Papers by Piya Srinivasan
Portside Review, 2022
Emerged from the theme "Endangered", this essay uses water as a thematic and narrative trope to r... more Emerged from the theme "Endangered", this essay uses water as a thematic and narrative trope to reflect on being an outsider, ideas of home and belonging, floods, migration and displacement. The land that water takes and the life that water gives stand in contestation as lives and livehoods are threatened by the climate crisis and the increasing occurrence of floods and cyclones in the Bay of Bengal. These troubled histories and memories come together in this essay on water as life story, on its life-sustaning and deadly contradictions.
Write Art Connect 5: Sonic Thoughts, 2022
This essay will locate a series of bird sounds recorded in Kolkata the day after the Amphan cyclo... more This essay will locate a series of bird sounds recorded in Kolkata the day after the Amphan cyclone (2020) as an element of acoustic ecology and barometer of ecological health. The first impulse to record amidst such devastation was in search of a Carsonian idea of comfort in birdsong. But soon, an “avian orchestra” stood out from the eerie silence before the city began efforts to revive itself. Using Whitehouse’s (2015) idea of “anxious semiotics”, I suggest that this heightened birdsong is suggestive of disrupted ecosystems and what unbridled capitalist expansion portends for avian soundscapes.
The essay will use sound ecology to explore new ways of talking about the climate crisis in the age of the Anthropocene. I will reverse Krause’s (2012) argument that androphony has drowned out both biophony and geophony by a creative mapping of what happens when it is only biophony that we hear. This almost apocalyptic imagination that I will map using birdsong relies on tacit forms of knowledge to foresee what human technology still cannot predict, using Whitehouse’s identification of birdsong as a technique of marking territory and building new relations with other birds. These imagined dialogues will speak of habitat destruction, borders and migration towards a sonic understanding of the costs of unchecked human activity.
This paper explores the relationship of law and literature through an intertextual reading of Urd... more This paper explores the relationship of law and literature through an intertextual reading of Urdu writer Ismat<br> Chughtai's biographical essay Un Byaahtaonke naam (In the Name of Those Brides). The essay is based on the<br> obscenity trial for her short story Lihaf, where she was tried alongside fellow writer Saadat Hasan Manto for<br> his story Bu. The trial branded her as a writer of obscenity in literary memory. The author in this paper<br> explores how law becomes a tool of oppression through a feminist reading of women's experiences that resists<br> their violent interpellation by law as insubordinate subjects. The essay presents an ethnographic account of<br> her experience of law's violence by mapping the feminine self in court and turning an irreverent gaze on law<br> through literature's meaning-making practices. Using three texts, the paper traces how Chughtai<br> problematizes the gendered parameters of ob...
postScriptum: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Literary Studies, 2018
This paper explores the relationship of law and literature through an intertextual reading of Urd... more This paper explores the relationship of law and literature through an intertextual reading of Urdu writer Ismat Chughtai's biographical essay Un Byaahtaonke naam (In the Name of Those Brides). The essay is based on the obscenity trial for her short story Lihaf, where she was tried alongside fellow writer Saadat Hasan Manto for his story Bu. The trial branded her as a writer of obscenity in literary memory. The author in this paper explores how law becomes a tool of oppression through a feminist reading of women's experiences that resists their violent interpellation by law as insubordinate subjects. The essay presents an ethnographic account of her experience of law's violence by mapping the feminine self in court and turning an irreverent gaze on law through literature's meaning-making practices. Using three texts, the paper traces how Chughtai problematizes the gendered parameters of obscenity within literature and creates a dialogical universe in her writing that challenges the monological consciousness of Manto's Bu. In tracing this journey of feminist subjectivity, the paper argues that Chughtai makes an internal critique of not just law but also of her friend Manto. Using these instances, the paper demonstrates how the essay produces new textualities that supersedes law's regulatory nature and becomes a way of reading its limits, presenting a commentary on censorship itself. The paper argues that her critical reflexivity provides insights into law's exclusions and maps an intellectual space in which to challenge its phallocentric vision. The essay becomes the blueprint for a feminist vision of literary justice, illuminating literary truths that fill what law does not accommodate.
Uploads
Papers by Piya Srinivasan
The essay will use sound ecology to explore new ways of talking about the climate crisis in the age of the Anthropocene. I will reverse Krause’s (2012) argument that androphony has drowned out both biophony and geophony by a creative mapping of what happens when it is only biophony that we hear. This almost apocalyptic imagination that I will map using birdsong relies on tacit forms of knowledge to foresee what human technology still cannot predict, using Whitehouse’s identification of birdsong as a technique of marking territory and building new relations with other birds. These imagined dialogues will speak of habitat destruction, borders and migration towards a sonic understanding of the costs of unchecked human activity.
The essay will use sound ecology to explore new ways of talking about the climate crisis in the age of the Anthropocene. I will reverse Krause’s (2012) argument that androphony has drowned out both biophony and geophony by a creative mapping of what happens when it is only biophony that we hear. This almost apocalyptic imagination that I will map using birdsong relies on tacit forms of knowledge to foresee what human technology still cannot predict, using Whitehouse’s identification of birdsong as a technique of marking territory and building new relations with other birds. These imagined dialogues will speak of habitat destruction, borders and migration towards a sonic understanding of the costs of unchecked human activity.