Till kontaminationens lov

Abstract

I am currently engaging with the relation between literary and academic writing. Drawing from my own experience as a literary writer and academic I interrogate how these writing practices may inform each other, and whether or not they can be merged. I have more specifically experimented with a cross-genre form that I tentatively call “ethnographic fiction”. Bengaluru Boogie, which juxtaposes an unpublished journalistic reportage from 2003 with the impressions from two visits to Bangalore (Bengaluru) ten years later, is part of my ongoing open-ended interrogation, by different means, of the discourse of purity and impurity (the World Waltz). “In praise of contamination” is borrowed from Kwame Anthony Appiah (2006:111.113) and refers to contamination both as a literary genre of transgression and as a proposed politics of impurity (contamination), as opposed to the still pervasive and apparently rising politics of purity.