Professor%20Ankhi%20Mukherjee: List of publications
Showing 1 to 43 of 43 publications
Psychoanalysis of the excommunicated
January 2023
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Journal article
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Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies
This essay examines singular traumas suffered by Tibetan refugees and expedient and culture-specific cures for the same. Drawing on Honey Oberoi Vahali’s Lives in Exile and other ethnographic studies of the Tibetan community in Dharamsala, India, it shows how classic trauma theory can be revised and expanded by including the vocabulary and symptomatology of the sufferance of exile and homelessness by displaced Tibetans.
FFR
Unseen City The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor
November 2021
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Book
These are layered with twentieth- and twenty-first-century works of world literature that explore issues of identity, illness, and death at the intersections of class, race, globalisation, and migrancy.
Literary Criticism
On Antigone's suffering
April 2021
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Journal article
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Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry
Examining the contestation of interpretations around this work, I argue that the proliferation of exegetical material on Sophocles’s Antigone is related to a noncomprehension of the human motives behind her transgressive action. Did she ever love, and is there any suffering in her piety? If she didn’t love (her brother), could she have suffered? I read the play alongside Kamila Shamsie’s postcolonial rewriting of it in Home Fire to elaborate on the relationship between personal loss and collective (and communal) suffering, particularly as it is focalized in the novel by the figure of a young woman who is both a bereaved twin and a vengeful fury.
To write like a dream: nineteenth-century legacies
April 2020
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Journal article
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Criticism
In this essay, I examine works of literature that present themselves as psychological curiosities by using dreaming as a modality of displaced, unintentional, or even reluctant authorship. What is it to write in, of, or like a dream? Who has the right to dream and who, conversely, is burdened with the nightmare of history? Themes to be considered include: dream-composition and the composition of dreams; narrative vs. lyrical form; the mediation of colonial commodities, like opium or travelogues, as what Nigel Leask calls “psychotropic technology”; artistic autonomy vs. discursive formations of and cultural influences on dream mentation; the yoking of opposites and extremes in the compacted economy of the dream. The literary and critical works discussed are Samuel Taylor Coleridge's “Kubla Khan,” Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of An English Opium-Eater, Charles Dickens's “An Italian Dream,” Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke, and Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams.
FFR
Affective form
February 2020
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Chapter
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Affect and Literature
Nautical Melodrama
November 2018
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Chapter
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The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama
After Lacan
November 2018
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Book
This book draws on the distinct phases of Jacques Lacan's career to show his way of thinking in and beyond his lifetime. It is an examination of the past, present, and futures of psychoanalysis, as these are developed in the dimensions of language, literature, logic, philosophy, visual culture, identity and sexuality, and politics. The interdisciplinary approach of the volume allows it to work across clinical, sociological, philosophical, and literary fields to both add dimensions to the literary/critical reception of Lacan and enable the system of Lacanian psychoanalysis to have a wider conversation. Re-examining the fundamental concepts of Lacanian theory in its historical contexts through the topological structures he inaugurated, After Lacan makes innovative critical interventions in contemporary debates on racism, Islam, the Communist Party, poetry, new media, disability identity, and queer theory. It is a key resource for students, graduates and instructors of literary theory, psychoanalysis, and the works of Lacan.
After Lacan Literature, Theory and Psychoanalysis in the 21st Century
This book explores the phases of Jacques Lacan's career and examines the past, present, and future of psychoanalysis.
Literary Criticism
Continental Scope and Its Discontents
January 2018
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Journal article
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College Literature
47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4705 Literary Studies
Slums and the Postcolonial Uncanny
January 2018
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Chapter
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Planned Violence: Post/Colonial Urban Infrastructure, Literature and Culture
This essay examines the Freudian concept of the 'uncanny' in relation to the psychogeography of postcolonial Mumbai. The uncanny, in this definition, is a psychological avoidance mechanism that has its dark double in the way visibility is negotiated and manipulated by the colonial infrastructure dominant in global cities. Reading narrative non-fiction such as Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Siddhartha Deb's The Beautiful and the Damned, and Sonia Faleiro's Beautiful Thing, I also examine the ways in which these genres of aberrational fiction defy the naturalistic and neo-realist documentary style generally associated with humanitarian narratives on the urban poor. Works such as Faleiro’s push against the limits of social justice discourse as well as creative literature on poverty in the way they cultivate physical proximity with the objects of inquiry through sustained and destabilizing encounters. In the process, they develop a humanitarian critique that is embodied and kinaesthetic and that, without being voyeuristic, confers maximal visibility to the vulnerable habitations of the poor.
The Hysterical Material
September 2017
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Chapter
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The Hysterical Material
Introduction: Postcolonial Reading Publics
February 2017
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Journal article
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Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry
In this introduction to the special issue, “Postcolonial Reading Publics,” Mukherjee charts the history of reception of two texts, one a Bengali novel published in British India, the other a Shakespeare adaptation staged in twenty-first-century Kolkata, to examine the fortuitous ways in which reading publics baffle or exceed authorial intention and the given text’s addressable objects. Offering summaries of and continuities among the four essays that constitute the volume, the introduction ends with an analysis of the salience of this discursive context for postcolonial writing, theory, and critique in a world literary frame.
FFR
Canonicity
January 2017
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Chapter
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Entries in ’Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Literary Theory (3 Volumes)
"Borderless Worlds"
June 2016
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Chapter
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Conflicting Humanities
Edward Said, Democratic Criticism, Humanities
The Great Bengali Novel in English
January 2016
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Journal article
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Contemporary Literature
47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4705 Literary Studies
Politics
November 2015
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Chapter
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The Wiley‐Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Theory
4705 Literary Studies, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology, 44 Human Society, 47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4303 Historical Studies, 4408 Political Science
"Creole Modernism"
December 2014
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Journal article
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Affirmations: Of the Modern
Primetime Psychoanalysis
May 2014
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Chapter
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A Concise Companion to Literature, Psychoanalysis, and Culture
A concise companion to psychoanalysis, literature, and culture
January 2014
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Book
This concise companion explores the history of psychoanalytic theory and its impact on contemporary literary criticism by tracing its movement across disciplinary and cultural boundaries. • Contains original essays by leading scholars, using a wide range of cultural and historical approaches • Discusses key concepts in psychoanalysis, such as the role of dreaming, psychosexuality, the unconscious, and the figure of the double, while considering questions of gender, race, asylum and international law, queer theory, time, and memory • Spans the fields of psychoanalysis, literature, cultural theory, feminist and gender studies, translation studies, and film. • Provides a timely and pertinent assessment of current psychoanalytic methods while also sketching out future directions for theory and interpretation.
What is a Classic?: Postcolonial Rewiting and Invention of the Canon
January 2013
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Book
Postcolonial Responses to the Western Canon
January 2012
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Chapter
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The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature 2 Volume Set
Literary Criticism
The Rushdie Canon
January 2011
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Chapter
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Salmam Rushdie: Cntemporary Critical Perspectives
"This Traffic of Influence": Derrida and Spivak
January 2011
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Journal article
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Parallax
Post Colonial Responses to the Western Canon
January 2010
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Chapter
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Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature (2 Volumes)
“What Is a Classic?”: International Literary Criticism and the Classic Question
January 2010
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Journal article
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PMLA
"Yes, sir, I was the one who got away": Postcolonial Emergence and the Question of Global English
January 2009
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Journal article
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Études Anglaises
The Death of the Novel and Two Postcolonial Writers
January 2008
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Journal article
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Modern Language Quarterly
Aesthetic Hysteria The Great Neurosis in Victorian Melodrama and Contemporary Fiction
September 2007
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Book
Using literary texts to explore emotion/affect and trauma studies, this study uses its theoretical and philosophical questioning of a cultural phenomenon to interrogate the politics and ends of theory, addressing anxieties dominating ...
Literary Criticism
Fissured Skin, Inner Ear Radio, and a Telepathic Nose: The Senses as Media in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children
January 2006
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Journal article
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Paragraph
47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4705 Literary Studies
"Buried Alive: The Gothic Carceral in Naipaul's Fiction"
October 2005
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Journal article
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South Asian Review
Missed Encounters: Repetition, Rewriting, and Contemporary Returns to Charles Dickens's Great Expectations
January 2005
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Journal article
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Contemporary Literature
47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4705 Literary Studies
Stammering to Story: Neurosis and Narration in Pat Barker's Regeneration
January 2001
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Journal article
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Critique Studies in Contemporary Fiction
47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4705 Literary Studies, Mental Health
Funny English, Queer Indian: The New Novel in 50s India
Conference paper
Poor like them: Representations of Poverty in South Asian Literature and Cinema
Conference paper
Postcolonial Responses to the Canon
Conference paper
Seduction in Two Languages
Conference paper
Vernacular Modernity in the Subcontinent
Conference paper
Writer Among the Ruins: Conrad, Said, Naipaul
Conference paper
"Other Classics"
Conference paper
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MLA, Philadelphia
"Slums and the Postcolonial Uncanny"
Conference paper
’Funny English, Queer Indian’
Conference paper
’The Victorian Canon and the Aesthetic Critic’, ’Loose Canons: Victorian Canonicity’
