University Library, University of North Bengal

FROM THE EDITORS

The Department of English, University of North Bengal, is as old as the University itself. Established in 1962, the Department has brought out magazines and bulletins from time to time to showcase the works of its faculty, students and scholars. It has long felt the need for a peer-reviewed journal so as to be able to contribute substantially to global scholarship. Born of this resolve, Negotiations: An International Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies is devoted to literary and cultural studies international in scope and interdisciplinary in method. Negotiations encourages scholarly submissions on diverse fields of literature, theatre, performance art, cultural history, politics, film, and media. The journal will be published annually. Etymologically, “negotiation” (Latin negotiationem) means “business” with a significant accent on “no-leisure “ or “lack of leisure” and “bargain.” “Negotiation” in lived life means to bargain for an advantage, individual or collective, and also a loss born of certain modes of reification and “unhinging” which are clearly enriching. It aims more at an agonism whose ferment should touch all margins and centres, and be beneficial to all interactive communities. The negotiation the journal envisages looks to a collective, continuous engagement, and exchange (a non-aggressive argumentation) where there may not be a consensus, or the resolution of differences as such, but which ensures “pleasure” in the unstoppable pursuit of interlocking goals. Negotiations, therefore, sponsors “with-against” fashions of reading, envisages “punctuations” in thoughts and processes where if anything, as Derrida has noted, is “passed over in silence it is I.” The journal has been visualized as a forum for all communities cutting across nations, disciplines and institutions. The goal is to have a dialogue between seemingly incompatible bodies of knowledge and systems of practice and explore the points of intersection that demonstrate a mutual “profit” in an endless epistemic cross-communication. Negotiations aims to carve out more space for an inseparable circulation of literary and nonliterary “texts,” create a network of “competing [literary-cultural] representations” (Greenblatt) and indulges in “the impossibility of […] settling in a position” (Derrida). The “no leisure” or “un-leisure” in such intermittent “shuttling” between “positions” and “stations” will surely not be “fatiguing,” though; rather, as Jean-Luc Nancy observes, “there must be a dwelling [demeure]: sojourn, lateness, remaining, repose, and even reserve, delay.” This negotiation is expected to arrive at new destinations of newer dimensions, continually reinventing and expanding the areas of exchange and engagement. It combines vacationing with work, ushering a “play” in both; it is about vacationing out of a thought and paradigm into another.Negotiations, thus, accommodates both leisure and un-leisure, marching through knots and paces with deliberation, initiation, communion, fragmentation, distraction and felicitation. Negotiations, in its inaugurality, activism and unfoldment, takes a close call on our institutional positions and positionalities and makes us rethink the space we choose to speak from – a democratic anarchism, productive, proliferating and protean. The inaugural issue, which consists of solicited articles by eminent scholars from across the world, reflects, in a most fitting manner, the spirit of the journal. The essays published here cover a wide range of topics and issues, collapsing traditional borders and boundaries in terms of discipline, genre, and methodology: public pedagogy and the politics of humiliation; an ethics of literature that sees art as more than a mere description of possible lives; “influence” in terms of a transatlantic poetics; the linguistic dilemma that plays an important role in decolonization; and the construction of the “middle-worlder” subjectivity in transnational films. The current issue of the journal serves as a meeting ground for an enormous and scintillating array of ideas in multiple literary-cultural contexts. We take this opportunity to put on record our sincerest thankfulness to the contributors and hope that the standard they have set for the journal will be maintained in the days to come. Our special thanks are also due to our department colleagues and to the University of North Bengal authorities for all kinds of support to the project. Happy reading!

Ashis Sengupta
Ranjan Ghosh
Department of English
University of North Bengal
March 2011