Anxiety as Art: Reading People , Precarity and Landscape in Assam's Borderlands

Presenter:

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Abstract

The literary imagination of landscape is a site for critical and emotional responses to histories that have witnessed violent and often transformative changes in the community. I use the multiple lenses of literature, anthropology and politics to explore how art and poetry translate the anxiety of being in transnational borderlands (in India’s northeastern state of Assam) to a spatio-temporal condition of human experience. Migrant communities along the borders of Assam and Bangladesh have in the last several decades confronted both the ideas of freedom and the perils that attend mobile and shifting societies. A new literary culture that articulates through poetry these fears and promises, now increasingly accommodated in its regional literature, invites attention to its reigning tropes: identity, landscape and the nation.