Three Experiments in Subaltern Intimacy

Abstract

This paper centers the Marxist artistic experiments of anti-colonial activist and playwright, Rashid Jahan, for her phenomenological approaches to feminist decolonial practices in India. I argue that Jahan’s experiments in literature and theater provide a far more incisive mobilization of the “subaltern” consciousness than previously understood within postcolonial debates. This paper is thus a renewed engagement with articulations of the subaltern consciousness that were so central to the anti-colonial literatures of this era. I seek to challenge the field of postcolonial studies to shift a traditional focus on the discursive and ideological contours of colonial violence and power to account for how habits of mind are secured in the habituated responses of the body. Simultaneously, I seek to attend to a gap in affect studies by making available new modes of reading racialized affective forms through the historical materialities that produce its expressive forms.