Rites Of Passage In Postcolonial Women S Writing

This volume brings a variety of new approaches and contexts to modern and contemporary women’s writing. Contributors include both new and well-established scholars from Europe, Australia, the USA, and the Caribbean. Their essays draw on, adapt, and challenge anthropological perspectives on rites of passage derived from the work of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner. Collectively, the essays suggest that women’s writing and women’s experiences from diverse cultures go beyond any straightforward notion of a threefold structure of separation, transition, and incorporation. Some essays include discussion of traditional rites of passage such as birth, motherhood, marriage, death, and bereavement; others are interested in exploring less traditional, more fluid, and/or problematic rites such as abortion, living with HIV/AIDS, and coming into political consciousness. Contributors seek ways of linking writing on rites of passage to feminist, postcolonial, and psychoanalytic theories which foreground margins, borders, and the outsider. The three opening essays explore the work of the Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera, whose groundbreaking work explored taboo subjects such as infanticide and incest. A wide range of other essays focus on writers from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia, and Europe, including Jean Rhys, Bharati Mukherjee, Arundhati Roy, Jean Arasanayagam, Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, and Eva Sallis. Rites of Passage in Postcolonial Women’s Writing will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of postcolonial and modern and contemporary women’s writing, and to students on literature and women’s studies courses who want to study women’s writing from a cross-cultural perspective and from different theoretical positions. Contributors: Lizzy Attree, Lopamudra Basu, Katrin Berndt, Gay Breyley, Helen Cousins, Tanya Dalziell, Alexandra Dumitrescu, Anna Gething, Jessica Gildersleeve, Sharanya Jayawickrama, Kimberley M. Jew, Polina Mackay, Alexandra W. Schultheis, Rachel Slater, Irene Visser.

This volume brings a variety of new approaches and contexts to modem and contemporary women's writing. Contributors include both new and well-established scholars from Europe, Australia, the USA , and the Caribbean. Their essays draw on, adapt, and challenge anthropological perspectives on rites of passage derived from the work of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner. Collectively, the essays suggest that women's writing and women's experiences from diverse cultures go beyond any straightforward notion of a threefold structure of separation, transition, and incorporation. Some essays include discussion of traditional rites of passage such as birth, motherhood, marriage, death, and bereavement; others are interested in exploring less traditional, more fluid, and/or problematic rites such as abortion, living with HI V/AIDS, and coming into political consciousness. Contributors seek ways of linking writing on rites of passage to feminist, postcolonial, and psychoanalytic theories which foreground margins, borders, and the outsider. The three opening essays explore the work of the Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera, whose groundbreaking work explored taboo subjects such as infanticide and incest. A wide range of other essays focus on writers from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia, and Europe. including Jean Rhys, Bharati Mukherjee, Arundhati Roy, Jean Arasanayagam, Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, and Eva Sallis. Rites of Passage in Postcolonial Women's Writing will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of postcolonial and modern and contemporary women's writing, and to students on literature and women's studies courses who want to study women's writing from a cross-cultural perspective and from different theoretical positions. Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo is Head of Humanities at Sheffield Hallam University. Her research focus is on African literature (particularly Zimbabwean), contemporary women's writing, and postcolonial cinemas. Gina Wisker is Professor of Higher Education and Contemporary Literature at the University of Brighton, where she teaches literature, is the head of the centre for learning and teaching, and pursues her research interests in postcolonial women's writing.

This classic work of anthropology explores the transitional stages of an individual’s life and the societal rituals involved. Arnold van Gennep’s masterwork, The Rites of Passage, has been a staple of anthropological education for more than a century. First published in French in 1909, and translated into English by the University of Chicago Press in 1960, this landmark book explores how the life of an individual in any society can be understood as a succession of transitions: birth, puberty, marriage, parenthood, old age, and, finally, death. Van Gennep’s great insight was discerning a common structure in each of these seemingly different transitions, involving rituals of separation, liminality, and incorporation. With compelling precision, he set out the terms that would both define twentieth-century ritual theory and become a part of our everyday lexicon. This new edition of his work demonstrates how we can still make use of its enduring critical tools to understand our own social, religious, and political worlds, and even our personal and professional lives. In his new introduction, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and anthropologist David I. Kertzer sheds new light on van Gennep, on the battles he fought, and on the huge impact the book has had since publication of the first English edition. With a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize–winner David I. Kertzer

An alphabetized volume on women writers, major titles, movements, genres from medieval times to the present.

This book puts the short story at the heart of contemporary postcolonial studies and questions what postcolonial literary criticism may be. Focusing on short fiction between 1975 and today – the period in which critical theory came to determine postcolonial studies – it argues for a sophisticated critique exemplified by the ambiguity of the form.

The contributors to this volume re-think established insights of memory and trauma theory and enrich those studies with diverse Asian texts, critically analyzing literary and cultural representations of Asia and its global diasporas. They broaden the scope of memory and trauma studies by examining how the East/ West binary delimits horizons of "trauma" by excluding Asian texts. Are memory and trauma always reliable registers of the past that translate across cultures and nations? Are supposedly pan-human experiences of suffering disproportionately coloured by eurocentric structures of region, reason, race, or religion? How are Asian texts and cultural producers yet viewed through biased lenses? How might recent approaches and perspectives generated by Asian literary and cultural texts hold purchase in the 21st century? Critically meditating on such questions, and whether existing concepts of memory and trauma accurately address the histories, present states, and futures of the non-Occidental world, this volume unites perspectives on both dominant and marginalized sites of the broader Asian continent. Contributors explore the complex intersections of literature, history, ethics, affect, and social justice across East, South, and Southeast Asia, and on Asian diasporas in Australia and the USA. They draw on yet diverge from "Orientalism" and "Area Studies" given today’s need for nuanced analytical methodologies in an era defined by the COVID-19 global pandemic. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars invested in memory and trauma studies, comparative Asian studies, diaspora and postcolonial studies, global studies, and social justice around contemporary identities and 20th and 21st century Asia.

From The Other Boleyn Girl to Fingersmith , this collection explores the popularity of female-centred historical novels in recent years. It asks how these representations are influenced by contemporary gender politics, and whether they can be seen as part of a wider feminist project to recover women's history.

This book represents a significant contribution to academic knowledge, making a compelling case for a contemporary analytical re-reading of a number of “core” postcolonial women’s narratives, such as Erna Brodber’s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood, and Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter. These narratives highlight diversity, contextuality, opposition, and metachrony, have a “generative literary function”, and anticipate what have now become postcolonial feminist issues and debates. Bringing together feminist writing from a range of postcolonial contexts, the book contributes to a field represented by the critical writings of Francoise Lionnet, Ketu Katrak, and Elleke Boehmer, among others. The deconstructive, cultural approach of the book is mobilised to support an in-depth literary analysis which focuses on female oppression, difference, voice, and agency. Questions of what it means to be “a woman” and to be “postcolonial” are read as central debates which emphasise “multi-vocal and multi-focal” female narratives and perspectives. That is, they highlight the temporal, as well as cross-cultural links and implications of the selected narratives, which give the project a kind of positive complexity and linkage. Above all, the analysis of several unconventional modes and (physical/imaginative) spaces of female resistance, such as prison, widow confinement, and madness, yields some surprising results that are sustained by a close reading of the texts which are not only attentive to questions of genre, structure, imagery and narrative endings, but also oppositional, instructive and reconstructive.