Contents: Fantasy (Issue 61)
Contents: Fantasy (Issue 61)
Mar 6
Issue Editor’s Note: On Fantasy or Our Mundane Powers of Enchantment
By Atreyee Majumder
Does fantasy reveal in hidden, hitherto unthought-of version of the already known and domesticated reality? Does it reveal a yearning for the familiar just in a different package? Does capital usefully aid in providing such a shiny package?
The Worlds of Fantasy: Listening to Alien Voices
By R. Krishnaswamy
The activity of working is so fundamental to how we exist that even philosophers, like Marx, Engels, etc. have built their career around explaining the socio-economic consequences of such an activity.
Of the ‘Thing’
By Vishnupad
One such object – ‘the thing’ par excellence in Lacanese – was the cell phone. In its avatar before the smartphones it had already made a place for itself in public’s imaginary and practices after an initial phase of uncertainty.
Fragment, Fantasy, History: Towards Newer Projects for Re-Imagining National History
By Manhar Bansal
This essay argues that it is in the ‘unhistorical’, ‘silent’ and ‘scattered’ fragments that historical imagination must find its true place. In this endeavour, it must shun the hegemonic and homogenising forces of mainstream imagination and use oral tradition, collective memory, poetry, literature and fiction – alternative sources I broadly call ‘fantasy’ – to reimagine our multiform pasts.
Agha Shahid Ali and the Poetry of Exile
By Sheikh Shayan Fayaz
What are the problems of treating exile as a fantasy and a literary motif, which is partly how it was for Ali, a voluntary expatriate in America and certainly how it is for his non-exile readers?
Allegories of Primitive Accumulation: On ‘Lazzaro Felice’
By Virginia Lee and Suvij Sudershan
Lazzaro Felice presents an allegorical vision of this process through the fantastical depiction of its setting and characters.
To Dream, Perchance to Change
By Sandeep Banerjee
Across cultures, poetry has always been a key site for articulating the relationship between the fantastic and the transformative mediated by the shaping powers of the imagination.
Café Dissensus 