Understanding Women’s Experiences of Displacement: Literature, Culture and Society in South Asia

Description

The South Asian region has been especially prone to mass displacement and relocations owing to its varied geographical settings as well as socio-political factors. This book examines the women’s perspective in issues related to displacement, loss, conflict and rehabilitation. It maps diverse engagements with women’s experiences of displacement in the South Asian region through a nuanced examination of unexplored literary narratives, life writing and memoirs, cultural discourses and social practices. The book explores themes like sexuality and the female body, women and the national identity, violence against women in Indian partition narratives, stories of exile in real life and fairy tales. It also offers an understanding of the ruptures created by dislocation and exile in memory, identity and culture by analyzing the spaces occupied by displaced women and their lived experiences. The volume looks at the multiplicity of reasons behind women’s displacement and offers a wider perspective on the intersections between gender, migration and marginalization. This book will be useful for scholars and researchers of cultural studies, literature, gender studies, conflict studies, development studies, South Asian studies, refugee studies, diaspora studies and sociology. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents Image List of contributors Foreword Acknowledgements Introduction: Displacement: Debates and engagements Part I Critical essays Chapter 1 Interconnected lives, disrupted realities: Revisiting gendered narratives from India’s northeastern Partition, 1947 Chapter 2 “A language without words”: Remapping women’s displacements through transnationalism in Chandani Lokugé’s fiction Chapter 3 Displacement, family sagas, and a feminist gaze: Retelling women’s sexual history in Love Marriage and Bodies in Motion Chapter 4 Prison as a paradigm of displacement: Narratives of female prisoners in 1970s West Bengal Chapter 5 Negotiating the trauma of displacement in Bharati Mukherjee’s Wife and Jasmine Chapter 6 Post-riot narratives: Locating the voices of “displaced” women? Chapter 7 Nation, female body, and sexuality: Contextualizing Hansda Shekhar’s “November Is the Month of Migration” Chapter 8 When home is a glass coffin: Women and displacement in some Indian fairy tales Chapter 9 Women, violence, displacement: Delineating the abduction motif in South Asian partition stories Chapter 10 Singing in exile: Relocating the notion of displacement in Usha Kishore’s Immigrant Chapter 11 The post-Independence rehabilitation displacement: The birangona case in Bangladesh Chapter 12 “Please, dear Zari, tell my story!”: Reading women’s displacement in Zarghuna Kargar’s Dear Zari * Part II Life writings and memoirs Chapter 13 Among her own Chapter 14 Maps, shapes, and women breaking (out of) homes: A memoir Chapter 15 “Reaching out to grasp roots … I stand uprooted” Chapter 16 Dreams, displacement, and a garden Chapter 17 The women in Chambal: Translated from Bengali by Sanghita Sanyal Chapter 18 Women in conflict Index