Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism

ISBN-13: 9780415085045 / Angielski / Miękka / 1993 / 168 str.

Rajeswari Sunder Rajan; Kaushik Rajan Sunder; Rajan Ra Sunder

Opis

How can the women-as-victim be read as a resisting subject? Real and Imagined Women explores the position of the female subject in a postcolonial state. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan investigates the problematic relationship between the theory of the first world against the matter of the third - that is, she brings postcolonial theory to bear on the politics of gender, religion and the culture of contemporary India, focusing on the practice and the representaion of sati. Her writing engages with such subjects as pre-colonial Tamil and Indian texts and colonial imperialist texts; Indian writings and films; women's victimization by forms of sanctioned violence and their fraught, if passive, subject-position; contemporary novels by Indian women writers, and the elite women-as-leader, focusing on the discourse generated by Indira Ghandi. Real and Imagined Women explores a series of interesting and important questions for feminists working with postcolonial theory, to offer a challenging mode of reading resistance which destroys the stereotyped and sensationalized humanist image of the third world woman as victim.

Spis treści

Introduction; Chapter 1 THE SUBJECT OF SATI; Chapter 2 REPRESENTING SATI; Chapter 3 LIFE AFTER RAPE; Chapter 4 THE NAME OF THE HUSBAND; Chapter 5 GENDER, LEADERSHIP AND REPRESENTATION; Chapter 6 REAL AND IMAGINED WOMEN; INDEX;

O autorze

Rajeswari Sunder Rajan lectures in English at the University of Delhi. She has edited a collection of essays entitled The Lie of the Land: English Literary Studies in India and her work on feminist theory and politics has appeared in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and The Yale Journal of Criticism.