playground of empires & beyond the colonial history
Asian topics have been present in my research since the very beginning, as they have emerged with my interest in Portuguese maritime expansion and the discovery of the route to India. Quite another perspective emerged during my years at the University of Warsaw, when I was forced to step into the problems related to Russian landlocked colonisation. The third point of triangulation in Asian studies is my interest in all things Islamicate. The fourth reason to study Asia is its recent triumphal entrance into the domain of Comparative Literature. This is why I take great pleasure in studying the history of Sri Lanka and delving in Shehan Karunatilaka's The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.
my essays in Asian studies
Closets, boxes, pictures.
Queering the history in Shehan Karunatilaka’s
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
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(in progress)
The essay’s aim is to comment on the consequences of the queering of historical vision referring to Sri Lankan ethnic conflict and, in a wider outlook, of the country’s origin and becoming in Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2022). The novel, featuring a gay photographer, contains an intermodal reference to the iconic photographic works of Nick Ut and, crucially, Lionel Wendt. The essay’s author argues that Karunatilaka’s novel should be read in a broader context than that of Human Rights’ Literature. Inscribed in Buddhist/Saivite cosmovision, the text blurs the painful vision of the recent past and presents the interethnic conflict as an insignificant part of the general, ever-repeating mechanism of violence active throughout the history instated by the legendary primordial queen Kuveni and testified in Mahavaṁsa. Due to this transhistorical aspect of the violence under the auspices of Kuveni-Mahakali, the aim of solving the political conundrum through artistic intervention or revelation of a hidden truth cannot be attained. Instead, the focus moves to an even broader, ecocentric vision that acquires a queer resonance. The range of queer relations expands beyond the triangle built up by the protagonist, his lover, and his best female friend to become an intimate connection to all living beings. In parallel, the ‘decloseted’ historical vision shifts from the recent genocide and broadens into an ecocentric outlook encompassing human and non-human vitality of the island. |
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Travelling away from the 'artsy post-modern lefty-pinko university'. Noor's transcultural experience and the duties of the intellectualColloquia Humanistica, no 3/2014, p. 91-102. ISSN 2081-6774
https://ispan.waw.pl/journals/index.php/ch/article/view/ch.2014.006/570 The volume Qur’an and cricket consists of several travelogues produced by a Malay intellectual, Farish A. Noor, during his trips to the most problematic places of the world, marked by the contemporary “battles of God”. This book is interpreted in terms of a quest for transcultural condition understood as a dimension of experience transcending the multiplicity of cultural orders in dissent. Noor sketches his own definition of the intellectual, contrasted in this article with the visions given by Gramsci, Adorno and Said. The subject of the transcultural condition is defined as “itinerant scholar” transgressing the limitations of the academia by his nomadic immersion in the world. The attitude of the traveller is marked by openness and readiness to listen, even if he is confronted to irrational mumbling. Precisely the mumbling of anger and hate becomes the most difficult challenge to the intellectual unable to deal with it rationally. The only remaining answer is a sheer presence and love, emotional attachment to the world, as the scholar rejects the temptation of the ivory tower that would isolate him from the otherness. The modality of speech that opposes the hateful mumbling isn’t based on clear, persuasive argumentation, but on ironic ambivalence conjugated with directness and the rejection of euphemism. Most importantly, the “itinerant scholar” is not a preacher. 
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