Erothanatos: A Peer-Reviewed Quarterly Journal on Literature
Erothanatos (E-ISSN 2457-0265) is an interdisciplinary, double-blind peer-reviewed literary journal that explores the intersections of literature, philosophy, cultural studies, and critical theory. Established with a vision to foreground voices that challenge conventional narratives, the journal is committed to publishing original, thought-provoking scholarship that delves into the complexities of human experience, artistic expression, and socio-political realities amidst the conflict between Eros and Thanatos — life and death, desire and dissolution — as enduring metaphors of human imagination.
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The Culinary Sub-Text in Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘When Mr. Pirzada Comes to Dine’ in Interpreter of Maladies
When it comes to South Asian diaspora, families, communities and relations within the private space of the family is often pitted against the unfamiliar if not hostile territory of the public space. It is also a common understanding that while the process of assimilation works within spaces, the kitchen and the food prepared at home is the sacrosanct core that speaks of home and smells of home. This paper attempts to walk into one such home that might be given a label of a South Asian diasporic home with Jhumpa Lahiri's story 'When Mr. Pirzada Comes to Dine' from the collection Interpreter of Maladies to question the role that certain specific social spaces play in the event that a war plays out within the four walls of this home and the effect that the culinary nostalgia has on the traumatic suffering of the war. This paper would also like to contest the engendering of stereotypical roles in the interface between food, families and identities.
Copyright (c) 2021 Authors retain copyright and grant Erothanatos: A Peer-Reviewed Quarterly Journal on Literature the right of first publication. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) International License. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The Kamakhya Temple in Guwahati, Assam, uniquely sacralizes menstruation through the goddess's annual "bleeding" during Ambubachi Mela, transforming cultural taboos into symbols of fertility and renewal. This paper applies ecofeminist and ecocritical theories to analyze how this Tantric narrative reclaims feminine corporeality and ecological cycles against patriarchal and colonial erasures, drawing parallels in Assamese literary texts. The Kamakhya Temple venerates Goddess Kamakhya's yoni through her monsoon-aligned menstruation, celebrated in Ambubachi Mela, subverting menstrual stigma as cosmic Shakti. Rooted in Yogini Tantra and Kalika Purana myths of Sati's dismemberment, this folklore influences Assamese literature like Indira Goswami's works, framing blood as regenerative power. Employing Vandana Shiva's ecofeminism, which links women's marginalization to biodiversity loss—and ecocriticism's challenge to anthropocentrism, the paper argues Kamakhya resists dualisms of pure/impure, embodying earth-women unity. Ritual analysis reveals implications for gender justice amid climate disruptions, countering colonial demonization of Tantra.
Copyright (c) 2026 Authors retain copyright and grant Erothanatos: A Peer-Reviewed Quarterly Journal on Literature the right of first publication. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) International License. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
This paper examines Our Lady of the Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga to argue that trauma is represented not as a singular response to catastrophic violence but as an anticipatory and cumulative condition produced through everyday practices of exclusion, ideological conditioning, and institutional control. Drawing on trauma theory, the study demonstrates how trauma is encoded through narrative fragmentation, silence, and deferred meaning. The analysis is further informed by Sigmund Freud’s concepts of Eros and Thanatos, which illuminate the tension between life-affirming desires and destructive impulses within the novel’s social and psychological framework. Using trauma-informed close reading and psychoanalytic literary analysis, the paper explores four key dimensions: the construction of Veronica as an erotic–sacrificial figure, the articulation of genocide as a collective death drive, the function of institutional silence as a mechanism of control, and the sexualization of ethnic difference as a form of gendered trauma. It argues that Mukasonga’s narrative reconfigures trauma as a gendered and socially embedded phenomenon that precedes and exceeds the event of genocide, thereby challenging dominant trauma paradigms and offering a nuanced understanding of the psychic and cultural conditions that enable mass violence.
This paper examines the East Bengali refugee narratives after the 1947 partition through the lens of hunger, everyday survival and pangs of domestic life. Focussing on Ritwik Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara and Subarnarekha, it argues that food appears less as cultural continuity and more as an absence. Hunger becomes a lived experience of displacement, shaping the lives and identities of refugees through economic precarity and economic exploitation. The paper highlights how everyday survival replaces stability and how the loss of home disrupts family food cultures. A particular attention is also paid to the gendered nature of survival, where women’s bodies and labour absorb the impact of displacement through self-sacrifice and silent endurance. By reading hunger as an effective narrative force, this paper tries to suggest that refugee narratives preserve intimate histories of partition that largely remain unrecorded in official documents.
Precarious Identity, Displacement, and Belonging in Selasi’s Ghana Must Go and Bulawayo’s We Need New Names through the Lens of Afropolitanism
Africans are no longer a stereotype of resistance to Western colonial oppression in the literature of African diasporic authors; instead, they can navigate the world with economic security and education. In Selasi's Ghana Must Go, the transcontinental migrations of the Sai family and in Bulawayo's We Need New Names, Darling's journey from a Zimbabwean shantytown to America, highlight how contemporary Africans can access a transcultural, globalized community while also illustrating their challenges in overcoming emotional crises, displacement, a sense of alienation, socioeconomic vulnerability, legal ambiguity, and strained community ties. By adopting cosmopolitan practices and transnational rhetoric, both novels share the Afropolitan ideal, a notion popularised by Selasi in her 2005 essay Bye-Bye-Babar. However, they diverge at one point: Bulawayo's work challenges the celebratory rhetoric of Afropolitanism by highlighting its protagonists' material and emotional struggles in coping with racial incompatibility and economic crisis, whereas Selasi's is a perfect example of Afropolitanism, showcasing its characters as economically privileged, educated, and elite. Using Afropolitanism as the theoretical framework and adopting the Critical Discourse Analysis as the methodology, this paper will examine the intersectional points of cosmopolitan practices as well as their irreversible deviations in these two novels.
In Beckett's plays, food has lost its agency as nourishment and has become a symbol of decay, stagnation and deterioration. Characters do not eat out of hunger; they eat out of habit, compulsion, or boredom. Food also works as an instrument of control, domination and subjugation, as in Pozzo's control over Lucky and Hamm's control over Clov, Nagg and Nell. This article examines the transformation of food in the dramatic universe of Samuel Beckett, arguing that it undergoes a radical devaluation from a life-sustaining necessity to a marker of decay, repetition, and power. Acts of eating are detached from hunger and instead function as compulsive, mechanical gestures that sustain the illusion of activity within an otherwise stagnant existence. The study demonstrates how food operates as an instrument of domination within hierarchical relationships—most notably between Pozzo and Lucky, and Hamm and Clov—where control over sustenance reinforces structures of dependency and subjugation. Tracing a trajectory from external deprivation to internalized compulsion, the article reveals how nourishment becomes progressively emptied of meaning, culminating in self-destructive habit. Ultimately, Beckett’s use of food exposes a profound existential crisis in which survival is reduced to mere endurance.
This paper investigates the multifaceted impact of Arunachalam Muruganantham’s grassroots innovation—the low-cost sanitary napkin machine—as depicted in the Hindi film Padman (2018). It analyses the disruptive challenge this innovation poses to established market forces in South Asian menstrual hygiene management (MHM). Despite significant advancements in public health discourse, affordable access remains restricted due to high product costs and deeply entrenched socio-cultural taboos. This study examines how Padman functions as a cultural catalyst for entrepreneurship education, deconstructing myths of "overnight success" and highlighting the grit required for social ventures. Furthermore, the paper analyses the decentralised economic model against the centralised, high-cost strategies of multinational corporations (MNCs) like Hindustan Unilever (HUL) and Procter & Gamble (P&G). By integrating market data and examining the competitive landscape—with a specific focus on the strategic importance of the Maharashtra market—this research demonstrates how grassroots innovation provides a sustainable solution to the affordability crisis while fostering local economic empowerment and challenging corporate hegemony.
Cannibalism has long functioned as a metaphor for love, circulating across cultural, religious, and popular imaginaries, where images such as the pomegranate and the vampire have linked acts of consumption to intimacy, desire, transgression, binding love to food through the language of excess and incorporation. This essay offers a psychoanalytic reading of Choi Jin-young's Hunger that foregrounds food as the novel's central site for negotiating grief, desire, and death. Rather than approaching cannibalism as a mere aberration, it argues that eating operates as an affective bodily logic through which the text dismantles dominant narratives of love, survival, and futurity. Drawing on Freudian theories of melancholia and dialectics between Eros-Thanatos, the analysis demonstrates how hunger in the novel exceeds the restorative function of nourishment, emerging instead as a compulsive practice that sustains attachment to loss. Through Dam's consumption of her dead lover, Hunger collapses the distinction between care-destruction, intimacy- self-erasure, private mourning-social rites, revealing how desire persists not despite death but through it, and reimagining love as a melancholic fidelity to what cannot be recovered. Ultimately, situating the novel within the broader socioeconomic landscape of disposability and deprivation, it further contends that Dam's grief is not merely individual but structurally produced.
This paper aims to shed light on how a significant social and cultural shift has occurred with the advent of fast food restaurants in Kashmir. As a result, people are eating less in the familiar and safe environment of their own homes and more in the public arena of gastronomic spectacles. The culinary traditions of Kashmir have largely revolved around home kitchens, with the bigger community gatherings known as wazwan (a Kashmiri feast) or niyaz (offering) reserved for more inclusive occasions. Wazwan and other restaurant meals have become ubiquitous and commercialised, making dining a social performance, a type of recreational tastemaking, and a form of performative consumption. By looking at the spoilt meat scandal of 2025 in Kashmir via a critical lens, this analysis presents this change as a sign of cultural alienation and fetishisation rather than just a public health issue. The article utilises ideas of spectacle, differentiation, and food security to analyse how the modernity of taste has altered class identities, dismantled traditional foodways, and introduced new health hazards in a political context that suppresses and neglects alternative, more complex narratives.
Menopause remains strikingly under-discussed in the Indian public and policy arenas, even as evidence suggeststhat Indian women often enter menopause earlier than many of their Western counterparts and frequently do so without adequate workplace or health-system support. This paper examines Indian digital feminist platforms, including long-form feminist outlets, community support groups, and Instagram/Facebook micro-communities, to analyze how hot flashes, insomnia, changing sexuality, and aging are narrated, medicalized, resisted, and reclaimed within these spaces.
H.G. Wells' The Time Machine (1895) pioneered science fiction by exploring time travel, dystopian societies, and social critique through the lens of posthuman evolution. This foundational work critiques Victorian class structures via the Eloi and Morlocks, projecting a future where humanity diverges starkly. In contrast, Indian science fiction, exemplified by anthologies like Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction (2021) and Homo Minuscula (2023), envisions alternative futures with a focus on reimagining futures, speculation of co-evolution of living beings, and addressing contemporary societal issues by depicting dystopian futures. This comparative study analyzes how both literary traditions speculate on posthuman societies, addressing themes such as time travel, speciesism, and the role of technology in shaping future societies. It illuminates cultural differences in imagining future worlds and provides insights into global socio-political contexts influencing speculative fiction. By bridging these narratives, the research fills gaps in academic discourse, offering a nuanced understanding of how different societies envision posthumanism and respond to contemporary challenges through speculative fiction.
Menstruation, though a universal biological phenomenon, acquires culturally specific meanings through ritual, symbolism and social regulation. In India, menarche is frequently marked through ceremonies that publicly signal a girl’s transition into womanhood. This paper examines Ritu Kala Samskaram, a South Indian menarche ritual, as a critical site where gender identity is not merely recognized but actively produced. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, the study argues that womanhood emerges not as a natural outcome of biological maturation but as a culturally scripted identity constituted through repeated rituals. Through practices such as seclusion, ritual purification, adornment, and public celebration, the adolescent body is reconstituted as a socially acceptable feminine subject. The study demonstrates that menstrual initiation rituals operate as powerful ideological mechanisms through which gender is performatively produced, stabilised, and enforced. By reframing Ritu Kala Samskaram as a performative process rather than a neutral tradition, the paper highlights the ritual’s role in shaping gendered subjectivity and regulating womanhood within Indian cultural frameworks.
This paper proposes the Orwellian Utilitarian–Phonetic Framework (OUPF), a pronunciation pedagogy for Indian diaspora learners that uses George Orwell’s ethics of clarity—often captured in the ‘windowpane’ metaphor—as a bridge between literary study and intelligibility-oriented speech training. Drawing on Global Englishes/ELF scholarship, World Englishes, and research on intelligibility versus accentedness, the framework reframes ‘accent’ work as repertoire expansion rather than cultural erasure. Through close reading of selected Orwell texts (Animal Farm, 1984, “Politics and the English Language,” and The Road to Wigan Pier), OUPF maps Orwellian stylistic features (brevity, compression, rhythmic control, and sociolinguistic self-awareness) onto teachable pronunciation targets (segmental contrasts, vowel reduction, stress timing, and nuclear stress). The paper concludes with a utilitarian–phonetic matrix and classroom applications suitable for employability contexts (interviews, presentations, and multinational teamwork), and it outlines limitations and directions for empirical validation.
World Englishes Accent intelligibility English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) Phonological variation Language ideology Communicative competence
Hunger, Power, and Education in the Algorithmic Age
This article offers a critical pedagogical analysis of artificial intelligence in education by conceptualizing AI not as a neutral enhancement of learning, but as a reorganization of educational scarcity. Against dominant narratives that present AI as a solution to inequality, inefficiency, and lack of access, it argues that algorithmic educational systems often redistribute scarcity in less visible but more pervasive ways, producing informational abundance alongside ethical, political, and existential deprivation. Drawing on Freirean critical pedagogy, the article introduces hunger as a central analytical metaphor for examining education in the algorithmic age. Through a conceptual distinction between fasting, starvation, and death, it theorizes different forms of absence: fasting as a voluntary and pedagogically generative refusal of algorithmic immediacy; starvation as the imposed erosion of agency, voice, and context within datafied learning environments; and death as the foreclosure of education’s emancipatory horizon when prediction and optimization replace hope and transformation. The article develops a theoretical framework for understanding how AI reshapes power, subjectivity, and educational possibility, and outlines the contours of a critical pedagogy of AI grounded in dialogue, agency, and educational justice.
Artificial Intelligence, Hunger, Critical Pedagogy, Power, Education
This paper examines the representation of starvation and its impact on masculine identity in Knut Hamsun’s Hunger (1890) and Herta Müller’s The Hunger Angel (2009). Both novels depict extreme deprivation, yet they approach hunger through distinct mechanisms: Hamsun internalises hunger as a psychological and existential crisis, while Müller situates it within a politically enforced system of totalitarian control. By analysing how male protagonists navigate bodily weakness, pride, and survival, this study demonstrates that masculinity is neither stable nor universal; rather, it is a performative and contingent construct, shaped by social, cultural, and political pressures. Employing interdisciplinary frameworks, including gender performativity theory, trauma studies, and socio-political critiques of the body, the paper explores how hunger destabilises autonomy, erodes dignity, and reshapes male subjectivity. Comparative analysis reveals that while Hamsun emphasises self-directed struggle and the internal erosion of identity, Müller highlights externally imposed deprivation and systemic attempts to regulate both body and mind. Together, these texts illustrate adaptive strategies of endurance, negotiation, and identity reconstruction. The study contributes to literary scholarship by highlighting intersections of hunger, gender, and power, and suggests directions for further research on starvation narratives across cultures and genders.
The world suddenly unites when it comes to inflicting pain on women. One of the most common instances of the world uniting and inflicting pain upon women is seen in case of menstruation, a time when the body of a woman is already going through a lot of physical pain. Instead of providing women with minimal care the society comes forth with a list of absurd rules that the women are expected to follow. These rules end up making the physical menstrual pain a psychological one. The women have been made victims and an object of shame for centuries based on the bodily fluid that flows from within her every single month. Though the women earlier followed these absurd rules. The modern day women question these age old notions and demand scientific proof for the mentally burdening acts carried on the women every single month until menopause. This analysis aims to explore the various myths and manipulations that the Indian women have been expected to follow and also highlights how the perception of menstruation has finally evolved and matured in the current items.
Jungian Archetypes in the World of Italian Fashion
The research investigates how Jungian archetypes form the symbolic foundations which define major Italian fashion brands. The research examines how fashion brands including Gucci, Prada, Versace, Armani, Dolce & Gabbana, and Ferragamo develop emotionally powerful brand stories which transcend visual aspects. The brands achieve psychological impact through their adoption of universal archetypes including Ruler, Creator, Lover and Explorer which shape consumer perception while building brand loyalty and delivering values through mythic clarity. The paper positions Italian fashion within a symbolic tradition by viewing it as a cultural stage where archetypes function as storytelling scripts for personal expression and aspirational identity formation. The research demonstrates how archetypes maintain narrative coherence and emotional depth throughout different brand expressions which include runway shows and advertising as well as digital platforms and social media in a fragmented communication environment. Furthermore, this paper investigates the psycho-social aspects of brand identification to show how consumers adopt archetypal messages to shape their personal identities and social connections. The research demonstrates that archetypes serve dual purposes by creating brand uniqueness and symbolic depth and providing a storytelling framework for sustainable and ethical branding initiatives.
Jungian Archetypes, Brand Identity, Italian Fashion, Symbolic Branding, Cultural Narrative, Fashion Marketing
The negotiation between memory and silence is a pivotal point of discussion in any scholarly discourse concerning the history of Partition. However, as Urvashi Butalia argues, in ‘traditional’ sources of history, “there is an immediate clamouring of ‘voices’ that demand to be ‘heard’. These ‘voices’, according to her, speak about the histories of individuals who have been condemned to occupy a ‘peripheral’ space and have been glossed over by the larger canon of history. Thus, to successfully negotiate the politics of memory, it is perhaps essential to focus one’s vision on the lived experiences of the otherized. In a 2022 Stanford Report article on Tom Mullaney’s (Professor of History, Stanford University) approach in incorporating graphic novels to teach world history, Melissa De Witte writes that these narratives are “exceptionally good” at portraying “mundane moments” that present “powerful opportunities for inquiry,” holding a mirror to the truly horrifying experiences. This paper would thus attempt to examine how graphic narratives on Partition could serve as etchings that are well-suited to illuminate the conscious reader about the lived trauma of marginalised voices and their quest to resist the methodical epistemic violence that they have been subjected to by popular history.
Copyright (c) 2025 Erothanatos: A Peer-Reviewed Quarterly Journal on Literature https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
This article examines Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen and The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne through a feminist prism with reference to the characters of Elizabeth Bennet and Hester Prynne. Both of the women defy and surpass the social conventions in their respective patriarchal and puritanical cultures. This paper examines how the feminist theoretical positions (especially standpoint theory and embodiment) help Elizabeth oppose the marriage norms, and Hester transform shame into strength in ways that challenge the patriarchal structures that seek to define and marginalize them. The contrast between these two characters shows how the feminist thinking changes and finds its reflection in literature. Elizabeth and Hester are not only defiant of the conventional gender expectations but also demand their independence and re-negotiated identities which can be useful in examining the gendered power structures in their societies. This paper therefore examines how the two characters cross the boundaries which have been placed on them and exhibit feminist concepts of self-determination and self-powering.
Renegotiated identities. standpoint theory
Preferred Reading to Polysemic Reception
This research article applies the theory of encoding and decoding by Stuart Hall to analyze Chris Cleave's novel The Other Hand (also known as Little Bee), arguing that the novel encodes a liberal humanist ideology framing refugee suffering within a Western moral lens, thereby inviting reader empathy while reproducing power disparities between the savior and the victim. Cleave criticizes Western humanitarianism and institutional violence through the alternating first-person narratives of Little Bee, a Nigerian asylum seeker, and Sarah, a British lady. However, the novel's emotive appeals to normalize hierarchies of speech and visibility. Focusing on the encoding/decoding theory, which posits that text encodes dominant ideologies, but the readers decode them hegemonically, negotiated, or oppositional, the analysis examines encoding via textual elements like trauma depictions and cultural codes. The focus then switches to deciphering 15 recent Goodreads reviews (as of November 2025), which suggest a polysemic reception. Ultimately, the study highlights the ideological negotiation at the intersection of empathy, race, and gender, underscoring the limits of literary empathy in fostering political change amid global inequities. This contributes to cultural studies by illustrating how humanitarian literature circulates meanings in contested social contexts.
Encoding/Decoding, Humanitarianism, Empathy, Power Asymmetries, Refugee Representation.
Romantic lyrics, usually seen as signifiers of a culture that express emotional temperaments of the narrative while resonating with the collective receptivity of the listeners across linguistic and regional rupture, hold a pivotal position in the history of Bollywood cinema. Far from being mere melodic interludes, such lyrics have periodically served as mediums for speaking the unspoken that includes desire, longing, intimacy, separation, and reconciliation. In this context, the present paper seeks to explore how Gulshan Kumar Mehta, popularly known as GulshanBawra, an eminent lyricist of Bollywood movies, crafts lyrics that cut across any imitative romantic pronouncement. Offering a poetic tapestry that is both enterprising and contemplative, Bawra’s lyrics present an interesting interplay between playful imagery, romantic desire, and structural intricacy. The paper attempts to situate Bawra’s works within the ambit of Bollywood film music as an integrated form of art that creates a space that not only foregrounds storytelling but also character formation and emotional mediation. Bawra’s lyrics, as the paper would like to show, metamorphose songs into stratified narratives that transcend their given contexts and become a crucial point to understand the aesthetics of Bollywood film music.
One of the most powerful testaments to South Korea's soft power is its global proliferation of the 'Hallyu Wave'. Since the early 2000s, the South Korean ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism has consciously positioned popular culture as an exportable and valuable national asset, turning the country into a global content hub. This has been achieved by their food, beauty-products, webtoons, movies, dramas and music. The paper will examine this K-pop's performative stagecraft, visual aesthetics and construction of image and persona, through the androgynous and gender specific lens within K-pop, primarily citing the case study of the artist G-Dragon, one of the industry's most iconic and transgressive figures. By employing Entwistle's The Fashioned Body, the essay will interrogate how G-Dragon's artistic persona blurs the boundaries between masculinity-femininity, authenticity-artifice, self-spectacle. His androgynous aesthetics, manifested through fashion, music videos, performances, parody skits, function both as a site of resistance and commodification within the neoliberal machinery of Hallyu. Furthermore, drawing upon Jenkins' Participatory Culture, the article will explore how fandoms actively participate in reproducing, queering, reinterpreting G-Dragon's image, causing a co-authored discourse of fluid identity, disrupting the producer-consumer binary in art. In doing so, the G-Dragon persona emerges as a true 'Postmodern Celebrity.'
This article aims to examine the paradoxically programmed freedom through participatory narratives that solicit reader agency through metafiction, ergodic structures, and digital interactivity. This study analyzes reader-response theory, focusing on the democratization of textual meaning and how authors construct systems of simulated freedom or ‘choice’ while maintaining aesthetic and thematic control. Through a close-reading of selected modernist and postmodernist narratives, I argue that the aesthetics of participation posits that it is not freedom for the reader, but rather a productive tension between authorial design and readerly action. The greater the complexity of choices in a text, the clearer its constraints become. The most sophisticated participatory narratives in this regard will not so much hide as emphasize this paradox, transforming the border between constraint and agency into their central aesthetic object. This signifies a distinct reframing of aesthetic form in that postmodern and transmedia textual structures rely on reader engagement for their existence and meaning. Consequently, evaluation must switch from fixed textual design to constructed systems of possibility.
The global refugee crisis has become one of the most pressing issues of the twenty-first century, with millions of forcibly displaced individuals seeking refuge worldwide. South Asia, in particular, has a significant share in this crisis, hosting a substantial number of forced migrants. The Rohingya ethnic group from Myanmar has been a prominent case, experiencing immense persecution and displacement, leading to their mass exodus out of the country since the early 1970s. This research paper focuses on examining the Rohingya crisis through the lens of personal narratives, specifically analyzing the memoir, First, They Erased Our Name: A Rohingya Speaks by Habiburrahman and Sophie Ansel. By delving into the protagonist’s narrative, the study aims to challenge the dominant discourse presented by official sources and the media, which often overlooks the individual experiences of the displaced Rohingya. By exploring the protagonist’s quest for identity and individuality in the face of societal expectations and integration into Burmese society, the study delves into the complexities of the Rohingya predicament. The paper aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the crisis, emphasizing the need to amplify personal narratives to challenge dominant narratives perpetuated by the state, host nations, and media.
Rohingya, narratives, identity, memoir, refugees, forced migrants, dominant discourse
The current research aims to investigate Ijeoma Oluo’s activist discourse through the lens of Neurohumanities. The study focuses on how racial trauma operates as both a social condition and a neurological reality. Drawing on Catherine Malabou’s theory of neuroplasticity from The New Wounded, the research employs a textual and theoretical analysis of So You Want to Talk About Race and Be a Revolution to trace the neural and emotional imprints of systemic racism. The analysis discloses that Oluo’s portrayals of fatigue, hypervigilance and emotional labour mirror the neurological effects of toxic stress and chronic trauma, illustrating how racism alters fear and memory systems in the brain. At the same time, her emphasis on resilience, empathy, and collective action reflects the brain’s capacity for plasticity and repair. The findings demonstrate that Oluo’s works bridge the gap between activism and neuroscience, presenting racism not merely as a cultural or political phenomenon but as a neurobiological scar that shapes cognition and affect. This research contributes to Neurohumanities and trauma studies by positioning activism as a form of neural resilience, highlighting how Oluo’s writing redefines social justice as both psychological recovery and collective empowerment.
This article examines the conceptual connections between ChatGPT, the Borg from Star Trek, and Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious. Although these systems emerge from technology, fiction, and psychology, each represents a form of distributed intelligence that challenges traditional ideas of individuality. ChatGPT functions as a synthetic voice shaped by collective human language. The Borg illustrate a collective that sacrifices individuality for unity, while Jung’s collective unconscious describes inherited archetypes that guide human experience across generations. By bringing these perspectives together, the essay argues that artificial intelligence does not invent intelligence but reorganizes existing symbolic patterns that echo myth and imagination. Large language models act as channels of cultural memory, reflecting human archetypes through statistical processes. The Borg metaphor emphasizes both the promise and the danger of collective intelligence: connection can foster knowledge and coordination, yet it also threatens autonomy and selfhood. Modern AI contributes to a new digital mythology where tools speak as oracles and data takes on dreamlike meaning, revealing ancient patterns in computational form.
Distributed Intelligence Collective Unconscious Artificial Intelligence (AI) Archetypes Digital Mythos
The submission explores the parallels between ChatGPT, the Borg from Star Trek, and Jung’s collective unconscious, arguing that each represents a form of distributed intelligence that reshapes ideas of individuality and creates a new digital mythos.
Literary and Cultural Studies – because of the analysis of Star Trek (science fiction) as cultural text.
Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey and Helen Huntingdon
A closer reading of Anne Brontë’s two novels Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) reveals a clearly feminist sub-text, which displays a variety of Brontë’s concerns about how the home becomes a site of imprisonment for both her heroines, Agnes and Helen, rather than the safe, nurturing space upheld by Victorian society. This paper examines how Anne Brontë, writing in the nineteenth-century Victorian era, challenges the doctrine of the ‘separate spheres’ prevalent at that time, the period’s most ingenious mechanism for restraining insurgent women, by depicting the struggle by the passionate, intellectual, and strong-minded heroines of her two novels, Agnes Grey and Helen Huntingdon, to achieve economic autonomy and thereby script their own identities. This paper takes into account British feminist and historian Alice Clark’s investigation into the impact of industrialization on women’s work in reducing the choice of independent occupations for women and explores how both Agnes and Helen, confined at home, take the crucial decision to step out into the public arena, to earn a living for themselves and for their family, and as a result, they lead a happier, fulfilling life.
Copyright (c) 2024 Erothanatos: A Peer-Reviewed Quarterly Journal on Literature https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Reading Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice Candy Man through the Lens of Biopolitics and Sexuality
Bapsi Sidhwa re-examines the political upheaval where she highlights events after the Partition in the life of Lenny as witnessed by her as a child narrator to an adult narrator. The current paper studies Sidhwa’s work in the light of biopolitics, investigating through a Foucauldian lens. Kamala Bhasin and Ritu Menon will be critically analysed in studying women as ‘bodies symbolising conquered lands’ from the margins of politics. The paper reads the work as interrogating the biopolitical discourse in Sidhwa’s work as an overwhelming response to body politics. In doing so, the paper will analyse sexuality as an essential element through a psychoanalytical approach and how biopolitics situates the self in the process. The register of anxiety in the individual due to partition is more to the underprivileged person, and Sidhwa’s work is archival, which positions subjects accordingly. The study will investigate Lenny’s predicament and her neurotic experience with the repercussions of Partition and how she, as a child, holds on to her disability. The paper will further study Foucauldian discourse at length to form further arguments and investigate politics, sexuality and biopolitics.
Biopolitics, Foucault, Politics, Sexuality, Body, Disability
This paper critically examines the representation of women in contemporary media, with a focus on digital platforms, popular culture, and advertising. Drawing on feminist media theory, postcolonial feminism, and representation studies, it investigates how traditional gender stereotypes coexist with emergent narratives of empowerment. Through an intersectional lens, the study explores the impact of caste, class, religion, sexuality, and disability on visibility, interpretation, and audience reception. The experiences of Sydney Sweeney and Bhumi Pednekar facing online backlash, Sabrina through her album visuals, and Taylor Swift with her carefully shaped public image reveal how women negotiate autonomy, public judgment, and audience interpretation in today’s digital media landscape. The paper argues that while media offers unprecedented opportunities for women’s self-representation, it also perpetuates structural biases, gendered judgment, and symbolic erasure. The analysis further highlights the societal implications of these representations, influencing public perception, policy discourse, and women’s self-conception. By advocating critical engagement, digital literacy, and inclusive media practices, the study emphasizes the potential of media as a transformative tool for promoting equitable and nuanced portrayals of women across cultural contexts.
Psychological Necessity of Shen Teh—Shui Ta Anamorphosis
This paper examines the psychological necessity of Shen Teh’s adoption of the Shui Ta persona in Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan. Through Lacanian psychoanalysis, it explores that Shen Teh’s disguise of Shui Ta, her imaginary cousin, is more than a materialistic necessity to survive in the societal structures, which compel individuals to adopt capitalist morality. Shen Teh, a good-hearted prostitute, creates a male persona, Mr. Shui Ta to know the public opinion about herself, glorify herself making her disguised role a sharp contrast to her female/original representation before other at the same time fulfil her desires to dominate over others which patriarchal society does not permit a female individual, and most importantly, fulfil her desire to be the male counterpart, thus completing the wholeness of her psychological identity.