4.12.2006
Bombay London New York (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Title
Kumar, Amitava. Bombay London New York. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Field
Postcolonial Asian American Studies
Summary
I am reading this book and thinking, shit.
How will I not natively inform? How can I not speak excitedly about what I recognize? But then, part of my joy of recognition, implicated by the burrs of writing in this netting, Bombay….London…New York, is about some sort of memory and attachment to what I never had, but things my parents talk about things like their obsession with pooping and farting but never sex. Or men on the street saying, “are, dekho, dekho, red rojjjj” to pretty women and how my aunt taught me to walk on the street with my elbows out so men wouldn’t accidently on purpose bump into me or
I will have been to all three of those places, Bombay London New York, before this year is out. I can’t wait to get back to London and I am going back to New York next weekend. But there is something of a fear in me about my return, after 8 years. There is something there about fathers just like this book was a little bit about fathers, good and bad. And something about violence and the pleasure in the mundane…I have no idea what this means, but it seemed important to get off my chest.
Here are some things I’ll show you…
The Photographs
The Title and maping
The Return
Literature and Reading
“This book is about recent Indian fiction in English, but it is also, I have found out, about how and why we read.” (1)
“Libraries are haunted by the marketplace – but, it can be hoped, the opposite is true as well. At the same time, there is the enormous tussle of memory and desire that cannot all be neatly or fully regulated by the market or, for that matter the rulers of nations and corporations. Writers bear witness to this unenven battle too: it is part of the reality of the writer’s work of struggling every day with the worldliness of the word. Writers are caught in the contradictory tasks of building imaginary worlds that are removed from the everyday life and, at the same time, establishing how the imagination is not detached from the quotidian world and wery much a vital part of it. To realize the truth of this condition is to know that books not only offer refuge from the world, they also return you to it. When I had understood this truth, I had stopped worshipping paper and became a reader.” (15)
“The old order is gone, the new one not yet born, and the human lives are caught in the distortions of the interregnum. And yet, it is in that troubled space that literature and reading plays a role – not by staging a rescue but more simply and movingly, by holding to the reader a strange and surprising mirror of recognition.” (64)
“I have tried to understand how Indian writing has populated the literary landscape familiar to Western readers with people who look and speak differently and who have histories in another part of the world.” (232)
Liberalism and Modernity
Pg 71
“Art cannot exist in a vacuum. For books to be written, and for them to be read, we need schools. We need an enlightened state.” (119)
pg 162
pg 217 – bollywood and backwardness
Shame and Failure
“I tell stories about Patna because they are part of my shame at having come from nowhere. And also my nostalgia because Patna is all I ever had.” (93)
pg 159
Naipal’s father
Translation
“Any translation is also an act of betrayal, a sharing of intimacy with another tongue.” (179)
Nostalgia and Memory
“The movement I am most conscious of now is the movement of memory, shutting between places. One place is home, the other is the world.” (9)
“I am not distrustful of my nostalgia – I think nostalgia can be a weapon in a cultural milieu where you are expected to feel only shame for what you have left behind – but I do want to know what it means to remember.” (30)
“This book has been written with the conviction that all the cities mention on our tickets actually hide secrets of other places, small towns and villages, and of people who are perpetually being lost to history. The story of that loss is the true subject here even if I do not have any illusions of out ever having enjoyed a wholeness or a move-set perfection that is now forever lost. Bombay-London-New York records a movement away from any pure, mythical orgin: what it takes even as its starting point is a place that is populated by a mass of shared memories and patterns of forgetting.” (32)
“The world was rich with experience. This knowledge had freed me. It also made me remember the unremarked intimacies of my childhood, its joys and sorrows. In what I wrote and read, I began to return to Patna. The habit has grown in my self-imposed exile from Patna: I still write about it as if I knew very little else.” (93)
Abjectivity – Poop
“I am not from a culture, although that seems the wrong word here for any number of reasons, where you rubbed paper on your arse.” (1)
“I disliked Patna when I lived there as a boy, but what I remember most clearly is how much I disliked myself.” (82)
“Life seemed caught in an endless cycle that promised cheap excitement but inevitably led to frustration.” (86)
“[what] represents the abstract and somewhat elusive quality of Indianess…it is the quality of the burlesque: the staidness of colonial English tickled, harassed, abused, and caressed by proper as well as improper Indians: this is the world where memories, with a shift in the accent, get easily transmuted into mammaries…it is the realization that Indians, with all the ambiquity that accompanies the following term, get fucked in English.” (158)
“This is the postcolonial Gandhi. And I like him because – I don’t know how to say this without irony – nothing seems foreign to his body.” (210)
hybridity and others and change and reproduction
pg 165 – 185 - lahiri
pg 197 – workers rights
pg 201 – adf
“Against generalities, we need individual stories.” (223)
“It is the not the immigrant but the ones who stay behind who are the true unvanquished.” (225)
“How far removed is the pathos of the stowaway from the rage of the hijacker?” (234)
“All the others who succeeded in this country did so only by changing. They became someone else. Shashtriji, for better or for worse, never changed.” (247)
Kumar, Amitava. Bombay London New York. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Field
Postcolonial Asian American Studies
Summary
I am reading this book and thinking, shit.
How will I not natively inform? How can I not speak excitedly about what I recognize? But then, part of my joy of recognition, implicated by the burrs of writing in this netting, Bombay….London…New York, is about some sort of memory and attachment to what I never had, but things my parents talk about things like their obsession with pooping and farting but never sex. Or men on the street saying, “are, dekho, dekho, red rojjjj” to pretty women and how my aunt taught me to walk on the street with my elbows out so men wouldn’t accidently on purpose bump into me or
I will have been to all three of those places, Bombay London New York, before this year is out. I can’t wait to get back to London and I am going back to New York next weekend. But there is something of a fear in me about my return, after 8 years. There is something there about fathers just like this book was a little bit about fathers, good and bad. And something about violence and the pleasure in the mundane…I have no idea what this means, but it seemed important to get off my chest.
Here are some things I’ll show you…
The Photographs
The Title and maping
The Return
Literature and Reading
“This book is about recent Indian fiction in English, but it is also, I have found out, about how and why we read.” (1)
“Libraries are haunted by the marketplace – but, it can be hoped, the opposite is true as well. At the same time, there is the enormous tussle of memory and desire that cannot all be neatly or fully regulated by the market or, for that matter the rulers of nations and corporations. Writers bear witness to this unenven battle too: it is part of the reality of the writer’s work of struggling every day with the worldliness of the word. Writers are caught in the contradictory tasks of building imaginary worlds that are removed from the everyday life and, at the same time, establishing how the imagination is not detached from the quotidian world and wery much a vital part of it. To realize the truth of this condition is to know that books not only offer refuge from the world, they also return you to it. When I had understood this truth, I had stopped worshipping paper and became a reader.” (15)
“The old order is gone, the new one not yet born, and the human lives are caught in the distortions of the interregnum. And yet, it is in that troubled space that literature and reading plays a role – not by staging a rescue but more simply and movingly, by holding to the reader a strange and surprising mirror of recognition.” (64)
“I have tried to understand how Indian writing has populated the literary landscape familiar to Western readers with people who look and speak differently and who have histories in another part of the world.” (232)
Liberalism and Modernity
Pg 71
“Art cannot exist in a vacuum. For books to be written, and for them to be read, we need schools. We need an enlightened state.” (119)
pg 162
pg 217 – bollywood and backwardness
Shame and Failure
“I tell stories about Patna because they are part of my shame at having come from nowhere. And also my nostalgia because Patna is all I ever had.” (93)
pg 159
Naipal’s father
Translation
“Any translation is also an act of betrayal, a sharing of intimacy with another tongue.” (179)
Nostalgia and Memory
“The movement I am most conscious of now is the movement of memory, shutting between places. One place is home, the other is the world.” (9)
“I am not distrustful of my nostalgia – I think nostalgia can be a weapon in a cultural milieu where you are expected to feel only shame for what you have left behind – but I do want to know what it means to remember.” (30)
“This book has been written with the conviction that all the cities mention on our tickets actually hide secrets of other places, small towns and villages, and of people who are perpetually being lost to history. The story of that loss is the true subject here even if I do not have any illusions of out ever having enjoyed a wholeness or a move-set perfection that is now forever lost. Bombay-London-New York records a movement away from any pure, mythical orgin: what it takes even as its starting point is a place that is populated by a mass of shared memories and patterns of forgetting.” (32)
“The world was rich with experience. This knowledge had freed me. It also made me remember the unremarked intimacies of my childhood, its joys and sorrows. In what I wrote and read, I began to return to Patna. The habit has grown in my self-imposed exile from Patna: I still write about it as if I knew very little else.” (93)
Abjectivity – Poop
“I am not from a culture, although that seems the wrong word here for any number of reasons, where you rubbed paper on your arse.” (1)
“I disliked Patna when I lived there as a boy, but what I remember most clearly is how much I disliked myself.” (82)
“Life seemed caught in an endless cycle that promised cheap excitement but inevitably led to frustration.” (86)
“[what] represents the abstract and somewhat elusive quality of Indianess…it is the quality of the burlesque: the staidness of colonial English tickled, harassed, abused, and caressed by proper as well as improper Indians: this is the world where memories, with a shift in the accent, get easily transmuted into mammaries…it is the realization that Indians, with all the ambiquity that accompanies the following term, get fucked in English.” (158)
“This is the postcolonial Gandhi. And I like him because – I don’t know how to say this without irony – nothing seems foreign to his body.” (210)
hybridity and others and change and reproduction
pg 165 – 185 - lahiri
pg 197 – workers rights
pg 201 – adf
“Against generalities, we need individual stories.” (223)
“It is the not the immigrant but the ones who stay behind who are the true unvanquished.” (225)
“How far removed is the pathos of the stowaway from the rage of the hijacker?” (234)
“All the others who succeeded in this country did so only by changing. They became someone else. Shashtriji, for better or for worse, never changed.” (247)
# posted by SMRT : 12:47 AM
