1st Edition
Subaltern Women’s Narratives Strident Voices, Dissenting Bodies
Subaltern Women's Narratives brings together intersectional feminist scholarship from the Humanities and Social Sciences and explores subaltern women’s narratives of resistance and subversion.
Interdisciplinary in nature, the collection focuses on fictional texts, archival records, and ethnographic research to explore the lived experiences of subaltern women in different marginalised communities across a wide geographical landscape, as they negotiate their way through modes of labour and activism. Thematically grouped, the focus of this book is two-fold: to look at the lived experiences of subaltern women as they negotiate their lives in a world of political flux and conflicts; and to examine subaltern women’s dissenting practices as recorded in texts and archives. This collection will push the boundaries of scholarship on decolonial and postcolonial feminism and subaltern studies, reading women’s subversive practices especially in the themes of epistemology and embodiment.
This book is aimed primarily at scholars, postgraduates, and undergraduates working in the fields of colonial and postcolonial studies. It will appeal to both historians and scholars of nineteenth century and contemporary literature. Specifically scholars working on subaltern theory, feminist theory, indigenous cultures, anticolonial resistance, and the Global South will find this book particularly relevant.
1. Introduction: Subaltern Women’s Resistance
Samraghni Bonnerjee
PART I: EPISTEMOLOGICAL DISSENT
2. Narratives of Hidden Curriculum in Fiji
Elizabeth Yomantas
3. "Insulting the Modesty of a Woman?!": Examining the Language of Protest in Malawi
Asante Mtenje
4. Marginalised Women in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia: Novels as Fictional Intervention
Silvia Mayasari-Hoffert
5. Unhomed Knowledge: The Diasporic Family as Site of Subaltern Pedagogy
Mrinalini Greedharry
6. Searching in the Shadows: Aboriginal Women in Early Colonial New South Wales
Annemarie McLaren and Shino Konishi
7. Feminist voice(s) in South African Curriculum-Making and Dissemination
Bernice Badal
PART II: EMBODYING RESISTANCE
8. Touching the ‘Untouchable’: Depiction of Body and Sexuality in Select Dalit Women’s Autobiographies
Bidisha Pal
9. Rethinking Subalternity through Posthuman and Feminist Entanglements: Violence, Displacement, Exile and the Woman Subject in Contemporary Turkish Literature
Deniz Gündoğan İbrişim
10. Conjuring up a Shadow: A Case of Castration in a Colonial Archive
Niyati Misra-Shenoy
11. Voicing Sexual and Social Resistance in Seventeenth-Century Manila
Susan Broomhall
PART III: PRACTICING SUBVERSION
12. Survival and Resilience: Rohingya Refugee Women’s Narratives of Life, Loss, and Hope
Farhana Rahman
13. Translating into Other Identities: Bama and Her Writing
Nandita Ghosh
14. Thriving, Surviving and Hanging on: Domestic Workers in Harare Suburbs
Rudo Gaidzanwa
15. Restitution of Conjugal Rights and the Dissenting Female Body: The Rukhmabai Case
Kanika Sharma
16. Subaltern’s Resistance against Rape and Sexual Assault: An Aporia?
Sabujkoli Bandopadhyay
Biography
Samraghni Bonnerjee is Wellcome ISSF Fellow at the School of English, University of Leeds, and Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College, Oxford. She was a Vice-Chancellor’s Scholar at the University of Sheffield, where she read for a PhD in English Literature.
