Download or read book Chotti Munda and His Arrow written by Mahasweta Devi and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written in 1980, this novel by prize-winning Indian writer Mahasweta Devi, translated and introduced by Gayatri Chakravorty Sprivak, is remarkable for the way in which it touches on vital issues that have in subsequent decades grown into matters of urgent social conern. Written by one of India’s foremost novelists, and translated by an eminent cultural and critical theorist. Ranges over decades in the life of Chotti – the central character – in which India moves from colonial rule to independence, and then to the unrest of the 1970s. Traces the changes, some forced, some welcome, in the daily lives of a marginalized rural community. Raises questions about the place of the tribal on the map of national identity, land rights and human rights, the ‘museumization’ of ‘ethnic’ cultures, and the justifications of violent resistance as the last resort of a desperate people. Represents enlightening reading for students and scholars of postcolonial literature and postcolonial studies.
Download or read book Posthegemony written by Jon Beasley-Murray and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A challenging new work of cultural and political theory rethinks the concept of hegemony.
Download or read book Bitter Soil written by Mahāśvetā Debī and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bitter Soil contains four of her most powerful stories Salt , Seed , The Witch and Little Ones all set in Palamau, the tribal-intensive region she has traveled extensively. As she says in her introduction, My Palamau is a mirror of India. These harsh, hardhitting pieces are, in her own words, among the most important of her prolific writing career. Written in the eighties, they resonate with anger against the exploitation she witnessed firsthand, and the complacent hypocrisy of the upper castes and classes. Mahasweta Devi is one of India s foremost writers. Her powerful fiction has won her recognition in the form of the Sahitya Akademi (1979), Jnanpith (1996) and Ramon Magsaysay (1996) awards, the title of Officier del Ordre Des Arts Et Des Lettres (2003) and the Nonino Prize (2005) amongst several other literary honours. She was also awarded the Padmasree in 1986, for her activist work among dispossessed tribal communities. Ipsita Chanda is a translator who also teaches Comparative Literature in Jadavpur University. Ipsita Chanda, the translator, teches Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University, Calcutta.
Download or read book The Tale of Hansuli Turn written by Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-07 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A terrifying sound disturbs the peace of Hansuli Turn, a forest village in Bengal, and the community splits as to its meaning. Does it herald the apocalyptic departure of the gods or is there a more rational explanation? The Kahars, inhabitants of Hansuli Turn, belong to an untouchable "criminal tribe" soon to be epically transformed by the effects of World War II and India's independence movement. Their headman, Bonwari, upholds the ethics of an older time, but his fragile philosophy proves no match for the overpowering machines of war. As Bonwari and the village elders come to believe the gods have abandoned them, younger villagers led by the rebel Karali look for other meanings and a different way of life. As the two factions fight, codes of authority, religion, sex, and society begin to break down, and amid deadly conflict and natural disaster, Karali seizes his chance to change his people's future. Sympathetic to the desires of both older and younger generations, Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay depicts a difficult transition in which a marginal caste fragments and mutates under the pressure of local and global forces. The novel's handling of the language of this rural society sets it apart from other works of its time, while the village's struggles anticipate the dilemmas of rural development, ecological and economic exploitation, and dalit militancy that would occupy the center of India's post-Independence politics. Negotiating the colonial depredations of the 1939–45 war and the oppressions of an agrarian caste system, the Kahars both fear and desire the consequences of a revolutionized society and the loss of their culture within it. Lyrically rendered by one of India's great novelists, this story of one people's plight dramatizes the anxieties of a nation and the resistance of some to further marginalization.
Download or read book Death of a Discipline written by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2023-07-11 with total page 75 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is among the foremost figures in the study of world literature and its cultural consequences of the past half-century. In this book, originally published in 2003, she declares the death of comparative literature as we know it and sounds an urgent call for a “new comparative literature,” in which the discipline is reborn—one that is not appropriated and determined by the market. Spivak examines how comparative literature and world literature in translation have fared in the era of globalization and considers how to protect the multiplicity of languages and literatures at the university. She demonstrates why critics interested in social justice should pay close attention to literary form and offers insightful interpretations of classics such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Through readings of texts not only in English, French, and German but also in Arabic and Bengali, Spivak practices what she preaches. This anniversary edition features a new preface in which Spivak reflects on the fortunes of comparative literature in the intervening years and its tasks today.
Download or read book Titu Mir written by Mahāśvetā Debī and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Titu Mir, a peasant leader, led a revolt against the British in Bengal in 1830 31, in the course of which he was killed. He has remained a hero in the popular imagination. This was a period of transition in agricultural Bengal. The evil effects of the Permanent Settlement were beginning to be felt by the rural people. Traditional zamindars were being replaced by absentee landlords. Indigo plantations were eating up fertile agicultural land. Titu, a hotheaded, headstrong young man, a natural leader, found himself defending the rural poor against he exploitation of the landlords and the British, at the cost of his own life. In this warmly told historical adventure tale, Mahasweta Devi brings history alive in the presence of a charismatic hero, all the time, as is typical of her, embedding him in the larger socio-economic situation of the times. We get to know Titu as a young boy, fearless and restless, always standing up for victims of injustice, and then trace his gradual development into a rebel leader after his conversion to the Wahabi sect. Mahasweta Devi is one of India s foremost writers. Her powerful, satiric fiction has won her recognition in the form of the Sahitya Akademi (1979), Jnanpith (1996) and Ramon Magsaysay (1996) awards, the title of Officier del Ordre Des Arts Et Des Lettres (2003) and the Nonino Prize (2005), amongst several other literary honours. She was also awarded the Padmasree in 1986, for her activist work amongst dispossessed tribal communities. Rimi B. Chatterjee is a editor and translator based in Calcutta.
Download or read book The Book of the Hunter written by Mahāśvetā Debī and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This charming, expansive novel set in the sixteenth-century medieval Bengal draws on the life of the great medieval poet Kabikankan Mukundaram Chakrabarti, whose epic poem Abhayamangal, better known as Chandimangal, records the socio-political history of the time. In the section of this epic called Byadhkhanda the Book of the Hunter he describes the lives of hunter tribes, the Shabars, who lived in the forest and its environs. Mahasweta Devi explores the cultural values of the Shabars and how they cope with the slow erosion of their way of life as more and more forest land gets cleared to make way for settlements. She uses the lives of two couples, the brahaman Mukundaram and his wife, and the young Shabars, Phuli and Kalya, to capture the contrasting socio-cultural norms of rural society of the time. Mahasweta Devi acknowledges her debt to Mukundaram, who wrote about men and women, gods and goddesses. The hunter tribes refusal to cultivate and settle down, as described by him, is true of surviving forest tribes today. The villages and rivers mentioned by him still exist. Mahasweta Devi is one of India s foremost writers. Her powerful fiction has won her recognition in the form of the Sahitya Akademi (1979), Jnanpith (1996) and Ramon Magsaysay (1996) awards, the title of Officier del Ordre Des Arts Et Des Lettres (2003) and the Nonino Prize (2005) amongst several other literary honours. She was also awarded the Padmasree in 1986, for her activist work among dispossessed tribal communities. Sagaree Sengupta is translator based in the USA. She translates from Bengali, Hindi and Urdu. She has collaborated on this translation with her mother, Mandira Sengupta, an artist who maintains an active interest in her native Bengali. The two of them earlier translated The Queen of Jhansi in this series.
Download or read book Bashai Tudu written by Mahāśvetā Debī and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Love Itself written by Hélène Cixous and published by Polity. This book was released on 2008-08-11 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Love’s memories, love recalling itself in letters lost and found over an interval of forty years: Cixous’s writer-narrator advances here far into a labyrinth of passions long ago delivered and yet still arriving through the mail, through letters and literature, in other words, the poetry of the post. As for the lovers’ returning scenes, they have their addresses in Paris (rue Olivier de Serres, Avenue de Choisy, street names that endlessly feed love’s unconscious language) and in New York, but also in a lost oasis of the Egyptian desert during the Napoleonic wars, in Athens and along the shores of a great lake centuries ago in the country of myth. The lovers are poets or soldiers, philosophers or students madly in love with poetry and poets. They are as well mermaids or panthers. Panthers? Yes, for it is the passion of the animal that drives all these lovers to bare themselves, and sometimes their claws, before the beloved. Misunderstandings are often, even inevitably the result. Seconded and witnessed by her passionate, truth-telling cats, Cixous’s narrator-writer returns unerringly to moments of errancy inflicted on address and language, those errors and faults when love, perhaps, is listening only to itself, without subject or object, lover or beloved, just love itself, l’amour même, l’amour m’aime, love loving me, in the letter box of memory.
Download or read book Queen of Jhansi written by Mahāśvetā Debī and published by . This book was released on with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Bulletproof written by Jennifer Wenzel and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-07-15 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1856 and 1857, in response to a prophet’s command, the Xhosa people of southern Africa killed their cattle and ceased planting crops; the resulting famine cost tens of thousands of lives. Much like other millenarian, anticolonial movements—such as the Ghost Dance in North America and the Birsa Munda uprising in India—these actions were meant to transform the world and liberate the Xhosa from oppression. Despite the movement’s momentous failure to achieve that goal, the event has continued to exert a powerful pull on the South African imagination ever since. It is these afterlives of the prophecy that Jennifer Wenzel explores in Bulletproof. Wenzel examines literary and historical texts to show how writers have manipulated images and ideas associated with the cattle killing—harvest, sacrifice, rebirth, devastation—to speak to their contemporary predicaments. Widening her lens, Wenzel also looks at how past failure can both inspire and constrain movements for justice in the present, and her brilliant insights into the cultural implications of prophecy will fascinate readers across a wide variety of disciplines.
Download or read book Silent Spring written by Rachel Carson and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2002 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essential, cornerstone book of modern environmentalism is now offered in a handsome 40th anniversary edition which features a new Introduction by activist Terry Tempest Williams and a new Afterword by Carson biographer Linda Lear.
Download or read book Imaginary Maps written by Mahasweta Devi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-08-28 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imaginary Maps presents three stories from noted Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi in conjunction with readings of these tales by famed cultural and literary critic, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Weaving history, myth and current political realities, these stories explore troubling motifs in contemporary Indian life through the figures and narratives of indigenous tribes in India. At once delicate and violent, Devi's stories map the experiences of the "tribals" and tribal life under decolonization. In "The Hunt," "Douloti the Bountiful" and the deftly wrought allegory of tribal agony "Pterodactyl, Pirtha, and Puran Sahay," Ms. Devi links the specific fate of tribals in India to that of marginalized peoples everywhere. Gayatri Spivak's readings of these stories connect the necessary "power lines" within them, not only between local and international structures of power (patriarchy, nationalisms, late capitalism), but also to the university.
Download or read book Politics and the Other Scene written by Étienne Balibar and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As one of Louis Althusser's most brilliant students in the 1960s, Etienne Balibar contributed to the theoretical collective masterpiece of Reading Capital. Since then he has established himself among the most subtle philosophical and political thinkers in France. In Politics and the Other Scene Balibar deepens and extends the work he first developed with Immanuel Wallerstein in Race, Nation, Class. Exploring the theme of universalism and difference, he addresses such topical questions as European racism, the notion of the border, whether a European citizenship is possible or desirable, violence and politics, and identity and emancipation.
Download or read book Old Women written by Mahāśvetā Debī and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The two stories in this collection, Statue (Murti) and The Fairy Tale of Mohanpur (Mohanpurer Rupkatha) are touching, poignant tales, in both of which the protagonists are old women. In the first, a tragic, for bidden love returns to haunt Dulah, now an old woman pre-occupied only wih filling her stomach and surviving from day to day. In the second, Andi loses her eyes through a combination of poverty, societal indifference and governmental apathy, even as she persists in her belief in fairy tale solutions. Mahasweta Devi is at her most tender in her sensitive, delicately-drawn portraits of these two old women, although her trenchant pen is as ruthless as ever in delineating the socio-economic oppression within which they are forced to survive. Though extremely readable as moving stories for the fiction lover, they also yield layers of deeper significance upon closer reading. As translator Gayatri ChakravortySpivak says: Here in this text, you ll find what Kamala Visweswaran has called women as subaltern the first story and subaltern women the second. In my way of reading there is here a solid critique of nationlism as an end in itself and a loving critique of how male-gendered nationalism can solve a young man s crisis; and of course, a very strong critique of the failure of decolonization in the second story. The realization that as time passes, for a woman, the ideology of love remains a memory but acknowledges defeat in the hands of hunger is an exquisite aporia in the first story; almost between species-life and species-being. And in the second, the extraordinary resourcefulness of this village community of women and the guileless courage and simplicity of Andi, her relationship with her eldest daughter-in-law and so on, are again a responsible narrative that offers a critique no less powerful than a merely reasonable one. How tellingly Devi outlines the limits of mere goodwill! Indeed, I m always amazed by the theoretical delicacy of Mahasweta s stories. The aporias between gendering on the one hand ( feudal -transitional, and subaltern), and the ideology of national liberation (as tragedy and as face) are also worth contemplating. Mahasweta Devi is one of India s foremost writers. Her powerful, satiric fiction has won her recognition in the form of Sahitya Akademi (1979), Jnanpith (1996) and Ramon Magsaysay (1996) awards, the title of Officier del Ordre Des Arts Et Des Lettres (2003) and the Nonino Prize (2005) amongst several other literary honours. She was also awarded the Padmasree in 1986, for her activist work among dispossessed tribal communities. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, translator, critic and scholar, is Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities Department, Columbia University. She is well known for her translations from French and Bengali into English.
Download or read book Other Asias written by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 2008-01-03 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this major intervention into the “Asian Century,” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak challenges the reader to re-think Asia, in its political and cultural complexity, in the global South and in the metropole. Among the chapters in this volume are: “Foucault and Najibullah,” in which she looks at Afghanistan in its own historical and gendered narrative “Moving Devi,” in which she addresses the authority of autobiography and writes as a diasporic “Responsibility,” in which she examines the limits of “theory” upon the floodplains of Bangladesh “Megacity,” where she reads cyberliteracy in Bangalore. Other chapters focus on, among other things, Human Rights, and the turbulent “present” of the Caucasus.
Download or read book Feminism in Indian Writing in English written by Amar Nath Prasad and published by Sarup & Sons. This book was released on 2006 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
