This event will be held virtually.
Institute for Comparative Literature and Society
The first meeting of our Graduate Colloquium will take place May 12 at 12:30pm. Sourav Chatterjee presents his chapter, Between Famine and War: Late Colonial Newspaper Strips in Bengal
Abstract
Piciel’s Khooro was the first newspaper gag comics to appear in Bengal. It was published every Sunday between 1935 and 1975 in Amrita Bazar Patrika’s (ABP) ‘Magazine Section.’ This gag captured the daily struggles of its eponymous protagonist, Khooro, a middle-aged clerk in Calcutta who witnessed first-hand the impacts of WWII and the Bengal Famine (1943) in the city. The object of visual satire in Khooro is the middle-class clerical body caught in the War and the Famine. It captures prevalent anxieties and fears of the middle-class clerical profession caught in the myriad civic issues of urbanity. It uses leitmotifs and tropes that help us grasp verbal-visual representations of satire, caste, class, and gender in War and the Famine.
Drawing on periodical studies and multimodal studies, this article analyzes the format (printed newspaper) and medium (comics/imagetext) of select Khooro gags, set during WWII and the Bengal Famine, to propose a ‘meta-imagetextual’ reading of Khooro. The meta-imagetextual reading of Khooro complicates and clarifies verbal-visual representations of colonial gender performances during the War and the Famine. The article also argues how meta-imagetexts in Amrita Bazar Patrika captured the historical zeitgeist of a time by discursively centering a particular section of the population that became the supposedly ultimate victim of the War and the Famine.
ICLS graduate students and affiliated faculty are invited to participate in the ICLS Dissertation Colloquium. Before each 2 hour-long session of the colloquium, presenters will circulate at least five days in advance a dissertation chapter or article, indicating in a reader’s note the areas in which they are seeking feedback. Participation is required for ICLS ABD graduate students.
On an ad hoc basis, those workshopping their writing may invite faculty and graduate students external to ICLS to participate in their session.
All questions should be addressed to the 2023-2024 Graduate Coordinating Fellow, Fatima-Ezzahrae Touilila ft2451@columbia.edu
