Capitalism and the Construction of Corpo-Realities: A Study of Select Malayalam Short Stories

Abstract

The paper makes an attempt at tracing the construction and mobilization of various corporeal identities under the Capitalist regime, in the light of select Malayalam short stories. It also delineates how metamodern elements have outrun postmodernity in addressing questions of existence and survival, especially in the lives of the marginalized. The imposition of a deceptive homogeneity and an illusion of equality by Capitalism for the mobilization of bodies and their commodification is highlighted here. The paper also tries to capture how Capitalism ascribes a uniform consumer subjectivity to people as a whole, who are further ensnared by the market in an unending chain of dissatisfaction and unsatiated desire. The paper also focuses on the debasement of certain lives as ‘bare life’, which is the life of a political outcast, and the transformation of the body as a cultural artifact, a site of political inscriptions, an object of fetish, a biological entity and a marker of socio-political identity and class distinctions, especially in the Capitalist world.