“Reading the impossible impassible object: Reading Ismat Chughtai”

Unfortunately this is during class time

 

WGSI Research Seminar 
presents



Geeta Patel

“Reading the impossible impassible object:  Reading Ismat Chughtai”

January 19, 4-6pm

2053 Wilson Hall

ABSTRACT:

This paper seeks to open a place for reading Ismat Chughtai, an Indian Muslim woman writer, that does not simply fold into the body politics that her short story "Lihaaf” ("The Quilt) seems to call up.   The story "Lihaaf," written in the early 1940s and charged with obscenity immediately after its publication, is about a young girl's short stay in a harem or zanana, and her subsequent foray into desire. Most conventional analyses of this story are attached to what is under the quilt, the promissory object that gives the story its name, and the object under which a relationship between two women in the story appears to be secreted, to find embodiments of sexuality.  Instead of consorting with a desire to lift the quilt, this paper asks: What does staying on the surface of the quilt, rather than succumbing to its seductive possibilities that one lift it up, offer us as readers?  Holding with the poetics of the secret, this paper will turn to shadows, proxies, portrayals and quantum physics as advocates of rigorous interdisciplinarities that salvage the grain of alterior readings.