Literature, Culture, and Politics

 

Literature, Culture, and Politics

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The brief idea which will be given to you about the topic is literature,culture and politics   and you will see that literature culture and politics is the tagline of this article but the reason it's there is because that's how I see literary studies right in my understanding of the way we live. There is no political existence, we are always on a political right. We are over-determined by it in so many ways and culture of course and politics you know they fuse into each other one feeds into the other changes or reforms or times transforms the other and any literature that is produced it's never really produced in a vacuum right the person who writes it is situated in a culture that has been constructed by that culture in so many ways and has politics and when they write literature that is that representation is part literary part political part cultural all of that combined is it comes to us as an object of study and similarly when we approach it we also are constituted beings right we are political we have a politics.

We have a belief system we have a cultural grounding that defines what we value what we do not so at both ends in its creation but also in its reading and analysis and scholarship the act of reading is over determined by the culture by the politics and then by the literary aspects of the text itself and I think keeping that in mind as scholars of literature and as professors of literature and students of literature is important because we have the misfortune of still not having broken out of our colonial mindset right so you go to any English department in Pakistan when you say English literature all they think about is Shakespeare and Ben Johnson and maybe a little bit of Thomas Hardy and Coleridge and words worth that is our idea of English literature and it is so far detached from what our culture is or what our politics is right and then we are trained also in a sort of a outdated way of treating literature as if it's an object in itself that exists in a vacuum and talking about it as if it is exists in a vacuum so what my effort has been here to my audience over here and students in Pakistan is to encourage grounded readings right readings that are grounded in our own cultural identities greetings readings that are informed by the politics within our text but also our own politics and then do the work of culture and what it enables us to do then is not just bring an fixed absolute con idea of what our culture is but it brings it to bear upon a text and maybe in the process then makes us question our own politics makes us question our own cultural assumptions right and if we do that then literature can be transformative because we are not treating it as a static object of study we are treating it as something dynamic which has a politics right which is situated contextually in the politics of its creation but also the politics of the moment of reading itself and so that's why I like this topic because what it where it takes us as scholars of literature is to this realm where we can't really do effective reading of literature or talking about literature or scholarships without having a thorough grounding in culture without having a thorough grounding in politics right and then in what constitutes literature these three things must come together to constitute a reading self that is aware of that but a reading self that knows that things are movable things are changeable soft right only then will literature you know will do the trans-formative thing that it does or it is supposed to do so these are some of my thoughts off the cuff I mean not off the cuff this is what I think about this is what I've lived for most of my life and taught and written about now what I see in my idea of Pakistani academy is slightly dated right and maybe a bit ill-informed is that there is still that legacy right that legacy of thinking of literature as this exalted object that we must then go and develop some mode of elevated reading and understanding it and only then we'll be able to read it carefully and have opinions about it that was there when we were studying of course and some of it is still there. This significance accorded to terminologies and vocabularies and not necessarily deep thought deep engagement with literature so let's say how is a political reading accomplished of a text right you pick up any novel right some novels are openly political right because they they're written as political novels you know how to get filthy rich in rising Asia is a political novel right because it's a critique of neoliberal capital and economy the case of exploding mangoes is a political novel right, if you go to Urdu is a political novel log is a political novel they carry that load with them most of them were leftist novels right until we got rid of the Pakistani left so but even you if you look at texts that claim to be just artistic and work of art then they cannot escape the politics of their times they cannot escape the politics of the author they cannot escape the politics of the publishing industry what would it publish what would it not publish right so if you really think about it you know if the text doesn't have an apparent politics it will have an under you know it will have politics that grounds it that shapes it that shapes its assumptions you know a lot of people in Pakistan like Raja Ged. I published an article about it too but deep down if you read that novel what is the political message in it right other than you know debates about Pakistan and how it came to be but the political message in it is a certain kind of you know esoteric way of dealing with life right it's politics is a kind of escapist route to this other reality where all your problems will be solved right that is its politics right it, it's trying to teach us that it is an illiberal work right because it privileges non-rational modes of dealing with the real right and hypothesizes them that's its politics right you know you pick up any of the books of daily Laki if you pick that up you know you know that will tell you this is a strident work that challenges the assumptions of the culture so it's culturally transformative it's transgresses right and so the texts have these politics sometimes they announce them sometimes they don't announce them you have to tease them out and they are determined by the time in which they were written right by the politics and culture that constitutes the subjectivity of the author and then the publishing environment what is permitted to be published what is not permitted to be published all these constraints are either cultural or political so that's why my general views about literature literary studies talking about literature is that and I am going to conclude here so that you can ask me any questions as you like so my general opinion always has been that that knowing that literature is produced and exists within a given culture or in a cross-cultural environment and that the author and the text are produced within a certain politics and that we take our own cultural assumptions to an act of reading and our politics play a role in it in evaluating a text in assigning it value it's important for literary scholars to keep that in mind because when you keep that in mind and do the work of culture or politics or literature you will then produce works you know that are powerful and that do something in the world right that's all I am going to say.