the realities of his ambition, expectations, and traditions. Other examples are “Pad Man,” “Bareilly Ki Barfi,” “Toilet Ek Prem Katha,” etc. This paper critically looks at how globalization and post-nationalism work in the realities of today exploring the concepts through literature and beyond.
Toward a Dialectic of Identity: Negative and Positive Identity in Adorno
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Eric Oberle
This paper makes a philosophical argument for a concept of “negative identity” by means of a historical examination of Theodor Adorno’s philosophy. The paper asserts, first, that the concept of identity as we use it today always has a negative side to it; and secondly, that this ‘negativity’ was in fact part of the original articulation of the idea itself under the auspices of the Frankfurt School. A historical look at the concept of identity points to its nervousness: the concept took off in the late 1960s as an idea of individual self-making and liberation, and it now rivals the concept of “freedom” in describing the ideals of individual and even national autonomy. Identity has become synonymous with liberation, wholeness, expressive individualism; yet it does not take much reflection to realize the degree to which Identity remains shadowed by the incompleteness of modern emancipation: within identity there are deep traces of loss, weakness, the vulnerability of all to the power of domination. Often deeply charged with ressentiment, the concept of group and personal identity is easily entangled with ethnonationalist and colonial concepts of race, and it can take on projective and paranoid features defined by victim-blaming and negative ontologies. Looking at the initial articulation of the identity concept by the Frankfurt School in the 1940s, this paper argues that a concept of “negative identity” can be useful at once for analyzing the negativity of the identity concept and for recovering identity’s emancipatory power.
