Tamil Dalit Feminist Poetics
Tamil Dalit Feminist Poetics

Author: Pramila Venkateswaran

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2024-09-23

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 1666921335

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Tamil Dalit feminist poetry occurs in the nexus of caste demands and literary expectations based on Tamil “high culture,” as set in the literary conventions of both classical and contemporary aesthetics. Tamil Dalit feminist poets and their allies challenge literary expectations set for women poets as well as caste stigma. In Tamil Dalit Feminist Poetics: Resistance, Power, and Solidarity, Pramila Venkateswaran argues that Dalit poets Sukirtharani, Arangamallika, Umadevi, Meena Kandasamy, and Tamil feminist allies, such as Malathi Maitri and Kutty Revathi, challenge the literary tradition of Tamil poetry by presenting their radical poems on themes based on their experience and witnessing the trauma of violence on Dalit women’s bodies, thus placing caste and gender at the center of their work. They assert their subjectivity, offering us a feminist poetics that is rich with insights on the Dalit body, spirituality, music, culture, Dalit connection to land, and democracy. Their poems theorize women’s experiences, using metaphor, symbol, folk idioms, as well as satire and irony to express feminist connectedness to all spheres of life. Replete with anti-caste resistance of language, form, and content, Tamil Dalit feminist poets reframe both feminism and contemporary Tamil poetry. Thus, Dalit feminist poetry and other cultural productions are vehicles for solidarity and democracy.

Dalit Feminist Theory
Dalit Feminist Theory

Author: Sunaina Arya

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2019-09-09

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 1000651487

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Dalit Feminist Theory: A Reader radically redefines feminism by introducing the category of Dalit into the core of feminist thought. It supplements feminism by adding caste to its study and praxis; it also re-examines and rethinks Indian feminism by replacing it with a new paradigm, namely, that caste-based feminist inquiry offers the only theoretical vantage point for comprehensively addressing gender-based injustices. Drawing on a variety of disciplines, the chapters in the volume discuss key themes such as Indian feminism versus Dalit feminism; the emerging concept of Dalit patriarchy; the predecessors of Dalit feminism, such as Phule and Ambedkar; the meaning and value of lived experience; the concept of Difference; the analogical relationship between Black feminism and Dalit feminism; the intersectionality debate; and the theory-versus-experience debate. They also provide a conceptual, historical, empirical and philosophical understanding of feminism in India today. Accessible, essential and ingenious in its approach, this book is for students, teachers and specialist scholars, as well as activists and the interested general reader. It will be indispensable for those engaged in gender studies, women’s studies, sociology of caste, political science and political theory, philosophy and feminism, Ambedkar studies, and for anyone working in the areas of caste, class or gender-based discrimination, exclusion and inequality.

Literary Sentiments in the Vernacular
Literary Sentiments in the Vernacular

Author: Charu Gupta

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-12-14

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 1000511189

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This collection brings together nine essays, accompanied by nine short translations that expand the assumptions that have typically framed literary histories, and creatively re-draws their boundaries, both temporally and spatially. The essays, rooted in the humanities and informed by interdisciplinary area studies, explore multiple linkages between forms of print culture, linguistic identities, and diverse vernacular literary spaces in colonial and post-colonial South Asia. The accompanying translations—from Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, and Urdu—not only round out these scholarly explorations and comparisons, but invite readers to recognise the assiduous, intimate, and critical labour of expanding access to the vernacular archive, while also engaging with the challenges—linguistic, cultural, and political—of rendering vernacular articulations of gendered experience and embodiment in English. Collectively, the essays and translations foreground complex and politicised expressions of gender and genre in fictional and non-fictional print materials and thus draw meaningful connections between the vernacular and literature, the everyday and the marginals, and gender and sentiment. They expand vernacular literary archives, canons and genealogies, and push us to theorise the nature of writing in South Asia. Literary Sentiments in the Vernacular is a significant new contribution to South Asian literary history and gender studies, and will be a great resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of History, Literature, Cultural Studies, Politics, and Sociology. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.

The Grip of Change
The Grip of Change

Author: Civakāmi

Publisher:

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13:

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The Grip of Change is the English translation of Pazhaiyana Kazhithalum, the first full-length novel by P. Sivakami, an important Tamil writer. This translation also features Asiriyar Kurippu, the sequel in which Sivakami revisits her work. The protagonist of Book 1, Kathamuthu, is a charismatic Parayar leader. He intervenes on behalf of a Parayar woman, Thangam, beaten up by the relatives of her upper caste lover. Kathamuthu works the state machinery and the village caste hierarchy to achieve some sort of justice for Thangam. The first Tamil novel by a Dalit woman, Pazhaiyana Kazhithalum, went beyond condemning caste fanatics. Sivakami is critical of the Dalit movement and Dalit patriarchy, and yet does not become a caste traitor because of her participation in the search for solutions. The novel became an expression of Dalit youth eager and working for change. In Book 2, Author s Note, Kathamuthu s daughter Gowri, the author of Book 1, traces the circumstances and events of her novel. The result is a fascinating exploration of the disjunctures between what happens in the author s family and community, and her fictional interpretations of those happenings. The Series: The books in the Literature in Translation series are translations of significant literature from Indian languages. The books in the Dalit Studies series deal with Dalit life and thought.

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.

The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature
The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature

Author: Douglas A. Vakoch

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-09-19

Total Pages: 587

ISBN-13: 100063440X

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The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature explores the interplay between the domination of nature and the oppression of women, as well as liberatory alternatives, bringing together essays from leading academics in the field to facilitate cutting-edge critical readings of literature. Covering the main theoretical approaches and key literary genres of the area, this volume includes: • Examination of ecofeminism through the literatures of a diverse sampling of languages, including Hindi, Chinese, Arabic, and Spanish; native speakers of Tamil, Vietnamese, Turkish, Slovene, and Icelandic. • Analysis of core issues and topics, offering innovative approaches to interpreting literature, including: activism, animal studies, cultural studies, disability, gender essentialism, hegemonic masculinity, intersectionality, material ecocriticism, postcolonialism, posthumanism, postmodernism, race, and sentimental ecology. • Surveys key periods and genres of ecofeminism and literary criticism, including chapters on Gothic, Romantic, and Victorian literatures, children and young adult literature, mystery, and detective fictions, including interconnected genres of climate fiction, science fiction, and fantasy, and distinctive perspectives provided by travel writing, autobiography, and poetry. This collection explores how each of ecofeminism’s core concerns can foster a more emancipatory literary theory and criticism, now and in the future. This comprehensive volume will be of great interest to scholars and students of literature, ecofeminism, ecocriticism, gender studies, and the environmental humanities.

Contesting Categories, Remapping Boundaries
Contesting Categories, Remapping Boundaries

Author: Krishnamurthy Alamelu Geetha

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2015-01-12

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 1443873047

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Literature produced by historically marginalized communities has often been argued to function as an important tool for social change. However, much depends on how this literature is received and interpreted. Since the university operates as a potential site for social change, it is significant to enquire whether such literature, specifically that produced by Tamil Dalits, has been incorporated into mainstream curricula. It is equally vital to explore how students respond to Dalit literature. This book traces the evolution of Tamil Dalit writing from the early decades of the twentieth century to the present, and explores its impact on academia. Furthermore, it analyses the literary works of Tamil Dalits and explores how students of Tamil and English literary studies have responded to Tamil Dalit literature and its English translations. The book addresses the following research questions: What were the socio cultural conditions that led to the emergence of contemporary Tamil Dalit literature? What are the dominant themes and trends in contemporary Tamil Dalit literature? How does academia respond to the emergence of Tamil Dalit literature? In particular, how do students respond to Dalit literature, a literature which has found a place in both English and Tamil literature curricula? As a literature which has an ideological function, how is it received and understood by readers?

Karukku
Karukku

Author: Pāmā

Publisher: Oxford India Paperbacks/Oxford University Press

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 9780199450411

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In 1992 when a Dalit woman left the convent and wrote her autobiography, the Tamil publishing industry found her language unacceptable. So Bama Faustina published her milestone work Karukku privately in 1992-a passionate and important mix of history, sociology, and the strength to remember.Karukku broke barriers of tradition in more ways than one. The first autobiography by a Dalit woman writer and a classic of subaltern writing, it is a bold and poignant tale of life outside mainstream Indian thought and function. Revolving around the main theme of caste oppression within theCatholic Church, it portrays the tension between the self and the community, and presents Bama's life as a process of self-reflection and recovery from social and institutional betrayal.The English translation, first published in 2000 and recognized as a new alphabet of experience, pushed Dalit writing into high relief. This second edition includes a Postscript in which Bama relives the dramatic movement of her leave-taking from her chosen vocation and a special note "Ten YearsLater".

The Rapids of a Great River
The Rapids of a Great River

Author:

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2009-06-08

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 8184758197

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The Rapids of a Great River begins with selections from the earliest known Tamil poetry dating from the second century CE. The writings of the Sangam period laid the foundation for the Tamil poetic tradition, and they continue to underlie and inform the works of Tamil poets even today. The first part of this anthology traverses the Sangam and bhakti periods and closes with pre-modern poems from the nineteenth century. The second part, a compilation of modern and contemporary poetry, opens with the work of the revolutionary poet Subramania Bharati. Breaking free from prescriptions, the new voices—which include Sri Lankan Tamils, women and dalits, among others—address the contemporary reader; the poems, underscored by a sharp rhetorical edge, grapple with the complexities of the modern political and social world. The selection is wide-ranging and the translations admirably echo the music, pace and resonance of the poems. This anthology links the old with the new, cementing the continuity of a richly textured tradition. There is something in the collection for every reader and each will make his or her own connections—at times startling, at other times familiar.