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An examination of the place of religion, especially Islam, in political and cultural life took on a special urgency after the events of 9/11. The essays in this volume concentrate on the way that Islam impacts on the everyday lives of people who reside in societies where Islam plays a large part. The relationship between Islam and women has always been seen as problematic, and by highlighting women’s negotiations with this religion, this volume seeks to understand the many and various strategies and connections that are made, and their political and cultural ramifications. By keeping an Asian focus, the authors also seek to understand the wide panorama that Islamic societies inhabit, and the manifold political and cultural expressions that ensue from this. The effort is not only to break the image of a monolithic structure and set of beliefs, but also to highlight on-the-ground negotiations, and the ways that women in particular find spaces within Islamic structures and discourses. This book was originally published as a special issue of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies.
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.
In Unveiling Desire, Devaleena Das and Colette Morrow show that the duality of the fallen/saved woman is as prevalent in Eastern culture as it is in the West, specifically in literature and films. Using examples from the Middle to Far East, including Iran, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand, Japan, and China, this anthology challenges the fascination with Eastern women as passive, abject, or sexually exotic, but also resists the temptation to then focus on the veil, geisha, sati, or Muslim women’s oppression without exploring Eastern women’s sexuality beyond these contexts. The chapters cover instead mind/body sexual politics, patriarchal cultural constructs, the anatomy of sex and power in relation to myth and culture, denigration of female anatomy, and gender performativity. From Persepolis to Bollywood, and from fairy tales to crime fiction, the contributors to Unveiling Desire show how the struggle for women’s liberation is truly global.
The implicit link between white women and "the dark races" recurs persistently in nineteenth-century English fiction. Imperialism at Home examines the metaphorical use of race by three nineteenth-century women novelists: Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and George Eliot. Susan Meyer argues that each of these domestic novelists uses race relations as a metaphor through which to explore the relationships between men and women at home in England. In the fiction of, for example, Anthony Trollope and Charles Dickens, as in nineteenth-century culture more generally, the subtle and not-so-subtle comparison of white women and people of color is used to suggest their mutual inferiority. The Bronte s...
How does Spivak approach the signs the madwoman in the attic, the good black servant, the monster and the “wholly Other”? What is the basis of Spivak’s ethics of interpretation and what are her main tools? Gayatri Spivak: Deconstruction and the Ethics of Postcolonial Literary Interpretation is an ambitious and compelling critical work which answers various questions surrounding one of the most notoriously difficult literary theorists in our times. This book is an in-depth study of Spivak’s readings of a cluster of canonical and peripheral literary texts covering Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, Frankenstein, Foe and “Pterodactyl.” It divides Spivak’s literary theoretical practice ...
Essays on the contribution of African, Caribbean, Asian and diaspora writers to 'English' literature. The 'new' literatures have most commonly been seen as a staging post en route to the current 'post-colonial' era. Yet these literatures and the diverse cultural histories they represent are older than such recent interpretations of them. This collection of essays investigates ways in which we can return to 'reading' these 'new' literatures without falling back on current critical assumptions.
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In this challening book, Firdous Azim, provides a feminist critique of orthodox accounts of the `rise of the novel' and exposes the underlying orientalist assumptions of the early English novel. Whereas previous studies have emphasized the universality of the coherent and consistent subject which found expression in the novels of the eighteenth century, Azim demonstrtes how certain categories: women and people of colour, were silenced and excluded. The Colonial Rise of the Novel makes an important and provocative contribution to post-colonial and feminist criticism. It will be essential reading for all teachers and students of English literature, women's studies, and post-colonial criticism.
On the political role of Muslim women in undivided Bengal in 19th and 20th century; a study.