Rethinking Postcolonial Melodrama and Affect

Abstract

This article rethinks melodrama’s history, uses, and effects, through an analysis of Deepa Mehta’s film Earth (1998), an adaptation of Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel on the partition of British India, Cracking India (1991). The film offers an encounter with postcolonial and global melodrama that raises questions of comparison, categorization, and periodization, as well as of the association of the melodramatic mode with “secular modernity” – the universal condition to which Peter Brooks suggests melodrama owes its rise. In Mehta’s film, the often disparaged aesthetic of melodrama makes sense of affective history by signifying the body and generating potential ethical knowledge through “affective reason,” which is often conveyed through Mehta’s use of interruptions, flashbacks, reversals, and simultaneities. The film thereby suggests a temporality that stands as an alternative to the progressive and teleological linearity underlying concepts of a homogenous and secular modernity and to official, realist accounts of nationalism.

Emergências preliminares e inovação substancial: atravessamentos pandêmicos e melodramáticos na narrativa de Amor de Mãe

“…Em Rethinking Postcolonial Melodrama and Affect, Sheetal Majithia utiliza a noção de razão afetiva para desconstruir a noção de que sequências não-lineares do melodrama indiano não são representações realistas e, portanto, seriam 'falhas' da narrativa. Segundo Majithia (2015), "falhas" são preenchidas pela imaginação melodramática do espectador.…”

Romancing the other: Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

“…In the next sections, this article advances the argument that romance in Roy's novels, although just one of her many literary devices, functions as a transformative and heroic political rescue of the other in postcolonial India. Unpacking the trope of romance in these novels and reading them politically allows for a reconsideration of the theme of romantic love in postcolonial writing which has also been studied by Sommer (1991) and, more recently, by Emily S. Davis (2013) as well as Majithia (2015).…”