WLP Scholar Series: Rituparna Mitra

**Registration is required by the end of the day on Wed, Oct 6.

We will email a Zoom link to registrants on the morning of the event.**

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Join us for a Scholar Series event, "Partitioned Border Ecologies: Submerged Histories and Disappearing Futures in Ghosh and Elias " with Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary and Postcolonial Studies in the Marlboro Institute Rituparna Mitra on Thurs, Oct 7, 6-7:30pm ET on Zoom. Please note that this event will be recorded and live streamed to Facebook (WLP Town Crier).

My talk will explore Bangladeshi writer Akhtaruzzaman Elias’ Bengali novel, Khwabnama/The Dream Narrative (1996), and Amitav Ghosh’s Anglophone novel, The Hungry Tide (2004), to model a conversation between postcolonialism and literary ecocriticism – particularly a comparison of political and ecological violence in borderlands that are also fragile ecotones. Situated in the upper and lower reaches of the Bengal delta respectively, the geographies depicted in the novels are not only at the risk of human-driven climate change (in the form of erratic flood control, dam engineering, destruction of mangrove forests and mudflats to name a few), but also form the volatile border between India and Bangladesh. The events of the 1947 Partition of the Indian sub-continent and its ongoing impact in the form of inter-religious violence and displacement continue to shape these spaces. Florence R. Krall, characterizes an ecotone as “a transitional area between communities, for instance the zone between field and forest, mountain and ocean, or between sea and land” (4). An ecotone may also indicate a place where two communities meet. As Krall puts it, in the natural world, edges where difference comes together are the richest of habitats (4). Bengal has historically been an exemplary ecotone supporting marginal communities as its unique geographical terrain made it, paradoxically, both easy to access and difficult to monitor by dominant cultural and political systems. In the context of Partition’s communal divisions, the subaltern cultures with syncretic religious and linguistic attachments inhabiting riparian and tidal edges of Bengal are of particular significance. Both Elias and Ghosh as I will show, have been invested in opening up these ecotones – placing the cultural cross-fertilization firmly within the riverine/littoral ecologies, and drawing attention to the imperiled status of both. Khwabnama and The Hungry Tide present striking figurations of displacement while delving deep into the political, historical, and affective flows between the human and the non-human (silt, water, rice crops, fish, marine mammals) that shape “belonging to place” as a more-than-human assemblage. The alliances that their works present are important ways of rethinking co-survival in fragile socio-natural worlds.

Rituparna Mitra, is Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary and Postcolonial Studies in the Marlboro Institute at Emerson College. Her teaching and research interests cover comparative literatures of the Global South, trauma studies, Environmental Humanities, migration studies, and urban fictions. She teaches courses in Literature, First Year Honors Seminars, as well as upper level Interdisciplinary courses on “Global Cities” and “Postcolonial Environments”. Her article “Precarious Duniyas in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness: Life, Death, and Repair in Ruin-Worlds” is scheduled to be published in Postcolonial Studies (Special Issue on Planetary Solidarities) on September 22, 2021. She is currently finishing her first monograph which examines the trauma of displacement and conflict in post-Partition South Asia in conversation with new areas of thought concerning intersections of the human with the non-human, in particular, how the ruptures of displacement enfold landscapes – natural and built. This spatial methodology privileges a refiguring of submerged, labile, vulnerable landscapes that are creatively reassembled in articulation and experience, thus drawing attention to collectivities and symbioses between human and non-human as they survive together in enduring traumascapes. Rituparna serves on the Executive Committee of the Global South Forum of the Modern Language Association and is a member of the Association for Urban Literary Studies and the Association for the Study of Literary Environments.

Free and open to the public. Alumni and friends of Emerson, please join us.

Contact wlpevents@emerson.edu with any questions, including accessibility requests.

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