kriticulture

  Editor’s Note A lot of good South Asian writing is taking place outside the dominant circuits of recognition. It was our assumption when we started SAE . Five years down the road, it is a conclusion. Leafing through pages from the past, we see many installed stereotypes crumbling. Yet much survives that seems to identify us.             What is still awaited is a radical mobilization of the elements of the ensemble that is us and our experience, a mobilization that dislocates, disassembles and creates afresh beyond merely reproducing. This would require infusion of energies from outside the ensemble’s boundaries. But haven’t cultures always outsourced? Isn’t imagination the great outsourcing machine? Isn’t literature always in another place, always already elsewhere?             South Asia is a horizon that must be transcended. Only when it begins to...

By Badri Raina badri.raina@gmail.com They had great faith in the gods Dotting the hills and dales— Those men and women who Are now corpses. Yet, not one among those that Survived was heard to say “The gods govern our conditions; Not the government, not the builders, Not the hoteliers, not the miners— None of these are responsible, since God willed it so.” All of their moaning suggested How unstuck they were with the gods They believed in. Of all the tangled flesh and bone That lay mangled among the rubble, One corpse stood out: Bang in the sanctum sanctorum, This young man, dead and askew, Had open eyes full of consternation Fixed searingly upon the god-in-chief. It was as though in his moment Of dying, his amazement at the deity’s Uncaring repose was too much to hide. He might have been thinking, “H...

Monday 19 December 2011 by Henry A. Giroux, Truthout | Op-Ed Source: Here In both the United States and  many other countries, students are protesting against rising tuition fees, the increasing financial burdens they are forced to assume, and the primacy of market models in shaping higher education while emphasizing private benefits to individuals and the economy. Many students view these policies and for-profit industries as part of an assault on not just the public character of the university but also as an attack on civic society and their future.  For many young people in the Occupy movement, higher education has defaulted on its promise to provide them with both a quality education and the prospects of a dignified future. They resent the growing instrumentalization and accompanying hostility to critical and oppositional ideas within the university. They have watched over the years as the university is losing ground as a place to think, dissent, and develop a cult...