Migrant Form

Migrant Form examines the works of James Joyce, Salman Rushdie, and Satyajit Ray for the anti-colonial arguments in their unsettled, and unsettling, aesthetics. Among the questions it engages are the following: What are the aesthetic moves through which art expresses its resistance to dominance and demands for conformity? How can we define anti-colonial aesthetics? How do these aesthetics manifest themselves in different media such as literature and film? Contending that Joyce inaugurates an anti-colonial «aesthetics of reconstitution», the book mines such aesthetics in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake to propose a formal model for postcolonialism. It also draws on that exercise to consider how Rushdie extends a play with reconfigured forms into an overt politics in two of his novels ( Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses ). Turning its attention to film, the book contests the common view of Ray as a gentle realist and examines a formal restlessness in Ray’s earlier work, Charulata ( The Lonely Wife ), before demonstrating how Ray stages his preference for restlessness in his final film, Agantuk ( The Stranger ).