Literature, Cultural Politics and Counter-Readings: Hamlet as the Prince of Deconstruction

Description

This book is an attempt at deconstructive counter-reading or at what Jonathan Dollimore called “creative vandalism” (2018) of existing cultural or literary texts. Deconstruction is a much maligned or a much misunderstood word and for many, it usually bears a pejorative ring. While most would flaunt their familiarity with some of its philosophic jargons, for the majority, it is an area to be dismissed as intellectual obscurity or abstruse ‘high theory’. In fact there is a serious dearth of Derrida scholarship because of our collective aversion to Derrida that emanates from our lack of familiarity or engagement with deconstruction theory or with the philosophy of deconstruction.Norm-deviant reading strategies of deconstruction offer fresh insights and rebellious interpretative possibilities.

Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha is Professor in the Department of English, Kazi Nazrul University, India. He was a Fulbright Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellow 2018-19 in the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He has also been a Fellow in the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry, New School for Social Research, New York in 2017. His current areas of research focus on postcolonial public sphere, nationalism and xenophobia, and new turns in critical theory. His co-edited volumes include Violence in South Asia: Contemporary Perspectives (Routledge, 2019). He has contributed in journals such as International Journal of Zizek Studies, Parallax, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Contemporary South Asia, South Asia Research, History and Sociology of South Asia, Journal of Social Movement Studies, Economic and Political Weekly, Transnational Literature, etc. He co-edits Kairos, A Journal of Critical Symposium and is one of the founding members of the Postcolonial Studies Association of the Global South (PSAGS).