Migrant Form: Anti-Colonial Aesthetics in Joyce, Rushdie and Ray

Migrant Form_ examines Joyce's, Rushdie's, and Satyajit Ray's works for the anti-colonial arguments in their unsettled, and sometimes unsettling, aesthetics. Among the questions it engages are the following: What are the aesthetic moves through which art expresses its resistance to dominance and demands for conformity? How can we define anti-colonial aesthetics? How do these aesthetics manifest themselves in different media such as literature and film? Contending that Joyce inaugurates an anti-colonial "aesthetics of reconstitution," the book mines such aesthetics in _Ulysses_ and _Finnegans Wake_ to propose a formal model for postcolonialism in its opening section. Its next section draws on that exercise to consider how Rushdie extends a play with reconfigured forms into an overt politics in two of his novels (_Midnight's Children_ and _The Satanic Verses_). Turning its attention to film, the study contests the common view of Ray as a gentle realist and examines a formal restlessness in Ray's earlier work, _Charulata_ (_The Lonely Wife_), before demonstrating how Ray stages his preference for restlessness in his final film, _Agantuk_ (_The Stranger_).
Read more