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Avishek Parui

Bio: Avishek Parui is an academic researcher from Indian Institute of Technology Madras. The author has contributed to research in topics: The Imaginary & Eugenics. The author has an hindex of 4, co-authored 8 publications receiving 24 citations. Previous affiliations of Avishek Parui include Durham University & Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati.

Papers
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This essay examines Kishwar Desai’s Origins of Love in order to foreground how the novel is complexly reflective of the biomedical technologies strategically deployed by medical practitioners and prospective parents for the purpose of reinforcing caste-based bionormative notion of family that artificial reproductive technology is assumed to have problematised.
Abstract: This essay examines Kishwar Desai’s Origins of Love (2012) in order to foreground how the novel is complexly reflective of the biomedical technologies strategically deployed by medical practitioners and prospective parents for the purpose of reinforcing caste-based bionormative notion of family that artificial reproductive technology is assumed to have problematised. The essay also demonstrates how the use of bioenhancement facilities has led to the revival of neoliberal eugenics enmeshed with state-led biopolitics. The essay draws on the concept of renaturalisation discussed by Tamar Sharon in order to examine how the schizophrenic or deterritorialising potential of reproductive technology is reconfigured and domesticated by the medicolegal practitioners in order to reterritorialise the normative structures of kinship and family formation within a capitalist consumerist culture.

9 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Oh, Lovely Parrot (2004) is a compilation of 43 typical Kerala "parrot songs" translated from Malayalam into English by Scaria Zacharia and Barbara C. Johnson as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The Jews living in the state of Kerala enact their diasporic identities through a unique narrative network including songs, stories, and memoirs. Drawing on memory studies and affect theory, this article aims to examine selected Jewish folk songs as an example of entanglement of memory and culture, nostalgia and narrative. We study Oh, Lovely Parrot (2004), which is a compilation of 43 typical Kerala “parrot songs” – devotional hymns and songs for special occasions – translated from Malayalam into English by Scaria Zacharia and Barbara C. Johnson. Performances of these songs constitute cultural as well as affective phenomena that bring together Jewish identities, especially female rituals, in a collective effort to preserve their ethnic memory and its associated social identity. The music unique to this community illustrates the ancestry and tradition of the Kerala Jews which held them together even after ‘aliyah’ (a Hebrew word referring to the migration to the nation state of Israel post-1948). Using selected songs from the book, the article aims to examine the community's cultural identity markers related to experiential and discursive diasporic memory. It also draws on the memoir Ruby of Cochin: An Indian Jewish Woman Remembers (2001) by Ruby Daniel and Barbara C. Johnson to analyse the affective quality of songs which unites the community in collective imagination and in complex nostalgia narratives.

6 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as a piece of literature that captures an epistemic transition in biomedical practices from healing a diseased body to controlling and engineering a human body, anticipating the modern medical practices of our bioengineered era.
Abstract: Abstract:This essay examines Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a piece of literature that captures an epistemic transition in biomedical practices from healing a diseased body to controlling and engineering a human body, anticipating the modern medical practices of our bioengineered era. The process of artificially engineering a bioscientific creature by gathering materials from anonymous sources, and Victor Frankenstein’s ability to pre-select the physical features of the Creature, anticipate the baby-making procedures practiced in the domain of artificial reproductive technology (ART). This essay aims to foreground how the novel offers a fictional engagement with bioethical crises triggered by ART developments that have problematized our bionormative notion of the family as a heterosexual unit.

6 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss how the received heart triggers anxiety and the narrative crisis in the heart recipient who develops an ambiguous identity, and discuss the change of heart in Picoult's book.
Abstract: This paper discusses Jodi Picoult’s Change of Heart: A Novel in order to foreground how the received heart triggers anxiety and the narrative crisis in the heart recipient who develops an ambiguous...

4 citations

Book ChapterDOI
01 Jan 2021
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine the novella Requiem for the Living (2013) by Johny Miranda as a text that narrates the everyday life and local history of the Paranki community from an insider's point of view.
Abstract: The Portuguese creole community in Kochi, Kerala, also known as Parankis, is one of the lesser known groups of Anglo-Indians of Portuguese descent whose origins may be traced to the sixteenth-century colonial history. Using the interpretative framework of Memory Studies, this chapter closely examines the novella Requiem for the Living (2013) by Johny Miranda as a text that narrates the everyday life and local history of the Paranki community from an insider’s point of view. Introducing the idea of ‘identity-consumption’ as key to the remembered events from personal and collective memory, the authors demonstrate how this intergenerational tale of mixed-race identity and assimilation calls for a more nuanced and diverse understanding of Anglo-Indianness as well as a re-mapping of scholarship on Anglo-Indian studies.

3 citations


Cited by
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Journal ArticleDOI
08 Sep 1978-Science

5,182 citations

01 Jan 2002
TL;DR: The dramatic advances in DNA technology over the last few years are the stuff of science fiction as mentioned in this paper and it is now not only possible to clone human beings but also possible to create'superhumans' by mixing human genes with those of other animals for extra strength or longevity.
Abstract: The dramatic advances in DNA technology over the last few years are the stuff of science fiction. It is now not only possible to clone human beings it is happening. For the first time since the creation of the earth four billion years ago, or the emergence of mankind 10 million years ago, people will be able to choose their children's' sex, height, colour, personality traits and intelligence. It will even be possible to create 'superhumans' by mixing human genes with those of other animals for extra strength or longevity. But is this desirable? What are the moral and political consequences? Will it mean anything to talk about 'human nature' any more? Is this the end of human beings? Post Human Society is a passionate analysis of the greatest political and moral problem ever to face the human race.

945 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
06 Mar 1987-JAMA
TL;DR: Robert Jay Lifton, a renowned psychiatrist and author, spent a decade interviewing Nazi doctors and concentration camp survivors to piece together the horrifying process by which German physicians aided (for the most part willingly) in the destruction of 6 million innocent men, women, and children.
Abstract: If a lexicon were compiled of the greatest inhumanities man has visited on his fellows, the Holocaust would surely be the preeminent subject. The Nazi "final solution," promulgated in January 1942 at the Wansee Conference, was dedicated to the permanent eradication of Judaism. It was not a conceptual reshuffling of religious identity by conversion but rather a physical destruction. This genocidal purging was deemed a necessary program to rid the world, and more specifically the Aryan people, of the genetic reservoir of polluting Jewish genes.How this monstrous endeavor could be conceived and accomplished is the subject of Robert Jay Lifton's The Nazi Doctors. Dr Lifton, a renowned psychiatrist and author, spent a decade interviewing Nazi doctors and concentration camp survivors to piece together the horrifying process by which German physicians aided (for the most part willingly) in the destruction of 6 million innocent men, women, and children. Dr Lifton

373 citations