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Terror by Candlelight: The Affective Politics of Fear in Tanika Gupta’s Lions and Tigers

  • Marlena Tronicke

    is Assistant Professor of British literary and cultural studies at the University of Münster, Germany. Her areas of research and teaching include early modern as well as contemporary British drama, Victorian and neo-Victorian literature, and adaptation studies. Her first monograph, Shakespeare’s Suicides: Dead Bodies That Matter, was published by Routledge in 2018, and she is currently working on a second book project on configurations of empire in neo-Victorian fiction.

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Abstract

In 2017, Tanika Gupta’s Lions and Tigers premiered at London’s candle-lit, neo-Jacobean Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, which, at first glance, seems ill suited to house a play which is set in pre-Partition Bengal and which depicts both rioting mobs and machine gun shootings. This essay looks at the ways in which, contrary to such initial associations, text and performance space supplement each other. In this case, supposedly cosy candlelight and close proximity to the audience engender feelings of fear and anxiety that can be framed with Sara Ahmed’s notion of the ‘affective politics of fear.’ Continuously interwoven with negotiations between the leading figures of the Indian National Congress, Gupta’s play is firmly set in its own historical context. On the other hand, its climate of boiling nationalism and close parallels to jihad make it equally relevant to the present day. It is because of this contemporaneous historicity that Gupta’s play proves so gripping: through their ostensibly homely seventeenth-century staging, terror and political unrest become all too close to home, and so Lions and Tigers is as much a play that uncovers the hidden stories of Indian Partition as it speaks to the here and now.

About the author

Marlena Tronicke

is Assistant Professor of British literary and cultural studies at the University of Münster, Germany. Her areas of research and teaching include early modern as well as contemporary British drama, Victorian and neo-Victorian literature, and adaptation studies. Her first monograph, Shakespeare’s Suicides: Dead Bodies That Matter, was published by Routledge in 2018, and she is currently working on a second book project on configurations of empire in neo-Victorian fiction.

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Published Online: 2019-05-09
Published in Print: 2019-05-07

© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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