Dominic O’Key, post-doctoral research fellow with the University of Leeds team on the EXTINCT project, has published a new article proposing that the novel Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha by Mahasweta Devi works through literary de-extinction, which he defines as “any creative attempt to reimagine extinct species within the here and now a text’s narrative time.” Read his article here.
“By lifting the extinct figure of the pterodactyl out of the archives of the fossil record and into the world of this short novel, Mahasweta dramatizes how Puran becomes touched by the dactyl, or finger, of an entire nonhuman history which at the same time remains other to him. … By refusing an archival desire to catalog and commodify life, Mahasweta’s short novel re-imagines de-extinction as a model for opening literary form to the nonhuman and returning us to the present as a site of political and ecological resistance. In this respect, I see Pterodactyl as both a challenge to contemporary biotechnological conservation projects and a marker of how postcolonial literature can offer a multispecies intervention into the sixth extinction.”
Dominic O’Key (2020) “Entering Life:” Literary De-Extinction and the Archives of Life in Mahasweta Devi’s Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha, Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 31:1, 75-93, DOI: 10.1080/10436928.2020.1709715
