Provincializing Island Poetics: The Personal as the Spatial in N S Madhavan's *Litanies of Dutch Battery*

Affect towards islands is a unique approach to engage with in discussions of the phenomenology of fictional islands. This affect complements the already identified tropes within island poetics: those of sensorial exploration, spatial practices, and textural detailing of islands. This article turns t...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Soni Wadhwa, Jintu Alias
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Island Studies Journal 2024-03-01
Series:Island Studies Journal
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.24043/001c.94614
Description
Summary:Affect towards islands is a unique approach to engage with in discussions of the phenomenology of fictional islands. This affect complements the already identified tropes within island poetics: those of sensorial exploration, spatial practices, and textural detailing of islands. This article turns to a work of fiction about a fictional island based on the island city of Kochi in south India to unpack an alternative aesthetic of spatiality, the kind that changes the personal/political relationship to personal/spatial one. We argue that the novel, *Litanies of Dutch Battery* (the novel in question) by N.S. Madhavan, expands inquiries into phenomenology of fictional islands by making space for corporeal memory and collective memory in storytelling. These memory-oriented narrative devices, we suggest, "provincialize" island poetics to add a hermeneutic of postcolonial angst to the repertoire of formal features of literary islandness.
ISSN:1715-2593