Violent spectre of ghost limbs

Abstract

sion and appropriation are harmless preoccupations. In the conclusion of the book Khanna analyses Fanon’s elaboration of the disjuncture between the body and the anticolonial rhetoric of the colonized. Drawing on Fanon’s authority enables her to generalize her abstractions drawn from the fiction of the sub-Indian continent, seeking an account of decolonization elsewhere. The bodily dysfunctions explored in this literature explain the paralyzing tensions that exist among the colonized who aim less to ‘become’ but more to ‘substitute’ the settlers. The distinction here is of course critical: as Khanna argues, ‘the act of becoming’ could have ushered in a historical subject and paved the way for an alternative instantiation of decolonization. The extent that realism stifles the revolutionary ardor of eroticism or casts it as simply pornographic is a promising line of argument as proposed by the author. Indeed, Khanna indirectly asks us to rewrite the nationalist canons in order to distinguish the revolutionary from the pseudo-revolutionary arts. Here Khanna assumes that had the nationalists dwelled more on modernism instead of realism, colonial Indians or Algerians could have withstood a chance in regaining their freedom beyond the political instantiation of freedom. Differently put, realism could or could not have been an empowering mode of expression to galvanize action for the nationalist cause against colonialism, but after independence realism became a liability. Still, the logic of Visceral Logics looks like it is charging literary and cultural elites with failing to draw the kind of excitations that would somehow reverse the postcolonial dysfunction. After its perhaps demanding early chapters, students of postcolonialism will find this book exceptionally rewarding, where Khanna’s contribution will reshape literary scholarship for generations to come in the way The Country and the City (1973) by Raymond Williams or Orientalism (1978) by Edward Said have done.