Provincializing Island Poetics: The Personal as the Spatial in N S Madhavan's *Litanies of Dutch Battery*

Affect towards islands is a unique approach to engage with in discussions of the phenomenology of fictional islands. This affect complements the already identified tropes within island poetics: those of sensorial exploration, spatial practices, and textural detailing of islands. This article turns to a work of fiction about a fictional island based on the island city of Kochi in south India to unpack an alternative aesthetic of spatiality, the kind that changes the personal/political relationship to personal/spatial one. We argue that the novel, *Litanies of Dutch Battery* (the novel in questi... Mehr ...

Verfasser: Soni Wadhwa
Jintu Alias
Dokumenttyp: Artikel
Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
Reihe/Periodikum: Island Studies Journal, Vol Early access (2024)
Verlag/Hrsg.: Island Studies Journal
Schlagwörter: Physical geography / GB3-5030
Sprache: Englisch
Permalink: https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-28984744
Datenquelle: BASE; Originalkatalog
Powered By: BASE
Link(s) : https://doi.org/10.24043/001c.94614

Affect towards islands is a unique approach to engage with in discussions of the phenomenology of fictional islands. This affect complements the already identified tropes within island poetics: those of sensorial exploration, spatial practices, and textural detailing of islands. This article turns to a work of fiction about a fictional island based on the island city of Kochi in south India to unpack an alternative aesthetic of spatiality, the kind that changes the personal/political relationship to personal/spatial one. We argue that the novel, *Litanies of Dutch Battery* (the novel in question) by N.S. Madhavan, expands inquiries into phenomenology of fictional islands by making space for corporeal memory and collective memory in storytelling. These memory-oriented narrative devices, we suggest, "provincialize" island poetics to add a hermeneutic of postcolonial angst to the repertoire of formal features of literary islandness.