Problematic Identities in Women's Fiction of the Sri Lankan Diaspora

Problematic Identities in Women's Fiction of the Sri Lankan Diaspora PDF Author: Alexandra Watkins
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004299270
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Women novelists of the Sri Lankan diaspora make a significant contribution to the field of South Asian postcolonial studies. Their writing is critical and subversive, particularly concerned as it is with the problematic of identity. This book engages in insightful readings of nine novels by women writers of the Sri Lankan diaspora: Michelle de Kretser’s The Hamilton Case (2003); Yasmine Gooneratne’s A Change of Skies (1991), The Pleasures of Conquest (1996), and The Sweet and Simple Kind (2006); Chandani Lokugé’s If the Moon Smiled (2000) and Turtle Nest (2003); Karen Roberts’s July (2001); Roma Tearne’s Mosquito (2007); and V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Love Marriage (2008). These texts are set in Sri Lanka but also in contemporary Australia, England, Italy, Canada, and North America. They depict British colonialism, the Tamil–Sinhalese conflict, neocolonial touristic predation, and the double-consciousness of diaspora. Despite these different settings and preoccupations, however, this body of work reveals a consistent and vital concern with identity, as notably gendered and expressed through resonant images of mourning, melancholia, and other forms of psychic disturbance. This is a groundbreaking study of a neglected but powerful body of postcolonial fiction. “This is an excellent study that I believe makes a significant and timely contribution to the fields of postcolonial literature, Sri Lankan anglophone literature, diasporic literature, women’s studies, and world literature. It was a stimulating and thought-provoking read.” Dr Maryse Jayasuriya, The University of Texas at El Paso.

Problematic Identities in Women's Fiction of the Sri Lankan Diaspora

Problematic Identities in Women's Fiction of the Sri Lankan Diaspora PDF Author: Alexandra Watkins
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004299270
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Get Book Here

Book Description
Women novelists of the Sri Lankan diaspora make a significant contribution to the field of South Asian postcolonial studies. Their writing is critical and subversive, particularly concerned as it is with the problematic of identity. This book engages in insightful readings of nine novels by women writers of the Sri Lankan diaspora: Michelle de Kretser’s The Hamilton Case (2003); Yasmine Gooneratne’s A Change of Skies (1991), The Pleasures of Conquest (1996), and The Sweet and Simple Kind (2006); Chandani Lokugé’s If the Moon Smiled (2000) and Turtle Nest (2003); Karen Roberts’s July (2001); Roma Tearne’s Mosquito (2007); and V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Love Marriage (2008). These texts are set in Sri Lanka but also in contemporary Australia, England, Italy, Canada, and North America. They depict British colonialism, the Tamil–Sinhalese conflict, neocolonial touristic predation, and the double-consciousness of diaspora. Despite these different settings and preoccupations, however, this body of work reveals a consistent and vital concern with identity, as notably gendered and expressed through resonant images of mourning, melancholia, and other forms of psychic disturbance. This is a groundbreaking study of a neglected but powerful body of postcolonial fiction. “This is an excellent study that I believe makes a significant and timely contribution to the fields of postcolonial literature, Sri Lankan anglophone literature, diasporic literature, women’s studies, and world literature. It was a stimulating and thought-provoking read.” Dr Maryse Jayasuriya, The University of Texas at El Paso.

South Asian Diasporas and (Imaginary) Homelands

South Asian Diasporas and (Imaginary) Homelands PDF Author: Clelia Clini
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040255280
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
This edited volume looks at the ways in which films, literature, photography and social media construct images of homelands and diasporas as well as the ways in which they facilitate exchanges between them. The volume presents with a dialogue between these representations and analyses how they are constructed, disseminated, appropriated and/or challenged in relation to recent political developments in South Asia and in the diaspora. Focusing on images and narratives about South Asia and its diaspora, the book aims to re-centre the political nature of representations, as it addresses the interplay between representation, imagination and identity, with a specific focus on the South Asian diasporic experience. This book will interest students and scholars of media, communication, popular culture, cultural studies, Asian studies, politics and sociology. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of South Asian Diaspora.

Teaching Anglophone South Asian Women Writers

Teaching Anglophone South Asian Women Writers PDF Author: Deepika Bahri
Publisher: Modern Language Association
ISBN: 1603294910
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
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.

Mediating Literary Borders: Asian Australian Writing

Mediating Literary Borders: Asian Australian Writing PDF Author: Janet Wilson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135133543X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
Engaging with Asian Australian writing, this book focuses on an influential area of cultural production defined by its ethnic diversity and stylistic innovativeness. In addressing the demanding new transnational and transcultural critical frameworks of such syncretic writing, the contributors collectively examine how the varied and diverse body of Asian Australian literary work intervenes into contemporary representational politics and culture. The book questions, for instance, the ideology of Australian multiculturalism; the core/periphery hierarchy; the perpetuation of Orientalist attitudes and stereotypes; and white Australian claims to belong as seen in its myths of cultural authenticity and authority. Ranging in critical analyses from the historic first Chinese-Australian novel to contemporary award winning Sri Lankan, Bangladeshi and Filipino Australian novels, the book provides an inside view of the ways in which Asian Australian literary work is reshaping Australian mainstream literature, politics and culture, and in the wider context, the world literary scene. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

Narratives of Trauma in South Asian Literature

Narratives of Trauma in South Asian Literature PDF Author: Goutam Karmakar
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100082179X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
This volume addresses cultural and literary narratives of trauma in South Asian literature. Presenting a novel cross-cultural perspective on trauma theory, the essays within this volume study the divergent cultural responses to trauma and violence in various parts of South Asia, including Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Afghanistan, which have received little attention in literary writings on trauma in their specific circumstances. Through comprehensive sociocultural understanding of the region, this book creates an approachable space where trauma engages with themes like racial identity, ethnicity, nationality, religious dogma, and cultural environment. With case studies from Kashmir, the 1971 liberation war of Bangladesh, and armed conflict in Nepal and Afghanistan, the volume will be of interest to scholars, students and researchers of literature, history, politics, conflict studies, and South Asian studies.

Soap Operas, Gender and the Sri Lankan Diaspora

Soap Operas, Gender and the Sri Lankan Diaspora PDF Author: Shashini Gamage
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303070632X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
This book is a transnational ethnographic study of Sri Lankan women’s television soap opera cultures in Australia and Sri Lanka. Both Sri Lankan migrant women’s soap opera clubs in Melbourne, Australia, and female friendship groups watching soap operas in Colombo, Sri Lanka, are examined. Conducted in the sociopolitical backdrop of post-civil war Sri Lanka, this study examines how nationalist ideologies of womanhood shape meanings in Sri Lankan television soap operas that predominantly cater to female audiences. How women interpret, resist, deconstruct, and reconstruct good-bad binaries of women’s bodies, freedoms, and rights as represented in the soap operas are mapped, providing an ethnographic examination of how nationalist meanings translate into cultural capital in spaces of television production and reception, in national and diasporic everyday lives.

Superdiverse Diaspora

Superdiverse Diaspora PDF Author: Demelza Jones
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030283887
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Drawing on in-depth qualitative research, this book provides a nuanced picture of the everyday identifications experienced and expressed among the superdiverse Tamil migrant population in Britain. It presents the first detailed analysis of the narrative and experiences of Tamils from a diversity of backgrounds – including Sri Lankan, Indian, Singaporean and Malaysian – and addresses the question of their identification with a ‘Tamil diaspora’ in Britain. Theoretically informed by Brubaker’s conception of ‘diaspora as process’ and Werbner’s notion of diasporas as both ‘aesthetic’ and ‘moral’ communities, Jones examines political engagements alongside other, less studied, ‘frames’ of Tamil migrants’ lives: social relationships (local and transnational), the domestic space of home, and performances of faith and ritual. Considering diaspora as a process or practice allows the author to reveal a complex landscape upon which ‘being Tamil’ and ‘doing Tamil-ness’ in diaspora are diversely enacted. Combining original ethnographic research with a theoretical engagement in the key debates in migration, diaspora, ethnicity and superdiversity studies, this book makes a novel contribution to scholarship on Tamil populations and will advance critical understandings of the concept of ‘diaspora’ more generally.

Contemporary Diasporic South Asian Women's Fiction

Contemporary Diasporic South Asian Women's Fiction PDF Author: Ruvani Ranasinha
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137403055
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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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.

Diaspora Literature: Identity Beyond Borders

Diaspora Literature: Identity Beyond Borders PDF Author: Dr. Pradip Mondal
Publisher: Emerald Publishers
ISBN: 8195962521
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
The book Diaspora Literature: Identity Beyond Borders is a compendium of erudite academic articles depicting the generations of diasporic contemplation and consequences figured out in the literature of this specific theme and motif. The book is an enterprise to portray the displacement, alienation, clashes, assimilation, acculturation, rootlessness, torn identities, quest for identity, crisis of identity, and fusion and conflict between two cultures that have been stringed out in three parts of diasporic concerns—Ecumenical Scenario, Acculturation and Question of Hyphenation in Indian Diaspora and Oscillating State of expatriates and immigrants.

Forms of Engagement

Forms of Engagement PDF Author: Elizabeth Scott-Baumann
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191664227
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
What does it mean for a woman to write an elegy, ode, epic, or blazon in the seventeenth century? How does their reading affect women's use of particular poetic forms and what can the physical appearance of a poem, in print and manuscript, reveal about how that poem in turn was read? Forms of Engagement shows how the aesthetic qualities of early modern women's poetry emerge from the culture in which they write. It reveals previously unrecognized patterns of influence between women poets Katherine Philips, Lucy Hutchinson, and Margaret Cavendish and their peers and predecessors: how Lucy Hutchinson responded to Ben Jonson and John Milton, how Margaret Cavendish responded to Thomas Hobbes and the scientists of the early Royal Society, and how Katherine Philips re-worked Donne's lyrics and may herself have influenced Abraham Cowley and Andrew Marvell. This book places analysis of form at the centre of an historical study of women writers, arguing that reading for form is reading for influence. Hutchinson, Philips, and Cavendish were immersed in mid-seventeenth century cultural developments, from the birth of experimental philosophy, to the local and state politics of civil war and the rapid expansion of women's print publication. For women poets, reworking poetic forms such as elegy, ode, epic, and couplet was a fundamental engagement with the culture in which they wrote. By focusing on these interactions, rather than statements of exclusion and rejection, a formalist reading of these women can actually provide a more nuanced historical view of their participation in literary culture.