Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in
Book cover

World Literature, Non-Synchronism, and the Politics of Time pp 75–102Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

The Author as Digger: The Gypsy Goddess and the Strata of History

  • Chapter
  • First Online:

  • 207 Accesses

Part of the book series: New Comparisons in World Literature ((NCWL))

Abstract

Meena Kandasamy’s 2014 novel The Gypsy Goddess offers a highly reflexive narration of the Kilvenmani massacre: the brutal repression of agricultural labourers on strike in South India, December 1968. The novel does not provide a linear account of the events, but rather interrogates the very act of representing such historical reality in fictional form. Accordingly, Kandasamy’s text articulates a non-synchronous aesthetic whereby the chronological order of things is replaced by a stratigraphic process: the novelist is reimagined as a digger excavating overlapping grounds of history and reassembling them in a metafictional, multidimensional narrative composition. The anti-chronological aesthetic adopted by Kandasamy, however, does not end up in a postmodern fragmentation of the story of Kilvenmani. On the contrary, the novelist’s play with time emerges as a mirroring of objective conditions of peripheral capitalism in the narrative dialectic of story and history.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD   54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Works Cited

  • Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2009. The Danger of a Single Story. TED Talks. https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en. Accessed 1 May 2019.

  • Arruzza, Cinzia. 2015. Marx’s Gendered Temporalities. Historical Materialism 23.4: 49–59.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bayly, Susan. 2001. Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Benjamin, Walter. 1999. Selected Writings 1931–1934, vol. 2, Part 2. Trans. Rodney Livingstone and Others. Eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Boutang, Yann Moulier. 2018. Forms of Unfree Labour, History or Pre-History of Capitalism? Trans. Patrick King Viewpoint Magazine. https://www.viewpointmag.com/2018/02/01/forms-unfree-labor-primitive-accumulation-history-prehistory-capitalism/. Accessed 20 September 2018.

  • Caffentzis, George. 1999. The End of Work or the Renaissance of Slavery? A Critique of Rifkin and Negri. Common Sense 24: 20–38.

    Google Scholar 

  • Chakrabarti, Anjan, Stephen Cullenberg, and Anup Dhar. 2017. Primitive Accumulation and Historical Inevitability. In Theodore A. Burczak, Robert F. Garnett Jr., and Richard McIntyre, eds. Knowledge, Class, and Economics. Abingdon: Routledge,

    Google Scholar 

  • Charusheela, S. 2011. Response: History, Historiography, and Communal Subjectivity. Rethinking Marxism 23.3: 322–327.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cleaver, Harry M. 1972. The Contradictions of the Green Revolution. The American Economic Review 62.1/2: 177–186.

    Google Scholar 

  • Federici, Silvia. 2004. Caliban and the Witch. New York: Autonomedia.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gorringe, Hugo. 2005. Untouchable Citizens: Dalit Movements and Democratisation in Tamil Nadu. New Delhi: Sage.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2006. Which Is Violence? Reflections on Collective Violence and Dalit Movements in South India. Social Movement Studies 5.2: 117–136.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gough, Kathleen. 1974. Indian Peasant Uprisings. Economic and Political Weekly 9.32/34: 1391–1412.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harootunian, Harry. 2015a. Marx After Marx. New York: Columbia University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2015b. Piercing the Present with the Past. Historical Materialism 23.4: 60–74.

    Google Scholar 

  • Herrero, Dolores. 2019. Postmodernism and Politics in Meena Kandasamy’s The Gypsy Goddess. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 54.1: 70–83.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kandasamy, Meena. 2010. Ms Militancy. New Delhi: Navayana.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2014. The Gypsy Goddess. London: Atlantic.

    Google Scholar 

  • Karthikeyan, D., Stalin Rajangam, and Hugo Gorringe. 2012. Dalit Political Imagination and Replication in Contemporary Tamil Nadu. Economic and Political Weekly 47.36: 30–34.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lazzarato, Maurizio. 1996. Immaterial Labor. In Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno, eds. Radical Thought in Italy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 133–147.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2014. Signs and Machines. Trans. Joshua David Jordan. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e).

    Google Scholar 

  • Luxemburg, Rosa. 2003. The Accumulation of Capital. Trans. Agnes Schwarzschild. Abingdon: Routledge [1913].

    Google Scholar 

  • Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital, vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin.

    Google Scholar 

  • Menozzi, Filippo. 2018. Think Another Time: Rosa Luxemburg and the Concept of History. New Formations 94: 17–22.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mezzadra, Sandro. 2011a. The Topicality of Prehistory: A New Reading of Marx’s Analysis of ‘So- called Primitive Accumulation’. Rethinking Marxism 23.3: 302–321.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2011b. How Many Histories of Labour? Towards a Theory of Postcolonial Capitalism. Postcolonial Studies 14.2: 151–170.

    Google Scholar 

  • Osborne, Peter. 2015. Out of Sync: Tomba’s Marx and the Problem of a Multi-Layered Temporal Dialectic. Historical Materialism 23.4: 39–48.

    Google Scholar 

  • Parry, Benita. 2018. Perspectives on Rosa Luxemburg. New Formations 94: 49–61.

    Google Scholar 

  • Roy, Arundhati. 1997. The God of Small Things. London: Flamingo.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2013. Broken Republic. London: Penguin.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1991. Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1. Trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith. London: Verso.

    Google Scholar 

  • Shanin, Theodor. 1983. Late Marx and the Russian Road. New York: Monthly Review.

    Google Scholar 

  • Shiva, Vandana. 2016. The Violence of Green Revolution. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sundar, Nandini. 2019. The Burning Forest: India’s War Against the Maoists. London: Verso.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tomba, Massimiliano. 2013. Marx’s Temporalities. Leiden: Brill.

    Google Scholar 

  • Traverso, Enzo. 2016. Left-Wing Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Venkatesan, Sathyaraj, and Rajesh James. 2018. Mapping the Margins: An Interview with Meena Kandasamy: Conducted at Sacred Heart College in Kochi, India on 12 November 2015. ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 49.1: 143–154.

    Google Scholar 

  • Yadav, Kanak. 2017. Gentlemen Killers: The Politics of Remembering in Meena Kandasamy’s The Gypsy Goddess. Contemporary Voice of Dalit 9.1: 113–120.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, Merseyside, UK

    Filippo Menozzi

Authors
  1. Filippo Menozzi
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Filippo Menozzi .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2020 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Menozzi, F. (2020). The Author as Digger: The Gypsy Goddess and the Strata of History. In: World Literature, Non-Synchronism, and the Politics of Time. New Comparisons in World Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41698-0_3

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation