Download or read book South Asian Women in the Diaspora written by Nirmal Puwar and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-07-12 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: South Asian women have frequently been conceptualized in colonial, academic and postcolonial studies, but their very categorization is deeply problematic. This book, informed by theory and enriched by in-depth fieldwork, overturns these unhelpful categorizations and alongside broader issues of self and nation assesses how South Asian identities are ‘performed'. What are the blind spots and erasures in existing studies of both race and gender? In what ways do South Asian women struggle with Orientalist constructions? How do South Asian women engage with ‘indo-chic?' What dilemmas face the South Asian female scholar? With a combination of the most recent feminist perspectives on gender and the South Asian diaspora, questions of knowledge, power, space, body, aesthetics and politics are made central to this book. Building upon a range of experiences and reflecting on the actual conditions of the production of knowledge, South Asian Women in the Disapora represents a challenging contribution to any consideration of gender, race, culture and power.

Download or read book Diasporic Inquiries into South Asian Women s Narratives written by Shilpa Daithota Bhat and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-02-28 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The South Asian women’s diaspora engages in spatio-temporal interactions and power differentials in a variety of narratives, articulating agency, multiplicities of belonging and culturally integrative practices, highlighting homing paradigms. The sense of alienness in a new homeland, rather in worldwide home places, triggers rethinking of diasporic conceptions and epistemes of individual and group histories, personal and collective experiences. Some of the questions that this anthology seeks to consider are: How do women from the South Asian diaspora represent cultural negotiations and alienness of the adopted homeland in various narratives? What are the themes/issues they select to portray their perceptions of foreignness? How do culture, history and politics intervene in their portrayal of lived experiences? How do they locate themselves in the matrix of foreignness and diaspora? The contributors to this anthology examine narratives depicting South Asian women, their complexly positioned voices, gesturing at the proliferating challenges and reflecting the grim realities of a globalized world.

Download or read book Our Feet Walk the Sky written by Women of South Asian Descent Collective and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fiction and non-fiction on South Asians living in the U.S. In Anu Murgai's A Marriage Proposal, a woman reprimands her future daughter-in-law for not appearing shy, in Zinab Ali's Daddy, a daughter reproaches her father for taking a second wife.

Download or read book Writing Diaspora written by Yasmin Hussain and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Representation and Resistance written by Jaspal Kaur Singh and published by University of Calgary Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Representation and Resistance: South Asian and African Women's Texts at Home and in the Diaspora compares colonial and national constructions of gender identity in Western-educated African and South Asian women's texts. Jaspal Kaur Singh argues that, while some writers conceptualize women's equality in terms of educational and professional opportunity, sexual liberation, and individualism, others recognize the limitations of a paradigm of liberation that focuses only on individual freedom. Certain diasporic artists and writers assert that transformation of gender identity construction occurs, but only in transnational cultural spaces of the first world-spaces which have emerged in an era of rampant globalization and market liberalism. In particular, Singh advocates the inclusion of texts from women of different classes, religions, and castes, both in the Global North and in the South.

Download or read book Contemporary Diasporic South Asian Women s Fiction written by Ruvani Ranasinha and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-05-28 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Diaspora Poetics and Homing in South Asian Women s Writing written by Shilpa Daithota Bhat and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2018-03-14 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Nation and Migration written by Peter van der Veer and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016-11-11 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peter van der Veer and the contributors to this volume explore the relationship between South Asian nationalism, migration, ethnicity, and the construction of religious identity. Although nationality and diaspora seem to represent opposite ideas and values, the authors argue that nationalism is strengthened, even produced, by migration.

Download or read book Impossible Desires written by Gayatri Gopinath and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2005-04-19 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By bringing queer theory to bear on ideas of diaspora, Gayatri Gopinath produces both a more compelling queer theory and a more nuanced understanding of diaspora. Focusing on queer female diasporic subjectivity, Gopinath develops a theory of diaspora apart from the logic of blood, authenticity, and patrilineal descent that she argues invariably forms the core of conventional formulations. She examines South Asian diasporic literature, film, and music in order to suggest alternative ways of conceptualizing community and collectivity across disparate geographic locations. Her agile readings challenge nationalist ideologies by bringing to light that which has been rendered illegible or impossible within diaspora: the impure, inauthentic, and nonreproductive. Gopinath juxtaposes diverse texts to indicate the range of oppositional practices, subjectivities, and visions of collectivity that fall outside not only mainstream narratives of diaspora, colonialism, and nationalism but also most projects of liberal feminism and gay and lesbian politics and theory. She considers British Asian music of the 1990s alongside alternative media and cultural practices. Among the fictional works she discusses are V. S. Naipaul’s classic novel A House for Mr. Biswas, Ismat Chughtai’s short story “The Quilt,” Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy, and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night. Analyzing films including Deepa Mehta’s controversial Fire and Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, she pays particular attention to how South Asian diasporic feminist filmmakers have reworked Bollywood’s strategies of queer representation and to what is lost or gained in this process of translation. Gopinath’s readings are dazzling, and her theoretical framework transformative and far-reaching.

Download or read book Routledge Handbook of the South Asian Diaspora written by Joya Chatterji and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-03 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: South Asia’s diaspora is among the world’s largest and most widespread, and it is growing exponentially. It is estimated that over 25 million persons of Indian descent live abroad; and many more millions have roots in other countries of the subcontinent, in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. There are 3 million South Asians in the UK and approximately the same number resides in North America. South Asians are an extremely significant presence in Southeast Asia and Africa, and increasingly visible in the Middle East. This inter-disciplinary handbook on the South Asian diaspora brings together contributions by leading scholars and rising stars on different aspects of its history, anthropology and geography, as well as its contemporary political and socio-cultural implications. The Handbook is split into five main sections, with chapters looking at mobile South Asians in the early modern world before moving on to discuss diaspora in relation to empire, nation, nation state and the neighbourhood, and globalisation and culture. Contributors highlight how South Asian diaspora has influenced politics, business, labour, marriage, family and culture. This much needed and pioneering venture provides an invaluable reference work for students, scholars and policy makers interested in South Asian Studies.

Download or read book Fashioning Diaspora written by Vanita Reddy and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2016-02 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author maps how transnational itineraries of Indian beauty and fashion shaped South Asian American cultural identities and racialized belonging from the 1990s through the first decade of the twenty-first century. She observes how diasporic subjects engage with and respond to various encounters with Indian beauty and fashion. She examines a range of literature, visual art, and live performance, such as novels by Bharati Mukherjee and Jhumpa Lahiri, young adult literature, performance art by Shailja Patel, beauty and adornment practices, as well as objects of popular culture including an Indian American fashion doll, Reddy challenges fashion and beauty as a set of dematerialized, overly commodified cultural practices. She argues instead that beauty and fashion structure South Asian Americans' uneven access to social mobility, capital, and citizenship, and she demonstrates their varying capacities to produce social attachments across national, class, racial, gender, and generational divides.

Download or read book Women in the Indian Diaspora written by Amba Pande and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-12-05 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings into focus a range of emergent issues related to women in the Indian diaspora. The conditions propelling women’s migration and their experiences during the process of migration and settlement have always been different and very specific to them. Standing ‘in-between’ the two worlds of origin and adoption, women tend to experience dialectic tensions between freedom and subjugation, but they often use this space to assert independence, and to redefine their roles and perceptions of self. The central idea in this volume is to understand women’s agency in addressing and redressing the complex issues faced by them; in restructuring the cultural formats of patriarchy and gender relations; managing the emerging conflicts over what is to be transmitted to the following generations,; renegotiating their domestic roles and embracing new professional and educational successes; and adjusting to the institutional structures of the host state. The essays included in the volume discuss women in the Indian diaspora from multidisciplinary perspectives involving social, economic, cultural, and political aspects. Such an effort privileges diasporic women’s experiences and perspectives in the academia and among policy makers.

Download or read book Bridges Borders and Bodies written by Christine Vogt-William and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-10-02 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: South Asian diasporas can be considered transcultural legacies of colonialism, while constituting transcultural forms of postcolonial reality in today’s globalised world. The main focus of investigation here is South Asian women’s fiction, where diverse forms of identity negotiation undertaken by the protagonists in a number of contemporary novels (from the 1990s to the early 2000s) are read as transgressions. The themes of early gendered experiences of South Asian indentured labour migration, female genealogies and transmissions of cultural heritages down female lines, as well as negotiations of patriarchal violence, are read using a framework culled from postcolonial and feminist criticism. The literary representations of South Asian diasporic female experience in these texts are forms of commentary and critique by contemporary South Asian diasporic women writers. Hence these novels can be viewed as feminist strategies of textual creativity with distinct political aims of presenting transformative narratives addressing the tensions of diaspora and patriarchy. This book is intended to contribute to the current spectrum of academic work being done in diaspora studies, in that it brings together the concepts of diaspora, transculturality, contemporary women’s writing and transnational feminist critical approaches to bear on South Asian women’s diasporic literature. Contrary to the celebratory notion of the concept in much theory, transculturality, as represented in these texts, is fraught with ambivalence.

Download or read book Religion and Identity in the South Asian Diaspora written by Rajesh Rai and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious identity constitutes a key element in the formation, development and sustenance of South Asian diasporic communities. Through studies of South Asian communities situated in multiple locales, this book explores the role of religious identity in the social and political organization of the diaspora. It accounts for the factors that underlie the modification of ritual practice in the process of resettlement, and considers how multicultural policies in the adopted state, trans-generational changes and the proliferation of transnational media has impacted the development of these identities in the diaspora. Also crucial is the gender dimension, in terms of how religion and caste affect women’s roles in the South Asian diaspora. What emerges then from the way separate communities in the diaspora negotiate religion are diverse patterns that are strategic and contingent. Yet, paradoxically, the dynamic and evolving relationship between religion and diaspora becomes necessary, even imperative, for sustaining a cohesive collective identity in these communities. This bookw as published as a special issue of South Asian Diaspora.

Download or read book Finding a Voice written by Amrit Wilson and published by . This book was released on 2018-10 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1978, and winning the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize for that year, Finding a Voice established a new discourse on South Asian women's lives and struggles in Britain. This new edition includes a preface by Meena Kandasamy, some historic photographs, and a remarkable new chapter by young South Asian women.

Download or read book Writing Imagined Diasporas written by Joel Kuortti and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-05-05 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joel Kuortti’s Writing Imagined Diasporas: South Asian Women Reshaping North American Identity is a study of diasporic South Asian women writers. It argues that the diasporic South Asians are not merely assimilating to their host cultures but they are also actively reshaping them through their own, new voices bringing new definitions of identity. As diaspora does not emerge as a mere sociological fact but it becomes what it is because it is said to be what it is, the writings of imagined diasporas challenge “national” discourses. Diaspora brings to mind various contested ideas and images. It can be a positive site for the affirmation of an identity, or, conversely, a negative site of fears of losing that identity. Diaspora signals an engagement with a matrix of diversity: of cultures, languages, histories, people, places, times. What distinguishes diaspora from some other types of travel is its centripetal dimension. It does not only mean that people are dispersed in different places but that they congregate in other places, forming new communities. In such gatherings, new allegiances are forged that supplant earlier commitments. New imagined communities arise that not simply substitute old ones but form a hybrid space in-between various identifications. This book looks into the ways in which diasporic Indian literature handles these issues. In the context of diaspora there is an imaginative construction of collective identity in the making, That a given diaspora comes to be seen as a community is the result of a process of imagining, at the same time creating new marginalities, hybridities and dependencies, resulting in multiple marginalizations, hyphenizations and demands for allegiance. The study concentrates on eleven contemporary women writers from the United States and Canada who write on South Asian diasporic experiences. The writers are Ramabai Espinet, Jhumpa Lahiri, Amulya Malladi, Sujata Massey, Bharati Mukherjee, Uma Parameswaran, Kirin Narayan, Anita Rau Badami, Robbie Clipper Sethi, Shauna Singh Baldwin, and Vineeta Vijayaraghavan.

Download or read book Stories for South Asian Supergirls written by Raj Kaur Khaira and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2021-11-25 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discover 50 inspirational stories of South Asian women and their INCREDIBLE achievements. Featuring stories of success from award-winning entertainers Jameela Jamil and Mindy Kaling, as well as pioneering business leaders Indra Nooyi, Anjali Sud and Ruchi Sanghvi. South Asian Supergirls also features equally remarkable yet less well known figures, such as the British Muslim spy, Noor Inayat Khan. Perfect for fans of Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls, this heartwarming read is the ideal gift for young readers. Each profile has been paired with a delightful illustration from one of ten South Asian artists, this is a book for all ages - treasured by parents and children alike. Praise for South Asian Supergirls: One of the most beautiful and visually stimulating books I've seen for a long time - The Morning Star This call to courage celebrates warrior queens of Bangladeshi, Indian, Nepalese and Pakistani heritage - The Guardian Heartwarmingly full of the power, resilience and ingenuity of South Asian women - Book Trust