Description
Book SynopsisMigrant Form examines the works of James Joyce, Salman Rushdie, and Satyajit Ray for the anti-colonial arguments in their unsettled, and 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. It also 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 book contests the common view of Ray as a gentle realist and examines a formal restlessness in Ra
