Postdoctoral Research Associate
she/her
Areas of Expertise
South Asian popular culture and literature, visual studies, comics and graphic novels, gender and sexuality studies
About Dr. Goswami
Nilakshi Goswami is an Assistant Professor at Royal Global University in Guwahati, India. Her project is entitled “Re(Imagining) Women: A Study of Religion and Gender in Indian Comics and Graphic Novels”. She is the recipient of the Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Fellowship in Anthropology and she will be working with Professor Shahla Haeri.
Research Abstract
The ever changing media-scape that has transformed the idea of religion from “sacred” to a quotidian, domestic spectacle has proved a widely unhinging experience since the twentieth century world’s tryst with modernity. With a specific emphasis on women and religion, my postdoctoral research delves into the discourse on feminist narratology while examining the critical reception of underrepresented voices and perspectives in Indian comics and graphic novels. Comics and graphic novels as a popular culture, which is so pervasive, has defined the popular understanding of gods and goddesses, historical events, and the canon of Indian myths and fables, and the present-day reality. I see this medium of popular culture as a potential site where multiple coexisting realms come together: the sacred, the artistic, the vernacular, and the commercial. My research would, thereby, examine the shifting aesthetics in the medium of the visual-print culture, and trace the changing mores of cultural history and popular religion through the tradition of comics and graphic novels in India. How do graphic novels and comics imagine gender with regard to religion, power, agency, and authority? In what ways do cartoonists/graphic artists’ imaginings of the present, past and future work to intervene in dominant constructions of gender, and how does it determine the reception of these visual narratives? To what extent is the visual media influential in determining the rhetorical choices of this multimodal form in terms of stylizing and in representing women’s issues and concerns? What role does the representation of religion play in determining the mentioned issues?
Selected Publications
- “Ideological History, Contested Culture, and the Politics of Representation in Amar Chitra Katha.” Special issue of Status Quaestionis – Sapienza Università di Roma, July 2021.
- “Retracing the Discourse of Referential Truth in Claude Cahun and Alison Bechdel’s Visual Narratives.” Writing Gender Writing Self: Memory, Memoir and Autobiography: Ed Dr. Aparna Lanjewar Bose, New Delhi: Routledge, May 2020.
- “Indian Nationalism and Hindu Widowhood: Contesting Margins in Indira Goswami’s Adha Lekha Dastabez.” Writing Gender Writing Self: Memory, Memoir and Autobiography: Ed Dr. Aparna Lanjewar Bose, New Delhi: Routledge, May 2020.