MARÍA LUZ GONZÁLEZ-RODRÍGUEZ
Mª Luz González-Rodríguez's main research interests lie in Anglo-Canadian and South Asian literature. She has mostly published on the relationship between women's literature and the natural environment, from a psychoanalytical, symbolic and ecocritical perspective.
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KEYWORDS: Partition, bodies, affect theory, shame, guilt
Cracking India (1991), considerada como la novela más destacable de la escritora pakistaní-estadounidense de ascendencia parsi Bapsi Sidhwa, se centra en el acontecimiento histórico de la Partición que tuvo lugar en 1947, que dividió el subcontinente indio en los países de India y Pakistán. La trama es sustancialmente ginocéntrica y relata los horrores de este conflicto territorial, político y social y de cómo las mujeres fueron cosificadas no solo desde una perspectiva sexual, sino también como trofeos de poder y humillación ante el enemigo. El objetivo de este artículo es explorar los conceptos de vergüenza y culpa en las relaciones de poder aplicando la teoría de los afectos desde una perspectiva de género.
Féminisme ou la Mort (Feminism or Death), the term ecofeminism has undergone important changes throughout history, expanding its focus beyond its initial emphasis on the interconnectedness of gender and ecology to include race, class, caste, indigeneity, and other forms of social oppression. In India, the origins of ecofeminism can be traced back to various movements that emerged in the 1960s and 70s, such as
the Chipko Movement, the Save Silent Valley Movement or the Forest Rights Movements, among others. It combines feminist and ecological principles to address the interconnected issues of gender inequality and ecological degradation and has been significantly led by tribal and other oppressed communities. Vandana Shiva’s work Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development (1988) has been instrumental in shaping ecofeminism in India. Other significant names include Maria Mies, who
collaborated with Shiva in the writing of Ecofeminism (1993) or Sunita Narain, Madhu Sarin and Bina Agarwal who have written extensively on and contributed to the frame of ecofeminism in the Indian context.
The conference is intended to be interdisciplinary, so papers from ecologists, historians, anthropologists, philosophers, economists, artists and environmental and cultural studies scholars are welcome. All topics should be related to India and its diaspora.
l’imagination de la matiére [El agua y los sueños: ensayo sobre la imaginación de la materia,
1942], “que no nos bañamos dos veces en el mismo río, porque ya en su profundidad, el ser
humano tiene el destino del agua que corre”(15). El agua, ciertamente, y de forma particular, el agua en movimiento, evoca el transcurso de la vida y su continuo e imprevisible devenir. El más receptivo de los elementos, la naturaleza del agua es transitoria, íntima, femenina, maternal y metafórica. La simbólica de este elemento, además, engloba una gran multitud de matices, que, como apuntan Jean Chevalier y Alain Gheerbrant, pueden, a grandes rasgos, reducirse a tres temas dominantes, perceptibles en las culturas del mundo. Estos son el agua “como fuente de vida, medio de purificación y centro de regeneración” (52). Sin embargo, como todo símbolo, el agua posee también un carácter ambivalente. Es cuna y sepulcro simultáneamente, nacimiento y muerte, alfa y omega, principio y fin.
Indianness, female subjectivities, the domestic space and the keeping of traditions, hierarchical relationships between race, class and gender, South-Asian Muslim identity, Women movements in India, and life writing are all subjects that the reader of this special issue will find in this volume.
In the first essay, Felicity Hand offers an ample study of the representation of the female in East African Asian literature through the eyes of writers such as M. S. Vassanji, Peter Nazareth and Jameela Siddiqui. Hand also exposes how, in spite of the social privilege they enjoy as Asians in East Africa, Indian women have to struggle to find their own spaces at home, becoming active agents in the construction of new social positions. Hand laments, however, that the East African Asian woman and her subaltern condition have not been sufficiently treated in fiction. In the following essay, Maurice O’Connor examines South Asian Muslims’ identity in the United Kingdom, highlighting the fact that authentic and essential Islamism should be distinguished from more radical postures that act as deformations or misrepresentations of their faith. O’Connor also explains how the South Asian Muslims living in Great Britain face a double dilemma: on the one hand, they are considered a minority and are excluded from any kind of national discourse, on the other, they must struggle against the propagation of the most radical Islamic groups. In order to illustrate all these ideas, the author offers a cultural analysis of different novels by Pakistani writers, such as Hanif Kureishi, Mohsin Hamid, Nadeem Aslam, among others.
Antonia Navarro’s essay, in turn, provides a historical overview of women movements in India till the present to demonstrate that the national front supporting Hindu nationalism, Hindutva, is currently giving a simplistic and reduced notion of Indianness, instead of its heterogeneous and complex true character. Hindutva ideology defends the idea that the essence of India must be found in the keeping of its traditions. So any activist movement concerned with gender equality is considered to be anti-Indian by the radical nationalists. Nonetheless, Navarro argues that women movements in India had existed long before its independence from the British Empire, in fact, from pre-colonial times, so their argument, she concludes, is not well-founded. Finally, the last essay deals with Salman Rusdhie’s novel Joseph Anton: A Memoir. Celia Wallhead especially focuses on the hybrid nature and the different genres and subgenres in which this novel may be classified: mainly as a pseudo-autobiography, a detective story or a literary novel. Similarities and differences with Coetzee’s autre-biography and Barthes’ autobiography “against itself” are also discussed in this study.
KEYWORDS: Partition, bodies, affect theory, shame, guilt
Cracking India (1991), considerada como la novela más destacable de la escritora pakistaní-estadounidense de ascendencia parsi Bapsi Sidhwa, se centra en el acontecimiento histórico de la Partición que tuvo lugar en 1947, que dividió el subcontinente indio en los países de India y Pakistán. La trama es sustancialmente ginocéntrica y relata los horrores de este conflicto territorial, político y social y de cómo las mujeres fueron cosificadas no solo desde una perspectiva sexual, sino también como trofeos de poder y humillación ante el enemigo. El objetivo de este artículo es explorar los conceptos de vergüenza y culpa en las relaciones de poder aplicando la teoría de los afectos desde una perspectiva de género.
Féminisme ou la Mort (Feminism or Death), the term ecofeminism has undergone important changes throughout history, expanding its focus beyond its initial emphasis on the interconnectedness of gender and ecology to include race, class, caste, indigeneity, and other forms of social oppression. In India, the origins of ecofeminism can be traced back to various movements that emerged in the 1960s and 70s, such as
the Chipko Movement, the Save Silent Valley Movement or the Forest Rights Movements, among others. It combines feminist and ecological principles to address the interconnected issues of gender inequality and ecological degradation and has been significantly led by tribal and other oppressed communities. Vandana Shiva’s work Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development (1988) has been instrumental in shaping ecofeminism in India. Other significant names include Maria Mies, who
collaborated with Shiva in the writing of Ecofeminism (1993) or Sunita Narain, Madhu Sarin and Bina Agarwal who have written extensively on and contributed to the frame of ecofeminism in the Indian context.
The conference is intended to be interdisciplinary, so papers from ecologists, historians, anthropologists, philosophers, economists, artists and environmental and cultural studies scholars are welcome. All topics should be related to India and its diaspora.
l’imagination de la matiére [El agua y los sueños: ensayo sobre la imaginación de la materia,
1942], “que no nos bañamos dos veces en el mismo río, porque ya en su profundidad, el ser
humano tiene el destino del agua que corre”(15). El agua, ciertamente, y de forma particular, el agua en movimiento, evoca el transcurso de la vida y su continuo e imprevisible devenir. El más receptivo de los elementos, la naturaleza del agua es transitoria, íntima, femenina, maternal y metafórica. La simbólica de este elemento, además, engloba una gran multitud de matices, que, como apuntan Jean Chevalier y Alain Gheerbrant, pueden, a grandes rasgos, reducirse a tres temas dominantes, perceptibles en las culturas del mundo. Estos son el agua “como fuente de vida, medio de purificación y centro de regeneración” (52). Sin embargo, como todo símbolo, el agua posee también un carácter ambivalente. Es cuna y sepulcro simultáneamente, nacimiento y muerte, alfa y omega, principio y fin.
Indianness, female subjectivities, the domestic space and the keeping of traditions, hierarchical relationships between race, class and gender, South-Asian Muslim identity, Women movements in India, and life writing are all subjects that the reader of this special issue will find in this volume.
In the first essay, Felicity Hand offers an ample study of the representation of the female in East African Asian literature through the eyes of writers such as M. S. Vassanji, Peter Nazareth and Jameela Siddiqui. Hand also exposes how, in spite of the social privilege they enjoy as Asians in East Africa, Indian women have to struggle to find their own spaces at home, becoming active agents in the construction of new social positions. Hand laments, however, that the East African Asian woman and her subaltern condition have not been sufficiently treated in fiction. In the following essay, Maurice O’Connor examines South Asian Muslims’ identity in the United Kingdom, highlighting the fact that authentic and essential Islamism should be distinguished from more radical postures that act as deformations or misrepresentations of their faith. O’Connor also explains how the South Asian Muslims living in Great Britain face a double dilemma: on the one hand, they are considered a minority and are excluded from any kind of national discourse, on the other, they must struggle against the propagation of the most radical Islamic groups. In order to illustrate all these ideas, the author offers a cultural analysis of different novels by Pakistani writers, such as Hanif Kureishi, Mohsin Hamid, Nadeem Aslam, among others.
Antonia Navarro’s essay, in turn, provides a historical overview of women movements in India till the present to demonstrate that the national front supporting Hindu nationalism, Hindutva, is currently giving a simplistic and reduced notion of Indianness, instead of its heterogeneous and complex true character. Hindutva ideology defends the idea that the essence of India must be found in the keeping of its traditions. So any activist movement concerned with gender equality is considered to be anti-Indian by the radical nationalists. Nonetheless, Navarro argues that women movements in India had existed long before its independence from the British Empire, in fact, from pre-colonial times, so their argument, she concludes, is not well-founded. Finally, the last essay deals with Salman Rusdhie’s novel Joseph Anton: A Memoir. Celia Wallhead especially focuses on the hybrid nature and the different genres and subgenres in which this novel may be classified: mainly as a pseudo-autobiography, a detective story or a literary novel. Similarities and differences with Coetzee’s autre-biography and Barthes’ autobiography “against itself” are also discussed in this study.