Touch and intimacy | Santanu Das

Описание: Touch is the one sense that completely defeats the powers of representation. Literature struggles through metaphors, images and narrative structures to communicate this most intimate and almost evanescent of the senses.

About Santanu Das:
"I am Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at Oxford University and a Senior Fellow at All Souls College. My work focuses on early twentieth-century literature and culture and I am especially interested in the relationship between experience, writing and emotion in times of conflict. My research also concerns colonial and postcolonial literature, particularly from South Asia, theories of the body, emotion and the senses and modernism and travel writing. I am a 2010 Philip Leverhulme Prize winner. My first book examined the role of the senses, particularly touch, in First World War experience and literature, while my recent work has focussed on the colonial dimensions of war culture and memory through an expanded notion of the ‘archive’ – artefacts, photographs, paintings, rumors, folksongs and sound-recordings, as well as testimonial, political and literary writings. I have just completed a monograph on India and First World War culture and work on the experience and imaginings of sea-voyages in a global context, from Victorian times to now."

Key Points
Touch is the most intimate yet least representable sense, and when language falters the body speaks, especially through the hands.
It is one of the ironies of the First World War that it brutalized the male body on an unprecedented scale. At the same time, it also restored tenderness to touch in everyday life.
Touch was the most intimate frontier along which empire was policed. In WWI, soldiers of color were not allowed to touch white officers.
AIDS and COVID showed how essential non-erotic touch is for comfort, grief and solidarity, and how its absence wounds private and public life.