Global South Literary Studies

Political Violence and Literary Responses in South and Southeast Asia since the 1940s

Political Violence and Literary Responses in South and Southeast Asia since the 1940s

South and Southeast Asian history has been permeated by political violence, the direct application or threat of physical force to achieve political ends, since the emergence of most countries in this region as independent nation-states in and around the nineteen-forties. Political violence may emerge and escalate from the contentious politics of an international scale, often threatening a broad human settlement. This also has varied local manifestations, like armed conflicts between a state and any counter-state political group segregated as ‘dangerous’ to ‘the national interest’ by the state, and between the oppositional political parties seeking ideological and material control. Periods of regime changes are often integrated with attempts to establish an absolute coercive monopoly within a politically defined territory or to seek release from it. Political violence interlaces with people’s non-violent struggles for constitutional/administrative rights and justice.

While socioeconomic identities are crucial in generating and perpetuating violence and deciding its executors and victims, political violence needs to be mapped around the form and conduct of civil governance. Deeply rooted in colonial rules and marred by the military and economic aggressions of the neo-imperialist Global North, political discontents have fed South and Southeast Asian society and culture. Informing how texts and circumstantiality are intertwined, literary narratives and political violence can be seen to both underscore and baffle each other, as exemplified by the Indian Partition literature and literary works on the Sri Lankan Civil Wars and on the Bangladesh Liberation War. These narratives explore the impacts of old and new wounds and voids, remain suspended while confronting “inconvertible violence” (Balibar 2015), resist authoritarian atrocities, or endorse revolutionary violence, justified as the only condition of freedom (Žižek 2008).

For Étienne Balibar, civility bears within it an exclusionary legacy, and along with technological developments, violence has become all-pervasive and inevitable. However, Hannah Arendt considers violence an expression of impotent political power. States like Indonesia under Suharto, Myanmar under recurring military rule, and Afghanistan at the hands of religious fanatics offer individual cases of political violence with overlapping issues, while certain anti-state movements, like that run by the LTTE, have evolved in transnational settings. The literary implications of the ubiquity of violence in the modern political history of South and Southeast Asia have not yet been critically studied within an interconnected framework. This special issue attempts a comprehensive critical scrutiny of literary reflections on concrete episodes and intersectional historical and geographical networks of political violence in South and Southeast Asia with attention to the nuances of this field.

The special issue invites submissions on areas that include but are not limited to:

• Episodes of emergency and literature
• Literary responses to conflicting relationships in postcolonial democracy
• Military regimes, state violence and literature
• Naxalite-Maoist insurgencies, anti-communist massacres and literary mediums
• Civil wars (in Sri Lanka, Nepal, Afghanistan, Cambodia etc.) and literary responses
• Literary responses to Rohingya crisis
• Partitions, forced migrations, memory and literary narratives

References

Balibar, Étienne. 2015. Violence and Civility. Trans. G. M. Goshgarian. New York: Columbia University Press.

Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. In Defense of Lost Causes. London: Verso.