"Indian National Weird: The Aesthetics of Air as Horror in New Literary Narratives" with Associate Professor Amit Baishya, University of Oklahoma
This talk considers new theoretical categories in the “aesthetics of the weird” and their double valence of the terms, “atmosphere” and “weird” in emerging South Asian literature. Dr. Baishya will be focusing on the aesthetics of the weird, a post-Lovecraftian generic descriptor that merges horror, science-fiction and speculation—to depict the vicissitudes of the Anthropocene in emerging literary narratives such as Siddhartha Deb’s new work The Light at the End of the World. In the era of Anthropocene, the “atmosphere” has become “weird” and in a different sense as a novel on the Anthropocene, the atmosphere that the characters inhabit is literally weird because of anthropogenic impacts such as air pollution. This latter aspect is especially germane in the representation of New Delhi, which is routinely listed as a city with poor air quality. In this talk, Dr. Baishya focuses exclusively on the Delhi segments of this sprawling heterotemporal and multi-scalar novel. Zooming in especially on atmospheric pollution and its differentiated impacts on the city’s populations, the creation of insulated and exclusionary “bubbles” (Peter Slotedijk) through technologies like air conditioning, and the mediated representation of air through techno-visualizations like the Air Quality Index (AQI), the talk traces the double valence of weird atmospheres, and argues that the ‘weird’ may be one of the most powerful generic modes to depict how elemental substances like air are changed, changed utterly in the epoch of the Anthropocene.
Presented in conjunction with UCF Department of English, College of Arts and Humanities and UCF's Center for Humanities and Digital Research.
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