I am Jack the ripper, a golden eagle: ethical alterity and dangers of narrative travel in world literature

Abstract

In this essay I extract an ethic from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s concept of “planetarity” in the context of world literature, which highlights the notion of transnational literary circulation. I argue for a planetary ethic of absolute otherness that interacts with the way a story travels across national borders. I take this dialogue through the Bengali-Indian writer Sandipan Chattopadhyay’s short story “Shonali Danar Igol” (“The Eagle with Golden Wings”), where we see this alterity in sync with a fantasmatic narrative passage that transcends national imagination. Delving into the psychotic fantasy of the story’s Anglo-Indian protagonist allows us to see how dangerous a transnational literary transmission can be. I hope to show how planetary ruptures interrupt the continuities of the global and how planetarity itself becomes an ethical tool to respect the untranslatable in the planetary non-human Other. Sandipan’s story contributes to this critical dialogue by introducing psychosis as the fallout of translating the untranslatable alterity of the planet.