1st Edition
Non-Conforming Women in Neoliberal Cities Re-thinking Empowerment in Contemporary Diaspora Fiction and Film
Introduction: Mapping Identities: South Asian Diasporic Women and Empowerment
1 Neoliberal Cities as Sites of Female Empowerment
2 “Places and Spaces”: Transformative Perspectives in Diasporic Narratives
3 Intersectionality and Its Impact on Identity Formation: A Comparative Analysis of South Asian Diasporic Female Characters
4 “Home and Homelessness”: Nostalgia and the Impact of Culinary Arts on Female Identity
5 Trauma and Healing: The Journeys of Diasporic Women as an Escape Mechanism
6 Conclusion (and beyond)
Biography
Shrimoyee Chattopadhyay has completed her PhD at the Doctoral School of Literary and Cultural Studies, University of Debrecen, Hungary, under the prestigious Stipendium Hungaricum Scholarship programme. She does research in contemporary South Asian diasporic fiction and film, but her interests include gender studies, food culture, memory, and trauma studies. She was awarded the Bangabidya Young Scholar Award (2022).
"The evolution of the role of the feminine, the typified ‘woman’ construct, has seen many shifts in immediate history. While the journey of gender identity confrontations have been surveyed and interrogated with lenses that managed to telescope temporal-spatial variances – thereby creating a composite look at the historical and geographical progressions (and regressions) – the focus on the immediate has demanded greater critical deliberation. In the last few decades the global pattern of emigration and diasporic attachments have necessitated substantial departures from the conventional understanding of such phenomena. The political atmosphere of the world has created large-scale movements, mostly involuntary, that had affected the location and situation of those already transplanted. The exploration that this book engages in, is based on those non-conforming stances that translate into literature and the literary. These are positions that can challenge the institutionalised structures. The chapters in this book look at a variety of such positions – theorizing them, interrogating them and celebrating them. Shrimoyee Chattopadhyay takes us on a journey that spans from terrors and trauma to healing and home. Home is perhaps the most significant concept in the world that we live in, and identifying it is identifying the self. The dislocated finding home is perhaps the most poignant dream of today. This book looks at a major part of that dreamscape – which can and does become nightmarish more often than we would like to recognise."
Dr Siddhartha Biswas, University of Calcutta.
