Yogic style in motion: experiments in power and knowledge. Issue 4 (3rd April 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Black, Shameem
• Is Part Of: Textual practice. Volume 36:Issue 4(2022)
• Page Start: 605
• Page End: 625
• Publication Date: 2022-04-03
• Subjects: Yoga -- style -- India -- svādhyāya; decolonial -- Iyengar; Literature, Modern -- 20th century -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Criticism -- Periodicals; Criticism, Textual -- Periodicals; Semiotics -- Periodicals; 801.95
• DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2022.2030515
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0950-236X

Abstract

ABSTRACT: In this essay I speculate on the idea that literary style can be informed by concepts of yoga and can constitute a yogic textual practice in its own right. As a popular practice around the world, yoga is often considered a set of embodied pursuits that promote holistic health and spiritual advancement. Yet yoga also claims a long tradition in South Asian philosophies as a modality of knowledge. Drawing on remediated concepts from these traditions, I theorise a form of yogic style that integrates changing genealogies of textual practice with attention to structures of power. This understanding of yogic style resonates with a twenty-first-century decolonising effort in Indian literature to animate the power of Indian cultural genealogies, while it contests a parallel tendency to manufacture mystiques of Indian civilisational belonging that legitimate the hierarchies and exclusions of majoritarian populism.