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

Author: Deepika Bahri

Publisher: Modern Language Association of America

Published: 2021-04-01

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781603294904

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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, Asia, and around the world.

Contemporary Diasporic South Asian Women's Fiction
Contemporary Diasporic South Asian Women's Fiction

Author: Ruvani Ranasinha

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-05-28

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 1137403055

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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.

Emerging South Asian Women Writers
Emerging South Asian Women Writers

Author: Feroza Jussawalla

Publisher: From Antiquity to Modernity

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781433128905

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This volume was conceived as a space to provide visibility for South Asian women writers whose work has not had much exposure in the West. It contributes to the knowledge of South Asian women writers by including scholarship not only on little-known writers but also by scholars from India - in particular, those whose voices do not necessarily find themselves in western academic publications. Many South Asian women writers engage with the overall quest for survival, which can be affiliated with all the themes expressed in this volume: trauma, diaspora, injustice, resistance, place, space, language, and identity. The texts discussed herein contribute to the ongoing discourse related to such themes in postcolonial studies and transnational literature, and could be used in courses on South Asian literature, women's writing, postcolonial studies and literature, and world or transnational literature.

Writing Diaspora
Writing Diaspora

Author: Yasmin Hussain

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-02

Total Pages: 174

ISBN-13: 1351870858

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Issues of cultural hybridity, diaspora and identity are central to debates on ethnicity and race and, over the past decade, have framed many theoretical debates in sociology, cultural studies and literary studies. However, these ideas are all too often considered at a purely theoretical level. In this book Yasmin Hussain uses these ideas to explore cultural production by British South Asian women including Monica Ali, Meera Syal and Gurinder Chadha. Hussain provides a sociological analysis of the contexts and experiences of the British South Asian community, discussing key concerns that emerge within the work of this new generation of women writers and which express more widespread debates within the community. In particular these authors address issues of individual and group identity and the ways in which these are affected by ethnicity and gender. Hussain argues that in exploring the different dimensions of their cultural heritage, the authors she surveys have created changes within the meaning of the diasporic identity, articulating a challenge to the notion of 'Asianness' as a homogenous and simple category. In her examination of the process through which a hybridized diasporic culture has come into being, she offers an important contribution to some of the key questions in recent sociological and cultural theory.

Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the early twentieth century
Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the early twentieth century

Author: Susie J. Tharu

Publisher: Feminist Press at CUNY

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 580

ISBN-13: 9781558610279

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Includes songs by Buddhist nuns, testimonies of medieval rebel poets and court historians, and the voices of more than 60 other writers of the 18th and 19th centuries. Among the diverse selections are a rare early essay by an untouchable woman; an account by the first feminist historian; and a selection from the first novel written in English by an Indian woman.

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.

If the Moon Smiled
If the Moon Smiled

Author: Chandani Lokuge

Publisher: Australian Scholarly Publishing

Published: 2017-04-21

Total Pages: 174

ISBN-13: 1925588238

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I go down to the river, unheeding my mother’s disapproval. I dip into the lazily flowing water. Here, at least, nothing has changed.The bath-cloth balloons around my body and I press it down. I loosen my hair and let it spread where it will. I open my hands upwards on the water’s surface, languidly remembering. All, that is familiar. The promise. The promise of life. As a young woman in Sri Lanka, Manthri marvels at the promise of life and yearns for a future of fulfilled dreams. Years on, she finds herself in a loveless marriage, in a foreign land, and estranged from her two Australian children. Torn between an idyllic past to which she cannot return and a present that breaks her heart, she never loses touch with those dreams, nor abandons her passionate enchantment with life.

Story-Wallah
Story-Wallah

Author: Shyam Selvadurai

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 454

ISBN-13: 9780618576807

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"Writers of South Asian descent have been garnering more and more success, acclaim, and attention. Story-Wallah gathers the finest South Asian voices in fiction for the first time in a single volume." "In this book, some of the world's best fiction writers hawk their wares from different parts of the South Asian diaspora - Sri Lanka, India, the United States, Great Britain, Guyana, Malaysia, Trinidad, Fiji - creating a virtual map of the world with their tales. These stories explore universal themes of identity, culture, and home, and Story-Wallah includes a rich array of experiences: a honeymoon in Sri Lanka, the trials of a Bangladeshi refugee in England, life on a sugar plantation in Trinidad, the attempts of an Indian family to arrange a marriage for their rebellious daughter."--Book jacket.

The Southeast Asian Woman Writes Back
The Southeast Asian Woman Writes Back

Author: Grace V. S. Chin

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-12-04

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 9811070652

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This collection of essays examines how Southeast Asian women writers engage with the grand narratives of nationalism and the modern nation-state by exploring the representations of gender, identity and nation in the postcolonial literatures of Brunei Darussalam, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Bringing to light the selected works of overlooked local women writers and providing new analyses of those produced by internationally-known women authors and artists, the essays situate regional literary developments within historicized geopolitical landscapes to offer incisive analyses and readings on how women and the feminine are imagined, represented, and positioned in relation to the Southeast Asian nation.The book, which features both cross-country comparative analyses and country-specific investigations, also considers the ideas of the nation and the state by investigating related ideologies, rhetoric, apparatuses, and discourses, and the ways in which they affect women’s bodies, subjectivities, and lived realities in both historical and contemporary Southeast Asian contexts. By considering how these literary expressions critique, contest, or are complicit in nationalist projects and state-mandated agendas, the collection contributes to the overall regional and comparative discourses on gender, identity and nation in Southeast Asian studies.