Nomadic Narratives

The Thar Desert, which is today divided by an international boundary, has historically been a frontier region connecting Punjab, Multan, Sindh, Gujarat and Rajasthan. This book looks at the Desert as an historical region shaped through the mobility of its inhabitants - warriors, pastoralists, traders, ascetics and bards, often in overlapping capacities. It challenges the frames of Mughal-Rajput relationships generally employed to explore the histories of the Thar, arguing that Rajputana remains an inadequate category to explore polities located in this frontier region, where along with Rajputs, a range of groups, such as Charans, Bhils, Meenas, Soomras and Pathans controlled circulation, and with whom the Rajput states had to constantly negotiate. Sifting through a wide range of Rajasthani written and oral narratives, travelogues of British administrators, and vernacular as well as English records, the book explores long-term relationships between mobility, martiality, memory and identity in the desert expanses of the Thar.

"The most thoughtful integration of paintings and epistolary narrative that I know. Nomadic Narratives, Visual Forces shows how letters do more than depict the `real' painter; the analysis problematizes the relations between visual and written texts. Insights from the author's meticulous archival research with autobiographical materials engage dynamically with Gwen John's art work, resulting in a dialogic narrative about the complex subjectivity of a woman artist working in a male-dominated world. Drawing on contemporary theory, Maria Tamboukou offers a new analytic perspective on the relation between the visual and the epistolary, which will push the `narrative turn' in social research in exciting directions." Catherine Kohler Riessman, Boston College --Book Jacket.

"Discusses the emergence of socio-historical identities in the Thar Desert with the mobility of its inhabitants"--

This book follows the stories of forcefully displaced women and raises the question of whether we can still use the figuration of the nomadic subject in feminist theories and politics. This question is examined in the light of the ongoing global crises of mobility and severe border practices. In recounting their stories migrant and refugee women appear in the world as ‘who they are’ — unique and unrepeatable human beings —and not as ‘what they are’ —objectified ‘refugees’, ‘victims’ or ‘stateless subjects’. Women’s stories leave traces of their will to rewrite their exclusion from oppressive regimes, defend their choice of civil and patriarchal disobedience, grasp their passage, claim their right to have rights and affirm their determination for new beginnings. What emerges from the encounter between theoretical abstractions and women’s lived experiences is the need to decolonize feminist theories and make cartographies of mobility assemblages, wherein nomadism is a component of entangled relations and not a category or a figuration of a subject position. These stories that have now been collected, transcribed and analysed; they have created a rich archive of uprooted women’s experiences and have brought forward a wide range of new ideas that will be presented and discussed in the book: Decolonizing feminist theory Mobility assemblages and geographies of nomadism The art of listening to fragmented narratives and the labour of translation Crossing borders and inhabiting borderlands Radical solitude and radical hope Feminist genealogies of labour under conditions of forced displacement The force of political narratives through the figure of Antigone? Education for hope Imagining the non-nomad 4 narrated stories will also be presented in full interwoven in the theoretical discussions of the book, thus opening up a dialogic space between theoretical reflections and diffractions, and narratives of lived experiences.

"This book brings together feminist histories in education with an innovative approach to epistolary narrative analytics. In deploying the notion of the epistolary bildung the author rigorously and eloquently shows how the correspondence of Barbara Bodichon can shed fresh light in a range of personal problems and public issues in women’s lives, which remain relevant today" - Maria Tamboukou, Professor of Feminist Studies, University of East London, UK This book assesses Barbara Bodichon’s significance in the history of the women’s movement in Britain by elaborating a conceptualisation of letters as sources of feminist development. Bodichon was the leader of the first women’s suffrage committee in England, which collected 1,500 signatures in favour of the female vote – a petition presented in the House of Commons by sympathising MPs to support the amendment of the 1867 Reform Bill. This book explores the significance of letter-exchange in Barbara Bodichon’s feminist becoming as she managed to mobilize partisans and secure signatures by means of chains of friendship letters spreading across the country. For letters functioned as platforms where, concomitantly to her making sense of her experiential input, Bodichon adopted, redefined and challenged circulating discourses – transforming them in the process and hence contributing to the production of feminist knowledge, intersubjectively and collaboratively in dialogue with her addressees. At the crossroads of history of feminism, gender history and history of women’s education, this book explores the significance of letter-exchange in Bodichon’s development into one of the galvanizing figures of the women’s rights movement in Victorian England.

This book shows how diverse, critical modern world narratives in prose fiction and film emphasize masculine subjectivities through affects and ethics. Highlighting diverse affects and mental states in subjective voices and modes, modern narratives reveal men as feeling, intersubjective beings, and not as detached masters of master narratives. Modern novels and films suggest that masculine subjectivities originate paradoxically from a combination of copying and negation, surplus and lack, sameness and alterity: among fathers and sons, siblings and others. In this comparative study of more than 30 diverse world narratives, Mooney deftly uses psychoanalytic thought, narrative theories of first- and third-person narrators, and Levinasian and feminist ethics of care, creativity, honor, and proximity. We gain a nuanced picture of diverse postpaternal postgentlemen emerging out of older character structures of the knight and gentleman.

This book explores and contests both outsiders’ projections of Mongolia and the self-objectifying tropes Mongolians routinely deploy to represent their own country as a land of nomads. It speaks to the experiences of many societies and cultures that are routinely treated as exotic, romantic, primitive or otherwise different and Other in Euro-American imaginaries, and how these imaginaries are also internally produced by those societies themselves. The assumption that Mongolia is a nomadic nation is largely predicated upon Mongolia’s environmental and climatic conditions, which are understood to make Mongolia suitable for little else than pastoral nomadism. But to the contrary, the majority of Mongolians have been settled in and around cities and small population centers. Even Mongolians who are herders have long been unable to move freely in a smooth space, as dictated by the needs of their herds, and as they would as free-roaming "nomads." Instead, they have been subjected to various constraints across time that have significantly limited their movement. The book weaves threads from disparate branches of Mongolian studies to expose various visible and invisible constraints on population mobility in Mongolia from the Qing period to the post-socialist era. With its in-depth analysis of the complexities of the relationship between land rights, mobility, displacement, and the state, the book makes a valuable contribution to the fields of cultural geography, political geography, heritage and culture studies, as well as Eurasian and Inner-Asian Studies. Winner of the Julian Minghi Distinguished Book Award (AAG, 2022)

In the final chapter of this volume, the authors refer to the pedagogical vantage points offered by narrative inquiry, an apt comment that encapsulates the volume s purpose and its spirit. As an increasing number of people throughout the world and from a broad range of disciplines are turning to narrative as a research methodology, this volume is timely in its focus on the learning and teaching of this approach. The contributors to the volume, all narrative scholars themselves, write about the creative and challenging pedagogical activities that they use in order to enable others to learn about and do narrative research. The volume will be of particular interest to those teaching narrative research methodologies at both undergraduate and postgraduate level in the social sciences, medical sciences and the humanities. The contributions from Hong Kong, Israel, Europe and North America, all reflect critically on the rich complexities of using and teaching narrative in those contexts and attend closely to the diverse constituencies of their learning communities."