Commonwealth: Essays and Studies 26.2: 107-119. “History Was Wrong-Footed, Caught Off Guard:” Gendered Caste, Class and Manipulation in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.

Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press. ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 33, 3-4: 35-60. A Martyrology of the Abject: Witnessing and Trauma in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Edited by Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana. “Society Must Be Defended:” Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Įtzioni, Amitai (1996). Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community Cultural Memory in the Present. New Brunswick: Rutgers University.Įsposito, Roberto (2010). New York: Fordham University Press.ĭoody, Margaret Anne (1997). Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Ĭaputo, John David (1977). Barrytown (NY): Station Hill.īoehmer, Elleke (2009). Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies 2, 4: 62-78.Īlthusser, Louis (1971). Complicity and resistance: Women in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Although ingrained within a deeply organicist community, the main characters in Roy’s novel prove to have a vigorous capacity to trespass communitarian boundaries and to expose themselves to otherness.Īl-Quaderi, GolamGaus and Mohammad Saiful Islam. This article examines Roy’s subversion of the operative community by considering: (a) the different communitarian organizations in The God of Small Things, from the most organic (the caste system, patriarchy, religious institutions, communism and the commodification of culture) to the least organic (the community of Others and the community of lovers) (b) the connection between alterity, finitude and secrecy as preventing the unworked community from organicist fusion (c) the link between alterity, finitude, secrecy and counter-history.

This article explores the different types of communities and the role of secrecy and counter-history in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997), a novel in which secrecy plays a crucial role and in which the most genuine human relations are characterized by a desire to participate in otherness.

The god of small things 1997