ABSTRACT

Subaltern Women's Narratives brings together intersectional feminist scholarship from the Humanities and Social Sciences and explores subaltern women’s narratives of resistance and subversion.

Interdisciplinary in nature, the collection focuses on fictional texts, archival records, and ethnographic research to explore the lived experiences of subaltern women in different marginalised communities across a wide geographical landscape, as they negotiate their way through modes of labour and activism. Thematically grouped, the focus of this book is two-fold: to look at the lived experiences of subaltern women as they negotiate their lives in a world of political flux and conflicts; and to examine subaltern women’s dissenting practices as recorded in texts and archives. This collection will push the boundaries of scholarship on decolonial and postcolonial feminism and subaltern studies, reading women’s subversive practices especially in the themes of epistemology and embodiment.

This book is aimed primarily at scholars, postgraduates, and undergraduates working in the fields of colonial and postcolonial studies. It will appeal to both historians and scholars of nineteenth century and contemporary literature. Specifically scholars working on subaltern theory, feminist theory, indigenous cultures, anticolonial resistance, and the Global South will find this book particularly relevant.

chapter Chapter 1|14 pages

Introduction

Subaltern women’s resistance

part I|89 pages

Epistemological Dissent

chapter Chapter 3|9 pages

Insulting the modesty of a woman?!

Examining the language of protest in Malawi

chapter Chapter 4|17 pages

Marginalised women in post-authoritarian Indonesia

Novels as fictional intervention

chapter Chapter 5|11 pages

Unhomed knowledge

The diasporic family as site of subaltern pedagogy

chapter Chapter 6|17 pages

Searching in the shadows

Aboriginal women in early colonial New South Wales

part II|60 pages

Embodying Resistance

chapter Chapter 8|15 pages

Touching the “untouchable”

Depiction of body and sexuality in select Dalit women’s autobiographies

chapter Chapter 9|13 pages

Rethinking subalternity through posthuman and feminist entanglements

Violence, displacement, exile and the woman subject in contemporary Turkish literature

chapter Chapter 10|16 pages

Conjuring up a shadow

A case of castration in a colonial archive

part III|74 pages

Practicing Subversion

chapter Chapter 12|11 pages

Survival and resilience

Rohingya refugee women’s narratives of life, loss, and hope

chapter Chapter 13|17 pages

Translating into other identities

Bama and her writing

chapter Chapter 14|15 pages

Thriving, surviving, and hanging on

Domestic workers in Harare suburbs

chapter Chapter 15|15 pages

Restitution of conjugal rights and the dissenting female body

The Rukhmabai case