Narrative Performances of Mothering in South Asian Diasporic Fiction

Narrative Performances of Mothering in South Asian Diasporic Fiction PDF Author: Sarah Knor
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000824705
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Examining a range of South Asian Anglophone diasporic fiction and poetry, this monograph opens a new dialogue between diaspora studies and gender studies. It shows how discourses of diaspora benefit from re-examining their own critical relation to concepts of the maternal and the motherland. Rather than considering maternity as a fixed or naturally given category, it challenges essentialist conceptions and explores mothering as a performative practice which actively produces discursive meaning. This innovative approach also involves an investigation of central metaphors in nationalist and diasporic rhetorics, bringing critical attention to the strategies they employ and the unique aesthetic forms they produce.

Frontiers of South Asian Culture

Frontiers of South Asian Culture PDF Author: Parichay Patra
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000928616
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
This book is the first of its kind to significantly concentrate on trans-nation, transnationalism and its dialogue with various nationalisms in South Asia. Taking the absence of discussion on transnationalism in South Asia as a conspicuous lacuna as well as a point of intervention, this book pushes the boundaries of scholarship further by organizing a dialogue between the nation-state and many nationalisms and the emergent method of transnationalism. It opens itself up for many cross-border movements, formulating the trans-South Asian discursive exchange necessitated by contemporary, theoretical upheavals. It looks at such exchanges through the prisms of literature and cinema and traces the many modes of engagement that exist between some of the globally dominant literary and cinematic forms, trying to locate these engagements and negotiations across three geopolitical formations and locations of culture, namely region, nation and trans-nation.

Emotional Transitions in Contemporary Afrodiasporic Women’s Writing

Emotional Transitions in Contemporary Afrodiasporic Women’s Writing PDF Author: Ángela Suárez-Rodríguez
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003816274
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
This book is an in-depth study of the category "stranger" as represented in four contemporary Afrodiasporic novels of female authorship: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, Sefi Atta’s A Bit of Difference, NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names and Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers. Examined from an interdisciplinary perspective that brings together different approaches to the figure of the stranger and Affect Theory, the plurality of experiences of estrangement, disorientation and unbelonging portrayed in these texts allows expansion upon Sara Ahmed’s (2000) investigation of "stranger fetishism" and, in so doing, contributes to the recent call for a more nuanced understanding of the idea of "stranger". In particular, the critical and comparative study of the different migration experiences of the protagonists reveals that, within the framework of the contemporary African diaspora to the West, "strange(r)ness" is a situated, embodied and emotional condition that depends on the politics of location and of identity from which it emerges. This book will particularly appeal to scholars and students in the fields of Postcolonial Studies, African Diaspora Studies and Black Women’s Literature, and will also be suitable for students at graduate and advanced undergraduate levels in English Studies.

Affect, Performativity, and Chinese Diasporas in the Caribbean

Affect, Performativity, and Chinese Diasporas in the Caribbean PDF Author: Elena Igartuburu García
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003838227
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Book Description
Affect, Performativity, and Chinese Diasporas in the Caribbean: Hopeful Futures analyzes the emergence of Chinese diasporic literature and art in the Caribbean and its diasporas in the twenty-first century. This book considers the historical and critical discourse about the Chinese diasporas in the Caribbean and proposes a textual and visual archive selecting contemporary texts that signal a changing paradigm in postcolonial literature at the turn of the twenty-first century. Whereas, historically, Chinese minorities had been erased or presented as ultimate Others, contemporary texts mobilize Chinese characters and their stories strategically to propose alternative configurations of community and belonging grounded in affective structures and contest the coloniality of national imaginaries.

Rehumanizing Muslim Subjectivities

Rehumanizing Muslim Subjectivities PDF Author: Aroosa Kanwal
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003835686
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 119

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Book Description
Rehumanizing Muslim Subjectivities: Postcolonial Geographies, Postcolonial Ethics is a timely and urgent monograph, allowing us to imagine what it feels like to be the victim of genocide, abuse, dehumanization, torture and violence, something which many Muslims in Palestine, Kashmir, Pakistan, Myanmar, Syria, Iraq and China have to endure. Most importantly, the book emphasizes the continued relevance of creative literature’s potential to intervene in and transform our understanding of a conceptual and political field, as well as advanced technologies of power and domination. The book makes a substantial theoretical contribution by drawing on wide-ranging angles and dimensions of contemporary drone warfare and its related catastrophes, postcolonial ethics in relation to the thanatopolitics of slow violence, dehumanization and the politics of death. Against the backdrop of such institutionalized and diverse acts of violence committed against Muslim communities, I call the postcolonial Muslim world ‘geographies of dehumanization’. The book investigates how ongoing legacies of contemporary forms of injustice and denial of subjecthood are represented, staged and challenged in a range of postcolonial anglophone Muslim texts, thereby questioning the idea of postcolonial ethics. One of the selling points of this book is the chapters on fictional representations by Muslim Myanmar and Uyghur writers as, to the best of my knowledge, no critical work or single authored book is available on Myanmar and Uyghur literature to date.

Bridges, Borders and Bodies

Bridges, Borders and Bodies PDF Author: Christine Vogt-William
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443868434
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
South Asian diasporas can be considered transcultural legacies of colonialism, while constituting transcultural forms of postcolonial reality in today’s globalised world. The main focus of investigation here is South Asian women’s fiction, where diverse forms of identity negotiation undertaken by the protagonists in a number of contemporary novels (from the 1990s to the early 2000s) are read as transgressions. The themes of early gendered experiences of South Asian indentured labour migration, female genealogies and transmissions of cultural heritages down female lines, as well as negotiations of patriarchal violence, are read using a framework culled from postcolonial and feminist criticism. The literary representations of South Asian diasporic female experience in these texts are forms of commentary and critique by contemporary South Asian diasporic women writers. Hence these novels can be viewed as feminist strategies of textual creativity with distinct political aims of presenting transformative narratives addressing the tensions of diaspora and patriarchy. This book is intended to contribute to the current spectrum of academic work being done in diaspora studies, in that it brings together the concepts of diaspora, transculturality, contemporary women’s writing and transnational feminist critical approaches to bear on South Asian women’s diasporic literature. Contrary to the celebratory notion of the concept in much theory, transculturality, as represented in these texts, is fraught with ambivalence.

South Asian Women’s Narratives

South Asian Women’s Narratives PDF Author: Somjeeta Pandey
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527515303
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
This collection on women’s narratives includes articles exploring the works of women authors who were either born in South Asia or identified as being from that region. It discusses themes of gender, identity politics, diaspora, trauma, and the new ‘self’ of women. The volume addresses a great range of creative output by South Asian women authors and examines how their writings critically engage with the social, cultural, and political issues of their times, while also simultaneously exploring the themes of social discrimination, empowerment, and economic exploitation.

Contemporary Diasporic South Asian Women's Fiction

Contemporary Diasporic South Asian Women's Fiction PDF Author: Ruvani Ranasinha
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9781137403049
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book is the first comparative analysis of a new generation of diasporic Anglophone South Asian women novelists including Kiran Desai, Tahmima Anam, Monica Ali, Kamila Shamsie and Jhumpa Lahiri from a feminist perspective. It charts the significant changes these writers have produced in postcolonial and contemporary women’s fiction since the late 1990s. Paying careful attention to the authors’ distinct subcontinental backgrounds of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka – as well as India - this study destabilises the central place given to fiction focused on India. It broadens the customary focus on diasporic writers’ metropolitan contexts, illuminates how these transnational, female-authored literary texts challenge national assumptions and considers the ways in which this new configuration of transnational, feminist writers produces a postcolonial feminist discourse, which differs from Anglo-American feminism.

Gender, Place, and Identity of South Asian Women

Gender, Place, and Identity of South Asian Women PDF Author: Pourya Asl, Moussa
Publisher: IGI Global
ISBN: 1668436280
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
In the past century, South Asia underwent fundamental cultural, social, and political changes as many countries progressed from colonial dominations through nationalist movements to independence. These transformations have been intricately bound up with the spatiality of social life in the region, drawing further attention to the significance of social spaces within transformative politics and identity formations. Gender, Place, and Identity of South Asian Women studies contemporary literature of South Asian women with a focus on gender, place, and identity. It contributes to the debate on gender identity and equality, spatial and social justice, women empowerment, marginalization, and anti-discrimination measures. Covering topics such as partition memory narrative, spatial mobility, and diasporic women’s lives, this book is an essential resource for students and educators of higher education, researchers, activists, government officials, business leaders, academicians, feminist organizations, sociologists, and researchers.

Her Mother's Ashes, and Other Stories by South Asian Women in Canada and the United States

Her Mother's Ashes, and Other Stories by South Asian Women in Canada and the United States PDF Author: Nurjehan Aziz
Publisher: Tsar Publications
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Contributors: Vidyut Aklujkar, Meena Alexander, Himani Bannerji, Chitra Divakaruni, Ramabai Espinet, Lalita Gandbhir, Lakshmi Gill, Feroza Jussawalla, Surjeet Kalsey, Farida Karodia, Geeta Kothari, Yasmin Ladha, Arun Prabha Mukherjee, Hema Nair, Tahira Naqvi, Uma Parameswaran, Roshni Rustomji-Kerns, Nazneen Sheikh, Bapsi Sidhwa, and Perviz Walji