Sanglap 2014 - Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry

Terror and terrorism are probably the most frequent catchwords of the contemporary times. At the turn of the century, Hardt and Negri warned us that we are living in a world of Empire as biopolitical production, where transnational corporations operate the mechanics of governance, and can wage ‘just war’ and resolve conflicts with the moral policing of the NGOs. Terror is part of the surveillance and regulation of life, while ‘terrorism’, in its delimited political use, is only one way of engaging with it. Agamben’s notion of ‘State of Exception’ in fuller picture indicates that the practice of life in contemporary times is a conscious response to fear of an unknown, unaccountable death which may not always be the death of the body as corpse. As Elizabeth Dauphinee and Christian Masters note, ‘Livings and dyings are ruptured by survivings that are neither livings nor dyings, but which are otherwise: liminal spaces of abjection that are dangerously difficult to recognize.’
The complexity of terror as an affect makes for an intricate field where the objective territory of a terrifying event encounters subjective history and makes an imprint on mind, body, self and memory. Not only does it combine the public and the private, the religious and the political; it is a site where the technological repertoire of the plotted event meets the inexplicably sacred rupture of its irruption. The experience of terror does not remain restricted to the terrifying event but consolidates itself over time running through a series of affects like trauma, fear, horror and anxiety. Terror establishes a socio-psychic structure if not an industry in which the psychic apparatus of traumatic repetition and phobic fixation is complemented by a ‘culture of terror’. Is then the mediatized dissemination of terror as an image verging on a spectacle another name for terror’s incessant reproduction? Terror is not only commoditized but also normalized in today’s world where everyone lives under the persistent shadow of its hypothetical recurrence. Terror has become the new name for the contingency of our contemporary world.
We understand the philosophical stakes in such an inquiry and do not define terror only as an event in itself, a unique, authentic experience, but also a figure and a response that can be perceived in different forms and practices of life. For example, the terror in 9/11 cannot be equated with the terror of the December 16 rape case in Delhi, or the terror of the body, produced by the phenomenon of ‘suicide bombing’, is quite different from the terror one perceives in the ancient ruins, and the historical residues. If our life is regulated by the perception of and response to terror, how do we perceive it? What are the different forms of terror? How do we encounter terror and the difference in perception?
This is where we see the ‘literary’ as an important term. By the ‘literary’ we understand a sensitized and perceptive dimension of every discursive experience. Following Rancière, we would like to revive the ‘aesthesis’ or the ‘sensual stimulation’ in the ‘aesthetic’ where the artistic realm opens up to the wide array of sensations and perceptions. In our world where each discourse is tied up with the other, the ‘literary’ is the name of a particular semiotic practice which seems to be embedded in various discourses like the social, the political, the cultural, the technological, the religious and so on. The literary is both the semiotic perception of an event taking place and the recognition of the conditions that produce it. And that is where the ‘literary’ operates as an analytical category which tries to address the interaction between an event and the response it generates in the minds of the witnesses, audience, or in turn readers.
What are the possible relations between terror and the literary? Are they intertwined only in a mimetic relation or is there something constitutive about this relation? Is terror constitutive of the discursive literary apparatus? Apart from the literary representation of terror, is there a literary becoming of terror and a terribly sublime becoming of the literary itself? If the literary is understood as a realm of sensations and perceptions, it automatically leads on to the affective realm where the experience of terror can be localized. Terror is not ubiquitous because it exists in sinister and deceptive fashion with the everyday; but it pervades the domain of perception and thus can be anything ? from the fear of machines to the anxiety of ‘hate mails’. If the literary partakes of the symbolic power of language and the energetics of the sensual, how does it respond to the sensation of the terrifying event and its socio-political and psychic circulation? We are also looking forward to understandings that address the complicated relations in terror, fear, horror, trauma, anxiety and others. Our purpose is to locate the various cognizable domains of ‘terror’ and broaden the demarcated use of the literary in response to that. We welcome articles focused on but not limited to the following:
Terror and Affect (fear, anxiety, trauma, horror and others)
Terror and Everyday
Terror and Technology
Terror in Literature, Film, Theatre, and Media
Terror State and Justice
Terror and the Body
Terror and Law
Terror and Religion
Terror and Gender
Terror and History
Terror and Fantasy
Terror and the Ruins
Submission Dates:
The articles should be strictly within 6,000 words (excluding endnotes and references), sent with an abstract not exceeding 200 words and 5 keywords to editors-AT-sanglap-journal.in. The last date for the submission of articles is 20th March 2014. The selected articles will be notified by 20th May. They have to be revised and sent back to the editors before 5th June.
For submission and formatting, please consult the guidelines.