פרופ' איילת בן ישי :
The situation in India today, the rise of authoritarian regimes in the world, the recent pandemic, and our local constitutional crisis all demand that we take a critical view of emergency facts and fictions to rethink their discursive implications for our times. Drawing on my research on the literature of the 1975-77 Emergency in India, my talk develops a three-fold argument. First, I show that the literary discourse of the Emergency, like its events, is structured on the tension between crisis and continuity, between the unprecedented and ongoing. I then argue that in addressing this tension, the authors of Emergency fiction take seriously the genres in which they write and use them to mobilize literary conventions as political interventions, to reach back in time and across cultures and languages, invoking past iterations of these genres and histories and anticipating those to come. I finally consider the historical-political event of the Emergency in terms of genre, offering a novel and productive way to analyze the specific historical event as well as the more general phenomenon of states of emergency and the cultures that they draw on and generate.