Archives of Minority: ‘Little’ Publications and the Politics of Friendship in Post-Colonial Bombay
Résumé
This essay considers several literary archives connected to Bombay/Mumbai: the ‘Bombay poets’ and Bombay modernisms archive; the archives of the PEN All-India Centre and those of the US-backed liberal ‘front’ in the Cultural Cold War. What does the vulnerability of these archives tell us of the practices, poetics and the politics of these writers, and what may bind them together? ‘Minority’, also epitomised by the figure of Nissim Ezekiel, is the key word here, and I will decline its many forms. I also argue for a revaluation of ‘minority’ that may be less a predicament than a condition of worldliness and a prerequisite for (creative and critical) freedom. These ‘archives of minority’, like many of the little magazines of the 1950s and 1960s, often stood up to authority. But if minority can be a ‘resource’ it’s also in the sense of a certain type of archival work. Recollecting histories from these apparently worthless snippets of world literature is all the more rewarding as they unsettle the dividing lines between what is obscure and canonical, local and worldly, trivial and political.
Domaines
Littératures
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Archives of Minority Little Publications and the Politics of Friendship in Post Colonial Bombay.pdf (2.47 Mo)
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