CHDR Presents: Amit Baishya

Center for Humanities and Digital Research: TCH 325

Join Dr. Amit Baishya from the University of Oklahoma as she speaks about new critical studies on South Asian Horror and Anthropocene in her talk: Indian National Weird: The Aesthetics of Air as Horror in New Literary Narratives.

This talk considers new theoretical categories in the "aesthetics of the weird" and their double valence of the terns, "atmosphere" and "weird" in emerging South Asian literature. I 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 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, I focus exclusively on the Delhi segments of this sprawling heterotemporal and multiscalar novel. Zooming in especially on atmospheric pollution and it's 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), my 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.

CHDR Presents is an ongoing talk series hosted by the Center for Humanities and Digital Research (CHDR) where scholars share innovative, award-winning, creative research to both showcase their work and foster collaboration.

This event is supported by the UCF India Center and the Department of English.