Disentwining the Other in the Poems of Alok Vaid Menon

  • Gopika Jayachandran

Abstract

The term the other has been employed in the critical discourse for centuries and it absorbs and manipulates the course of different critical realm in differing ways with its constantly evolving semantic range. The other or the otherness names the quality or state of existence of being other or different from established norms and social groups; the distinction that one makes between ones self and others, particularly in terms of sexual, ethnic and relational senses of difference (Wolfreys et al. 74). Though the term does not directly pose a parochial attitude, the title,  the other, often refers to the lesser privileged and the marginalised of a society. In the feminist scenario, the other indicates the position always occupied by woman within patriarchal culture which privileges masculinity. The subjugated woman denied of physical and mental space is seen as the other to retain the centrality of male domination. Similarly, the discourse of orientalism limns how the native, the non white, has given the label of the other by the coloniser. The colonised who is robbed of his land, language and natural resources is told to have the identity of colonial subject by justifying the colonisers civilising mission to educate the natives. Hence, the production of the knowledge of the other, in cultural representations and through ideologies, serves the establishment of hierarchies of domination. Many factors aid the maintenance of this hierarchy. Power is one among them which has an invincible part in the formation of the definition of the other as it is one of the three axes constitutive of subjectification according to Foucault (Taylor 63).

Published
2019-11-15
Section
Articles