Understanding the Politics of Literary Reception Through a Reading of Sarr’s the Most Secret Memory of Men and Miranda’s Requiem for the Living

Paper Abstract: The current preoccupation with Identity Studies even within Literature departments demands an understanding of the nature and function of literature as a discipline. This paper will examine the politics behind the reception of ‘aesthetics’ as a category in literary interpretation. The question of which texts are read for pleasure or for their aesthetic value, and which are read for their 'content' or theme through a mere reduction of the texts being tools for the assertion of one’s identity, becomes pertinent here.

What is the ‘true’ purpose of literature? Should it concern itself with authenticity or does it reside in the realm of imagination? I will explore these questions by undertaking a comparative analysis of the Senagalese author, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s The Most Secret Memory of Men (2023) and the Malayalam writer, Johny Miranda’s Requiem for the Living (2013) to explore the idea of ‘literary memory’ by which I refer to books not forming part of the recognised canon of ‘literary history.’ For this, the politics behind literary reception of texts will be analysed along with the idea of 'aesthetics' being ignored in texts recognised as being political to “voice” the identity and issues of ‘minority’ communities from various contexts. Apart from borrowing Adorno’s aesthetic theories, I will also engage with Mignolo’s idea of ‘decolonial aesthesis,’ Césaire's Negritude, and Dalit aesthetics to invoke the idea of a plural notion of an otherwise deemed ‘universal’ category termed ‘aesthetics’ in literary criticism.