"Troubled testimonies: Culture in terror-stricken times" a talk by Dr. Meenakshi Bharat at Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg > 3pm on 23rd July 2013

Time : 3:00 pm

Entry : Free (Seating on First-Come First-Served basis)

Place : Seminar Room, First Floor, Library Building, Nehru Memorial Museum & Library (NMML), Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg, New Delhi
Venue Info :  Events | About | Map | Nearest Metro Station - 'Race Course(Yellow Line)'

Event Description : The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library cordially invites you to the Weekly Seminar  on ‘Troubled testimonies: Culture in terror-stricken times’ by Dr. Meenakshi Bharat, Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi.

Abstract : ‘Come and see the blood in the streets!’
It would seem that Neruda, in enunciating this exhortation to witness the terror being unleashed in the world, and by himself bearing ‘witness’ to it in his poetry, seems to have touched a defining chord of the times. His words ring truer today more than ever with the forced recognition that ‘terror’ seems indeed to have become a decided cultural marker. Our todays seem to have become characterized by the thorny identification between the output of our creative imagination and the sweep of a violent ideological politics which reveals itself in the widespread acts of terrorism and the terrifyingly ‘regular’ outbreak of riots. The erstwhile correlation between art and life, acknowledged spontaneously and quite easily in ‘good’ times, with the happy acceptance of rubrics like the ‘Renaissance,’ ‘the Golden Age,’ is majorly problematic today. In the past, the assertion that the greatest periods of creativity have been periods of prosperity and peace, veritable, golden periods had been much bandied. But in today’s confusing, anarchic turmoil, is there any space for creativity? In this talk, the speaker will attempt to engage with the stranglehold that terror has come to establish on the minds of intellectuals and non-intellectuals alike; of both thinkers and creative minds. It is in this cultural response that a key can be located to understanding the unique cultural make-up of our times and its reverberations on the sense of self and belonging to a particular nation.

Speaker : Dr. Meenakshi Bharat, University of Delhi, is a writer, translator, reviewer and critic. Her special interests include children's literature, women's fiction, film studies, postcolonial, English and cultural studies—areas which she has extensively researched. Apart from articles and reviews, her published books are: The Ultimate Colony: The Child in Postcolonial Fiction; Desert in Bloom: Indian Women Writers of Fiction in English; Filming the Line of Control: The Indo-Pak Relationship through the Cinematic Lens; Rushdie the Novelist; an annotated edition of George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, two volumes of Indo-Australian short fiction entitled Fear Factor: Terror Incognito from Picador and Alien Shores: Tales of Refugees and Asylum Seekers and VS Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas: Critical Perspectives. A third volume of Indo-Australian stories, Only Connect and a book for children, Little Elephant Throws a Party are in the press. She is at present writing a volume on terrorism and its impact on English fiction from the Indian subcontinent for John Benjamins of the Netherlands.

 Related Events : Talks