Diaspora Poetics and Homing in South Asian Women's Writing
Diaspora Poetics and Homing in South Asian Women's Writing

Author: Shilpa Daithota Bhat

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2018-03-14

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13: 1498577636

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This anthology of essays, deliberates chiefly on the notion of locating home through the lens of the mythical idea of Trishanku, implying in-between space and homing, in diaspora women’s narratives, associated with the South Asian region. The idea of in-between space has been used differently in various cultures but gesture prominently on the connotation of ‘hanging’ between worlds. Historically, imperialism and the indentured/ ‘grimit’ system, triggered dispersal of labourers to the various colonies of the British. Of course, this was not the only cause of international migratory processes. The partition of India and Pakistan led to large scale migration. There was Punjabi migration to Canada. Several Indians, particularly the Gujaratis travelled to Africa for business reasons. South Indians travelled to the Gulf for employment. There were migrations to East Asian countries under the kangani system. Again, these were not the only reasons. The process of demographic movement from South Asia, has been complex due to innumerable push-pull factors. The subsequent generations of migrants included the twice, thrice (and likewise) displaced members of the diaspora. Racial denigration and Orientalist perceptions plagued their lives. They belonged to various ethnicities and races, inhabited marginalized spaces and strived to acculturate in the host society. Complete cultural assimilation was not possible, creating layered and hyphenated identities. These intricate social processes resulted in amalgamation and cross-pollination of cultures, inter-racial relationships and hybridization in all terrains of culture—language, music, fashion, cuisine and so on. Situated in this matrix was the notion of Home—a special personal space which an individual could feel as belonging to, very strongly. Nostalgia, loss of home, culture shock and interracial encounters problematized this discernment of belongingness and home. These multifarious themes have been captured by women writers from the South Asian region and this book looks at the various aspects related to negotiating home in their narratives.

Teaching Anglophone South Asian Women Writers
Teaching Anglophone South Asian Women Writers

Author: Deepika Bahri

Publisher: Modern Language Association

Published: 2021-06-15

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 1603294910

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Global and cosmopolitan since the late nineteenth century, anglophone South Asian women's writing has flourished in many genres and locations, encompassing diverse works linked by issues of language, geography, history, culture, gender, and literary tradition. Whether writing in the homeland or in the diaspora, authors offer representations of social struggle and inequality while articulating possibilities for resistance. In this volume experienced instructors attend to the style and aesthetics of the texts as well as provide necessary background for students. Essays address historical and political contexts, including colonialism, partition, migration, ecological concerns, and evolving gender roles, and consider both traditional and contemporary genres such as graphic novels, chick lit, and Instapoetry. Presenting ideas for courses in Asian studies, women's studies, postcolonial literature, and world literature, this book asks broadly what it means to study anglophone South Asian women's writing in the United States, in Asia, and around the world.

Diaspora and Cultural Negotiations
Diaspora and Cultural Negotiations

Author: Shilpa Daithota Bhat

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2022-03-30

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 1666912867

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Diaspora and Cultural Negotiations: The Films of Gurinder Chadha explores critical and theoretical conceptualizations of identity, globalization, intersectionality, and diaspora, among other topics, in the films of Gurinder Chadha. This book argues that Chadha’s work offers relevant and sensitive portrayals of the members of the diaspora community that make these films of contemporary and enduring value, highlighting their challenges in hybridization and acculturation in the societies they migrate to and the historical and political exigencies that influence their everyday existence. Contributors analyze Chadha’s films in the context of cultural milieus including multiculturalism, narration and representation, ethnicity, literary adaptation, and intercultural negotiations, while also exploring Chadha’s own role as an auteur. Scholars of film studies, Indian cinema, diaspora studies, sociology, and cultural studies will find this book particularly useful.

Routledge Handbook of the History of Colonialism in South Asia
Routledge Handbook of the History of Colonialism in South Asia

Author: Harald Fischer-Tiné

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-09-01

Total Pages: 697

ISBN-13: 0429774699

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The Routledge Handbook of the History of Colonialism in South Asia provides a comprehensive overview of the historiographical specialisation and sophistication of the history of colonialism in South Asia. It explores the classic works of earlier generations of historians and offers an introduction to the rapid and multifaceted development of historical research on colonial South Asia since the 1990s. Covering economic history, political history, and social history and offering insights from other disciplines and ‘turns’ within the mainstream of history, the handbook is structured in six parts: Overarching Themes and Debates The World of Economy and Labour Creating and Keeping Order: Science, Race, Religion, Law, and Education Environment and Space Culture, Media, and the Everyday Colonial South Asia in the World The editors have assembled a group of leading international scholars of South Asian history and related disciplines to introduce a broad readership into the respective subfields and research topics. Designed to serve as a comprehensive and nuanced yet readable introduction to the vast field of the history of colonialism in the Indian subcontinent, the handbook will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of South Asian history, imperial and colonial history, and global and world history.

Understanding Disability
Understanding Disability

Author: Ranu Uniyal

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-11-02

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9819949254

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This edited volume brings together contributions on disability studies organized around two themes: literary and sociological aspects. The contributors include academics, disability activists, and researchers from within and outside the Indian periphery. While the book strengthens the disability discourse and contributes to building academic scholarship on this subject, it also promotes disability activism by giving space to both direct practitioners and persons with disabilities. The chapters discuss various analytical and literary aspects of the marginalization experienced by the disabled community and bring forth new and elaborate perspectives. It draws connections across multiple identities and includes personal narratives across nations, cultures and societies. It is an excellent research resource on disability studies in India for scholars and students in the area of humanities, education, law, sociology and social work, while at the same time also addressing the global context.

Critical Perspectives on Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Critical Perspectives on Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Author: Amritjit Singh

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2022-02-15

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 1498556183

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Critical Perspectives on Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni: Feminism and Diaspora offers insights into Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s provocative and popular fiction. In their engaging and comprehensive introduction, editors Amritjit Singh and Robin Field explore how Divakaruni’s short stories and novels have been shaped by her own struggles as a new immigrant and by the influences she imbibed from academic mentors and feminist writers of color. Twelve critical essays by both aspiring and experienced scholars explore Divakaruni's aesthetic of interconnectivity and wholeness as she links generations, races, ethnicities, and nations in her depictions of the diversity of religious and ethnic affiliations within the Indian diaspora. The contributors offer a range of critical perspectives on Divakaruni’s growth as a novelist of historical, mythic, and political motifs. The volume includes two extended interviews with Divakaruni, offering insights into her personal inspirations and social concerns, while also revealing her deep affection for South Asian communities, as well as an essay by Divakaruni herself—a candid expression of her artistic independence in response to the didactic expectations of her many South Asian readers.

Discourses on Sustainability
Discourses on Sustainability

Author: Elena V. Shabliy

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-09-21

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 303053121X

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This volume presents an in-depth analysis of climate change problems and discusses the proliferation of renewable energy worldwide—in conjunction with such important questions as social justice and economic growth, providing an interdisciplinary approach to sustainable development. Exploring various responses to human-induced climate change, the book offers a critical reflection on climate change and clean energy and highlights the fundamental problems of international energy justice and human rights. Examining these and other climate-related issues from legal, business, political, and scientific perspectives, the volume also analyzes the impact of economic factors and policies on climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Narrative Performances of Mothering in South Asian Diasporic Fiction
Narrative Performances of Mothering in South Asian Diasporic Fiction

Author: Sarah Knor

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-12-30

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1000824705

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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.

Diasporic Inquiries into South Asian Women’s Narratives
Diasporic Inquiries into South Asian Women’s Narratives

Author: Shilpa Daithota Bhat

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-02-28

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 1498591779

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The South Asian women’s diaspora engages in spatio-temporal interactions and power differentials in a variety of narratives, articulating agency, multiplicities of belonging and culturally integrative practices, highlighting homing paradigms. The sense of alienness in a new homeland, rather in worldwide home places, triggers rethinking of diasporic conceptions and epistemes of individual and group histories, personal and collective experiences. Some of the questions that this anthology seeks to consider are: How do women from the South Asian diaspora represent cultural negotiations and alienness of the adopted homeland in various narratives? What are the themes/issues they select to portray their perceptions of foreignness? How do culture, history and politics intervene in their portrayal of lived experiences? How do they locate themselves in the matrix of foreignness and diaspora? The contributors to this anthology examine narratives depicting South Asian women, their complexly positioned voices, gesturing at the proliferating challenges and reflecting the grim realities of a globalized world.

Bridges, Borders and Bodies
Bridges, Borders and Bodies

Author: Christine Vogt-William

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2014-10-02

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 1443868434

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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.