Writing the Nation the Other Way: Sarah Joseph's Alahayute Penmakkal"

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' Writing the Nation the “Other” Way: Sara Joseph’s Alahayute Penmakkal' Sudhakaran C. B It is widely agreed that the dialectic of the local and the global has displaced the traditional opposition between the particular and the universal and contemporary discussions on the political, socioeconomic and cultural issues are governed by postmodern ideas of global governance, global citizenship and the “end” theories. The postmodern has also brought with it a heavy intellectual baggage of the image and architecture accompanied by a perceptible decline in the interest of the literary mode. In such an environment it may seem ironic that one dares to think of “obsolete” notions such as “nation” and “nationalism” and a literature that attempts to not only narrate the nation “allegorically” but also to map the history of nation from a subaltern perspective(. Postcolonial theories have emphasized the links between literary texts and concepts such as “nation” and “nationalism” and there is general agreement among writers as varied as Ernest Gellner, Miroslav Hrosch, Benedict Anderson, Eric Hobsbawm, Timothy Brennan, Adrian Hastings, Clifford Geertz, and Homi Bhabha that the role played by imaginative literature in the construction of a nation cannot be ignored. So long as the nation is believed to be a “discursive formation,” and, cultural expressions are recognized as participating in the formation and growth of a nation, in the context of the global dispensation where the status of culture and its consumption is radically different from what it was in the modernist period, it is not irrelevant to look into the role played by literature in the construction of a form of resistance against the hegemonic forces that dominate the cultural sphere of the contemporary world.

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