Gautam Basu Thakur, professor and chair of the Department of Humanities and Cultural Studies, published two papers: “Holes, Pits, and Caves: Empire, Ecology and Ontology” in Victoriographies: A Journal of the Long Nineteenth Century, as well as “Burning ‘Between Two Fires:’ The Individual Under Erasure in Hassan Blasim’s ‘The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes’” in Philosophies.
The first paper examines Rudyard Kipling’s “Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes” and Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Terror of Blue John Gap.” It connects situations where characters from colonizer backgrounds find themselves trapped in pits, holes and caves to historical memories of imperial trauma.
The second paper uses Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to interpret Hassan Blasim’s short story, “The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes,” about an Iraqi emigrant and his relationship to the Dutch society he inhabits. Basu Thakur explores issues relating to refugee experiences of past war traumas and the challenges of assimilating into primarily white host nations.