The ontology of affects in women writer’s literary productions from the Northeast borderlands of India

This paper is a foregrounding of the affective turn as an analytical tool in contemporary feminist epistemologies to recuperate feminist literary praxes from epistemic hegemonies of the global North. A quest of this differential feminist epistemology has been about methodology while narrativising the multiple located female selfhood which is at the centre of an ongoing epistemic debate in academia. In the context of this, it is rather important that newer modalities of responses from the global South are registered and actively produced through the discursive space of literature. While principally aligned with scholars of affect theory, this paper also makes a departure to study how “affect” can come to signify multiple emplacements that define a newer constituency of feminist methodology while writing the differential self, located in the global South. Focussing on select Anglophone texts from the borderland states of Northeast India, this paper argues that a relational self’s affective emplacements have a political significance. The geosociality of an affectively emplaced female self, in the literary works of women writers, this paper argues, is itself a site of contestation within the larger rubric of feminist geopolitics with its singular focus on locating paradigms of women’s oppression across differential situatedness.