We cannot escape categorisation. Not only because it gives agency but also because it is an important component of cognition. In turn, the defining traits of an object/ concept tend to become associated with its essence. However, essentialization becomes difficult as the concepts grow more complex and abstract. For example, it's way more challenging to define the essence of literature, Indian or Korean as compared to a bottle or a horse.

But then, every experience, every voice, every reader and every reading comes from/ with a unique position and the act of categorisation seems to hinder this sense of uniqueness and plurality. However, what we can change is how we conceive of categories. This paper proposes that what we need is a shift in paradigm, a shift in our way of thought and life. A shift from the binary mode of thought-perception to a plural mode of thought-perception. It is impossible to appreciate multiplicity and plurality of experience as long as the Aristotelian binary remains our functional mode of (intellectual) thought and perception. In a non binary mode of thoughts, categories would still exist, but they would have softer boundaries and it would be easier for things to spill outside of those boundaries (as they already do). In this way, it might become easier for us to accept that things just “are”, they do not have to specifically “be something” or “not be something”.

This paper means to justify its theoretical position with a case study of the concept “India” through the poets’ eyes in order to make explicit the multitudes that the idea/ category of India contains. Poets across time and space have conceived differently of India/ Bharata/ Hind based on what they received from their structure of feeling. Through this case, the paper aims to bring attention to the fact that so many categories are living categories. They are ever changing and ever evolving. They contain multitudes and therefore, have multiple combinations of essences. And this multiplicity can be best understood only through a framework that allows for diversity not only “among perceptions” but diversity/plurality as the default ethic “within a perception”.

The North-east region of India, made up of eight states, despite how culturally diverse it is, has often been subject to a reductionist gaze by means of publication, syllabi and new media representation. The colonial past, conversion to Christianity and the violence in the region that marks both pre and post-independent India is very often one of the two binaries in which the people are represented in literature and in academic syllabi often at the cost of their contemporary realities. This paper critically examines the persistence of the "Indic gaze" in the representation of these states within English literature syllabi over the last decade and the politics of publication with specific focus on Mizoram and Nagaland in this era of print capitalism.

Through a diachronic study of academic syllabi, this research explores whether the portrayal of these states and their people prioritise their current social and everyday culture. The question of whether the ordinary part of culture is an affordance or whether the extraordinary - that which exoticises, historicises and binarises is interrogated. The analysis highlights how north-eastern states are frequently reduced into the binary as either exotic idylls of the present or conflict-ridden regions of the past, from old media to new media.

The study further addresses the disparity between the lived experiences of the people and their representation in literature and academic scholarship, raising critical concerns that problematise the formation of literary canons of the region. By revisiting and challenging entrenched perspectives, this paper advocates for a more comprehensive approach to integrating contemporary narratives from the north-eastern states into academic curricula.

This paper offers readings of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss as entry points into the formation of a critique of the category called ‘postcolonial’.

It traces some of the definitions and understandings of what is known as ‘colonial’, ‘anti-colonial’, and ‘decolonial’ in an effort to understand what is ‘postcolonial’. To this end, this paper will include some interpretations of the works of Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Yogita Goyal, Leela Gandhi, Anne McClintock, Homi Bhaba, and Gayatri Spivak.

Drawing from structuralists and post-structuralists, this paper investigates if there is a ‘centre’ to the concept-structure known as ‘postcolonial’ and asks if the centre holds. Is there a referent to this word or is it a metaphor for something else?

Historically, in the field of literary studies, there has always been the emergence of new categorisations (in our case, ‘postcolonial literature’) – for the better or for worse. There have also been efforts to reconcile these categories with other categories and formations. This paper is an attempt to offer instead not another structure of concepts, but a framework of concepts rooted in a politics of relationality.

A dialogic encounter with literature “expands us, like water expands a river” (Falke 2017). Categorization, as an individuating, algorithmizing process of imposing parameters, is challenged by an aesthetic of transgression predicated upon a desire for plurality. This paper explores how literary encounters with transgressive, queer desires necessitate the formation of a dialogic aesthetics. Centring ‘desire’ rather than ‘identity’ as the point of transgression, I characterize the ‘reaching out’ of categories as integral to the reading and writing of queer desire in contemporary Indian fiction. Taking from Mikhail Bakhtin’s explorations of both dialogics and aesthetics, I suggest that the reading and writing of queer desire as the creation of a contingent, heteroglossic wholeness that challenges the hegemony of pure categories. Positing dialogue as the event of an encounter between constructed “borders”, of the self, the identity, and the text itself, I suggest that explorations of queer desire within the novel involve the desire to transgress boundaries of the self, identity and the text. To this end, I undertake a reading of Ruth Vanita’s Memory of Light (2020), as well as Aalohari Aanandham (2013) by Sarah Joseph. In the former, I demonstrate transgressive potentials expressed in Vanita’s generic border-crossings between the novel, historiography, and the ghazal. In the latter, I undertake queer reading as transgressive dialogue, examining how queer desire “reorients” the centre/periphery binary in its refusal to “centre” singular narrative voices. The presence and force of queer desire further destabilizes and oversteps the category of “women’s writing” by complicating given notions of both ‘woman’ and ‘writing’. It interrogates the aforementioned ‘categories’ of ‘contemporary’, ‘Indian,’ and ‘the novel’, by overstepping categories of identity, sexuality and textuality. In staging textual encounters as the site of transgressive desires and the desire to transgress, I place ‘surplus’ as the mode by which queerness may be comprehended textually. Whereas the constructions of categories display a pervasiveness of centre and margins, I suggest that the reading and writing of queerness and surplus understands contingent excesses from categorization as the rule, rather than the exception to textual ‘understanding’. Multiplicity is configured as the precondition of narration rather than its escapable ‘other.’ As such, this paper does not attempt a reading of mimetic ‘representation’. Both the novels investigated in this paper proposes queer readings and writings as an engagement with a multiplicity of assigned and unassigned meanings, as mode and method, rather than ‘queerness’ as “category.” Therefore, I locate queerness as an aesthetic method of surplus where the texts affiliate with each other and create such a dialogue in complementary ways.

Carson McCullers is one of the most important southern American writers in the 20th century. In the sixty years since her passing, numerous outstanding works have emerged. Jen Shapland's “My Autobiography of Carson McCullers” delves into McCullers' hitherto unacknowledged queer identity from the perspective of biographical research, and brings a new image-shaping to the biographical research on Carson McCullers, revealing the identity dilemma faced by queer women in mid-20th-century America.

Jen Shapland attempts to answer these questions: If a person did not personally admit to being queer during their lifetime, how should we interpret them today? If there are no material records left behind, how can we prove the existence of same-sex romantic feelings?

Firstly, "My Autobiography of Carson McCullers" exhibits experimental qualities with a postmodernist structure. Its chapter layout disrupts traditional linear logic and adopts a fragmented and discontinuous arrangement, deconstructing the authority of the subject in traditional biographical narratives. Jen Shapland 's writing approach was inspired by the autobiographical literary criticism. With its unique genre form, it breaks away from the detached and coherent textual structure traditionally associated with "male" rhetoric, integrating narrative into discourse and intertwining objective research with subjective lyricism.

Meanwhile, Shapland decodes Carson McCullers' intimate relationships through a close reading of the audio recordings and private letters, and dissects the women who were obscured in other biographies.Jenn Shapland also delves deep into the symbolic connotations of the silent clothing. Clothing can reveal how we perceive ourselves. For Carson, Clothing externalizes inner emotions, and the diverse clothing provides with a means to express her fluid identity.