Abstract
This chapter looks at the way Prayaag Akbar’s Leila (2017) thematizes precarity—not just individual but entire communities of vulnerable subjects. Closely aligned with Judith Butler’s now-classic formulation in Precarious Lives and Frames of War, the chapter looks at vulnerability as less a weakness than a condition in which the state has a major role to play. It shows how vulnerable subjects are embodied and embedded—in specific ecosystems that rather than protect the subjects, seem to transform their vulnerability into dependency and helplessness. That is, eroding social apparatuses are the primary cause of eroding ‘social ontologies’, thus rendering precariousness to citizens. The chapter discusses three ‘assets’ as central to the vulnerable subject’s survival: human assets (such as education and health), physical assets (the infrastructure) and social assets (networks, social welfare measures). In Leila all these forms of assets are responsible not for the amelioration of vulnerability, but its very opposite: the amplification of vulnerability into defencelessness.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Akbar, Prayaag. 2015. Leila. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Arya, Rina. 2014. Abjection and representation: An exploration of abjection in the visual arts, film and literature. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bauman, Zygmunt. 2004. Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts. Malden: Wiley.
Brown, Wendy. 1993. Wounded attachments. Political Theory 21 (3): 390–410.
Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious lives: The powers of mourning and violence. London: Verso.
———. 2009. Frames of war: When is life grievable? London: Verso.
Butler, Judith, et al., eds. 2016. Vulnerability in resistance. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Casas-Cortés, Maribel. 2014. A genealogy of precarity: A toolbox for rearticulat-ing fragmented social realities in and out of the workplace. Rethinking Marxism 26 (2): 206–226.
Fineman, Martha Albertson. 2008. The vulnerable subject: Anchoring equality in the human condition. Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 201 (1): 1–23.
———. The vulnerable subject: Anchoring equality in the human condition. Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 201(1), 2010. The Vulnerable Subject and the Responsive State. Emory Law Journal 60: 252–275.
Gilson, Erinn. 2011. Vulnerability, ignorance, and oppression. Hypatia 26 (2): 308–332.
Hawkins, Guy, and Steven Muecke. 2003. Introduction: Cultural economies of waste. In Culture and waste: The creation and destruction of value, ed. Guy Hawkins and Steven Muecke. Washington, DC: Rowman and Littlefield.
Mackenzie, Catriona, et al. 2014. Introduction: What is vulnerability and why does it matter for moral theory? In Mackenzie, Rogers and Dodds (eds) Vulnerability: New essays in ethics and feminist philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1-32.
Mendes, Ana, and Lisa Lau. 2020. The precarious lives of India’s others: The creativity of precarity in Arundhati Roy’s the ministry of utmost happiness. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 56 (1): 70–82.
Munck, Ronaldo. 2013. The precariat: A view from the South. Third World Quarterly 34 (5): 747–762.
Nayar, Pramod K. 2017a. A postcolonial humanities manifesto. Rendezvous 43 (1-2): 113–122.
———. 2017b. Mobility and insurgent celebrityhood: The case of Arundhati Roy. Open Cultural Studies 1 (1): 46–54.
———. 2017c. Bhopal’s ecological gothic: Disaster, precarity, and the biopolitical uncanny. Maryland: Lexington.
Turner, Bryan S. 2006. Vulnerability and human rights. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania.
Wiley. 2004. Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts. Malden.
Yaeger, Patricia. 2003. Trash as archive, trash as enlightenment. In Culture and waste: The creation and destruction of value, ed. Guy Hawkins and Steven Muecke, 103–116. Rowman and Littlefield.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Nayar, P.K. (2022). Purity, Precarity and Power: Prayaag Akbar’s Leila. In: Dwivedi, O.P. (eds) Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature in English. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06817-1_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06817-1_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-06816-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-06817-1
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)