Paromita Patranobish

@mccblr.edu.in

Assistant Professor Department of English
Mount Carmel College Bangalore

Paromita Patranobish


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https://researchid.co/paromitapat

RESEARCH, TEACHING, or OTHER INTERESTS

Literature and Literary Theory, Visual Arts and Performing Arts, Cultural Studies, Sociology and Political Science
7

Scopus Publications

8

Scholar Citations

1

Scholar h-index

Scopus Publications

  • The Ruined Archives of W. G. Sebald
    Paromita Patranobish
    Anglia, 2025
    This article examines the relationship between debris and memory in W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (2001; originally published in 1995 as Die Ringe des Saturn) to argue that mnemonic practices, including acts of autobiographical anamnesis, are shaped by material forms of decay and their textual presence. A corporeal entanglement with debris – either through modes of traveling in and a corresponding literary ethnography of damaged topographies – generates an excremental poetics in which claims to epistemic coherence and univocity are undermined by the twinned assertion of the fragmentary metaphysics of detritus, on the one hand, and the contingent structure of private retrospection and public memorialization, on the other. Material indices of destruction constitute an extensive reliquary in the text. They serve as a primary trope through which multiple sites of violence in their varied but interrelated geological, climatic, cultural, and geopolitical registers are brought into overlapping intertextual and intermedial encounters. Memory, especially in its close conjunction with place, becomes a tool of narrative cartography that deviates (from) the path of linear history and brings other worlds and times into potential cosmopolitical exchanges. This article analyzes Sebald’s articulation of such memorial cosmopolitics through his charting of an extinction imaginary. By focusing on the specific configurations of memory afforded by ruination, and the engendering of historical records through spectral and speculative modalities of absence, amnesia, illness, and disability, I argue that The Rings of Saturn destabilizes both the sanitized notion of bounded personhood as the epistemic center of historical knowledge, as well as the anthropocentric lens through which narrative production is predominantly construed. Correspondingly, focusing on the status of ruination as material phenomena, and epistemological and narrative resource, I read Sebald’s textual politics of ruins as a productive conceptual intervention into the terrain of private and public memory in the context of the Anthropocene’s multiple entanglements with trajectories of extraction, depletion, and extinction.1
  • Technologies of becoming-imperceptible in Ritwik Ghatak’s Ajantrik (1958)
    Paromita Patranobish
    South Asia Journal of South Asia Studies, 2025
    This article explores Ritwik Ghatak’s conception of the automobile in the Bengali New Wave film Ajantrik (Pathetic Fallacy, 1958) as providing an alternative framework within which to approach the question of technology and its implications for the post-Independence nation-state. The cinematic automobile elaborates a critical optic that reconfigures the machine, including the audio-visual apparatus of cinematic capture itself. In delineating a ramshackle car’s errant automobility, Ajantrik articulates a new politics of identity in relation to historical questions of difference, marginality, indigenous sovereignty and emergent subjectivity. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s dromological philosophy and concepts of nomadology, war machine, deterritorialisation and becomings-molecular, I examine Ghatak’s engagement with the contested trope of land and its reoccupation through the deployment of gesturo-haptic and kinaesthetic techniques. I link Ghatak’s documentary features and ethnographic writing on the Oraons, an ethnolinguistic indigenous community of eastern India, with his exploration of land, technology and subjectivity in Ajantrik.
  • Discard Ecologies and the ‘Hyposubject’ in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007)
    Paromita Patranobish
    Critique Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 2025
    This article posits the concept of excremental toxicity as a critical lens with which to explore the resistive and subversive ways in which pollution that is dumped onto precarious ecologies is reimagined in postcolonial writing beyond the norms of silencing that govern its distribution and police its visibility. Focusing on waste in Indra Sinha's Animal's People, I analyze the novel's construction of alternative decolonial and anti-capitalist configurations, affordances, and imaginaries of toxicity – both as substance caught in a nexus of racialized, neocolonial and settler-colonial, and consumer capitalist structures, as well as a modality of materialization that arbitrates on what appears in public perception as a legitimate field of mattering and what is displaced to the unseeable margins. These alternative configurations tackle toxicity's invisibilization through strategies of externalization that seek to materialize toxic politics in various eco-somatic ways by bringing corporeality, particularly disabled, impaired, pathological corporealities to the forefront of cultural inquiry. Methodologically situating itself at the intersection of medical humanities, waste, and toxicity studies and drawing on Morton and Boyer's formulation of the "hyposubject," this article examines literary configurations of medico-juridical pathologies in the context of ecological devastation and contemporary neoliberal resurgences of racial imaginaries and extractivist practices.
  • Commoning and Commemoration in Vesper
    Economic and Political Weekly, 2024
  • Speaking Crows and Alien Fish: Nonhuman Cosmopolitanisms in Satyajit Ray's Speculative Fiction
    Paromita Patranobish
    Science Fiction Studies, 2024
    I approach Satyajit Ray's sf stories as postcolonial interventions into Western Enlightenment discourses of scientific rationality. I trace the trajectory of these concerns as they are reflected in narratives centered around nonhuman animals, published in various Bengali juvenile magazines between 1961 and 1992. Ray's stories offer a critical site for interrogating, revising, and expanding the possibilities of a Kantian moral philosophy of cosmopolitanism for post-independence contexts of democratic governance, industrialization, and urbanization. Ray's sf enables readers to imagine a posthuman cosmopolitics (to use Isabelle Stengers's concept) as an alternative to colonial cartographies of personhood and the centrifugal impulse of postcolonial nation formation. My article addresses the significant but underexplored role played by Ray's ecological thinking and care for the nonhuman animal in his postcolonial politics. Ray's sf harnesses the possibilities of Bengali speculative fiction, including Kalpavigyan's model of a fluid science to posit a speculative vision of a future-oriented cosmopolitics where the possibility for non-reciprocal and untranslatable proximities becomes a conceptual foundation for thinking about alterity.
  • “I Am Also a We”*: Pathic Communities and the Globalization of Affect in the Wachowskis’ Sense8
    Paromita Patranobish
    Globalization and Planetary Ethics New Terrains of Consciousness, 2023
    This chapter attempts to bring into a productive conversation a philosophical conception of the flesh and the neoliberal post-industrial mediated formulation of the technological virtual. Using the phenomenological concept of the flesh as a structuring principle, Paromita Patranobish engages with the production of speculative bodies in Netflix’s in-house series Sense8. Patranobish examines how the body is posited as a site of questioning and destabilizing neoliberalism’s atrophying of subjectivity, and corporeality's emergence as a locus of materializing alternative possibilities for thinking about community, labour including artistic and creative labour, modes of inhabiting time and space, new forms of sensory and cognitive recalibration, and the shape of insurgent social solidarities. Patranobish’s analysis interrogates the limits of the model of corporeally and affectively realized sociality, shared consciousness, and radical empathy elaborated in the show, when juxtaposed in relation to a “grammar of transnationalism” employed by Netflix's in-house productions, and which in turn “can be translated and integrated into existing cultural conditions of a national media system” (Jenner 2018).
  • Travelling cultures: religion, travel, and subjectivity in V.S. Naipaul’s Among the Believers and William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives
    Paromita Patranobish
    Studies in Travel Writing, 2019
    This article examines V.S. Naipaul's Among the Believers (1981) and William Dalrymple's Nine Lives (2009) as texts that interrogate the metropolitan subjectivity of the traveller who arrives at sacred sites from a discursive grounding in secular modernity and whose rationalist, post-Enlightenment notion of travel as observation, empirical experience and knowledge, embedded in a conception of physical space as a tangible, homogeneous entity, enters into an interpretive struggle with travel as associated with a set of metaphysical ideas and identity practices which formulate the itinerary act as austerity, penance, subversion, transformation and social protest. Using Emmanuel Levinas's idea of the ethical encounter, Judith Butler's concept of primary vulnerability, and Michael Taussig's idea of mimesis, this essay explores how travel in conjunction with non-secular epistemes and praxes reconfigures culture, agency, selfhood, and power outside the rubric of modernity and liberal individualism.

RECENT SCHOLAR PUBLICATIONS

  • Articulating Visual Infrastructures of COVID-19 in the Global South through Pandemic Photography
    P Patranobish
    ECOCENE CAPPADOCIA JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES 16 (2: The COVID-19 … , 2025
    2025.0
  • Technologies of Becoming-Imperceptible in Ritwik Ghatak’s Ajantrik (1958)
    P Patranobish
    South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 48 (No. 5) , 2025
    2025.0
  • The Ruined Archives of W.G. Sebald
    P Patranobish
    Anglia 143 (2) , 2025
    2025.0
  • Discard Ecologies and the ‘Hyposubject’ in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007)
    P Patranobish
    Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 66 (3), 524-540 , 2025
    2025.0
    Citations: 1
  • Commoning and Commemoration in Vesper
    P Patranobish
    Economic and Political Weekly 59 (42) , 2024
    2024.0
  • Speaking Crows and Alien Fish: Nonhuman Cosmopolitanisms in Satyajit Ray’s Speculative Fiction
    P Patranobish
    Science Fiction Studies 51 (Part 2), 258-279 , 2024
    2024.0
    Citations: 1
  • Book Review of" Mourning in the Anthropocene: Ecological Grief and Earthly Coexistence"
    P Patranobish
    Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 15 (1), 263-266 , 2024
    2024.0
  • Radiant Ecologies: The Biopolitics of Animal Photography in Exclusion Zones
    P Patranobish
    Global Journal of Animal Law 12 (1), p. 116-135 , 2024
    2024.0
    Citations: 1
  • “I Am Also a We”*: Pathic Communities and the Globalization of Affect in the Wachowskis' Sense8
    P Patranobish
    Globalization and Planetary Ethics, 154-169 , 2023
    2023.0
    Citations: 1
  • Discard as Extractive Zone in Chen Qiufan’s Waste Tide
    P Patranobish
    SFRA Review 53 (3) , 2023
    2023.0
    Citations: 1
  • Bloom, Lisa E.,(2022) Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics: Artists Reimagine the Arctic and Antarctic.
    P Patranobish
    Journal of Ecohumanism 2 (2), 197-204 , 2023
    2023.0
  • A Short History of Dust
    P Patranobish
    Hakara Bilingual 13 (1) , 2021
    2021.0
  • Travelling cultures: religion, travel, and subjectivity in V.S. Naipaul’s Among the Believers and William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives
    P Patranobish
    Studies in Travel Writing 23 (1), 31-52 , 2019
    2019.0
    Citations: 3
  • Writing the woman language and the body in virginia woolf
    P Patranobish
    New Delhi , 0

MOST CITED SCHOLAR PUBLICATIONS

  • Travelling cultures: religion, travel, and subjectivity in V.S. Naipaul’s Among the Believers and William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives
    P Patranobish
    Studies in Travel Writing 23 (1), 31-52 , 2019
    2019.0
    Citations: 3
  • Discard Ecologies and the ‘Hyposubject’ in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007)
    P Patranobish
    Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 66 (3), 524-540 , 2025
    2025.0
    Citations: 1
  • Speaking Crows and Alien Fish: Nonhuman Cosmopolitanisms in Satyajit Ray’s Speculative Fiction
    P Patranobish
    Science Fiction Studies 51 (Part 2), 258-279 , 2024
    2024.0
    Citations: 1
  • Radiant Ecologies: The Biopolitics of Animal Photography in Exclusion Zones
    P Patranobish
    Global Journal of Animal Law 12 (1), p. 116-135 , 2024
    2024.0
    Citations: 1
  • “I Am Also a We”*: Pathic Communities and the Globalization of Affect in the Wachowskis' Sense8
    P Patranobish
    Globalization and Planetary Ethics, 154-169 , 2023
    2023.0
    Citations: 1
  • Discard as Extractive Zone in Chen Qiufan’s Waste Tide
    P Patranobish
    SFRA Review 53 (3) , 2023
    2023.0
    Citations: 1
  • Articulating Visual Infrastructures of COVID-19 in the Global South through Pandemic Photography
    P Patranobish
    ECOCENE CAPPADOCIA JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES 16 (2: The COVID-19 … , 2025
    2025.0
  • Technologies of Becoming-Imperceptible in Ritwik Ghatak’s Ajantrik (1958)
    P Patranobish
    South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 48 (No. 5) , 2025
    2025.0
  • The Ruined Archives of W.G. Sebald
    P Patranobish
    Anglia 143 (2) , 2025
    2025.0
  • Commoning and Commemoration in Vesper
    P Patranobish
    Economic and Political Weekly 59 (42) , 2024
    2024.0
  • Book Review of" Mourning in the Anthropocene: Ecological Grief and Earthly Coexistence"
    P Patranobish
    Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 15 (1), 263-266 , 2024
    2024.0
  • Bloom, Lisa E.,(2022) Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics: Artists Reimagine the Arctic and Antarctic.
    P Patranobish
    Journal of Ecohumanism 2 (2), 197-204 , 2023
    2023.0
  • A Short History of Dust
    P Patranobish
    Hakara Bilingual 13 (1) , 2021
    2021.0
  • Writing the woman language and the body in virginia woolf
    P Patranobish
    New Delhi , 0