Contemporary South Asian Women’s Writing

Module description

This module is designed to introduce you to a selection of contemporary Anglophone South Asian women's texts viewed through the lens of postcolonial feminist theory. The course focuses on the new wave of Anglophone women writers of South Asian origin that has emerged to great acclaim within the last decade, including Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy and Jhumpa Lahiri. The module is structured around four inter-related, themed sections. It explores a selection of contemporary texts in relation to ways in which gender inflects representations of national identity and history, the relationship of women to postcolonial politics, violence, and war, alongside gendered perspectives of migration, identity, displacement in an increasing global context. Reading these feminist fictions in relation to the historical and theoretical debates of postcolonial feminist studies, we will consider the legacies of colonialism for women; the burden of home and family for women; the patriarchal underpinnings of nations and religious, ethnic or caste-based communities; the communalising of women's sexuality in South Asia and traumas of rape; the problematics of subalternity and representation; and issues of agency, subjectivity and the formulation of a politics of resistance in these contemporary women writers counter-narratives to patriarchal discourses and to dominant configurations of the relationship between nation, gender and sexuality.

Assessment details

1 x 4,000-word essay

Teaching pattern

One two-hour seminar, weekly

Module description disclaimer

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