States of the Body Produced by Love
- Submitting institution
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Queen Mary University of London
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 1471
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Ignota Books
- ISBN
- 9781999675943
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- November
- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- States of the Body Produced by Love is a collection of poetry, essays, and images which draws on experimental feminist poetics to explore relationships between gender, language, and power. Ramayya researched comparative linguistics and mythology (from Max Müller to M L West to Julia Kristeva) to conduct her own speculative lexicographical poetics by means of Monier-Williams’s Sanskrit-English dictionary. Her project engaged in expanded translation, from Sanskrit to English, from Tantric-Hindu rituals to avant-garde poetics, from goddess worship to feminist mythmaking, from transcendental consciousness to abject abused embodiment, from text to image to sound.
Opening with the discovery of the Indo-European language family in the 18th century and charting multiple journeys across British-Indian history, culture, and diasporic experience, Ramayya sets the idealism of liberal multiculturalism against the brutalities of racist and casteist nationalism. She highlights the possibilities and limitations of correspondence to argue that too-simple notions of translatability in terms of alikeness, sympathy, and origin are founded on and continually reproduce violence. Beauty is critical to this exploration, from the poetic pleasures of imagery and metaphor to the musicality of mantras, song, and non-verbal sounds; syntactical brokenness, jazzy breaks, social discord, and rude noises imbue the book with new approaches to reading and listening, and alternative understandings of solidarity and love.
The book was reviewed in newspapers and literary journals including The Guardian, The New Statesman, The White Review, and Poetry London. Ramayya has read at bookshops, universities, and arts venues across the UK, Berlin, the Netherlands, and the US, including the Barbican, Tate Modern, and Dundee Contemporary Arts; and festivals including Poetry International, Think Human, and Block Universe.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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