Hannah Arendt, Education, and Liberation : A Comparative South Asian Feminist Perspective

This article focuses on Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), education, and liberation, from a comparative South Asian feminist perspective. I am examining Arendt’s work as an independent-minded political theorist and philosopher who believed passionately both in education and liberation. She herself said, in an interview with Gunter Gaus in 1964, ‘I do not belong to the circle of philosophers. My profession, if one can even speak of it at all, is political theory.’ Exploring Arendt’s combination of existentialism and politically radical liberalism, my paper analyses some of the ways in which Arendt and two South Asian women thinker-activists have created models of human action and socio-political liberation, with a special interest in the sphere of education. I am arguing that Arendt’s view of politics as phenomenological (grounded in categories that are experiential) and existential has great usefulness and richness for analysing the work of women who were agents in the world of human ‘action’, a category that Arendt valued so much, and that she distinguished from ‘work’ and ‘labour’ in The Human Condition. Equally, Arendt grappled with the rich, eclectic resources of classic political thought, from Plato to Locke to Marx and Luxemburg. Reading Arendt non-hagiographically, I analyse her as an independent-minded, wide-ranging, and generative thinker on questions of power, politics, and the realm of human action

Remobilizing Religion in Utopian Studies: A View from a Feminist Literary and Historical Scholar of Utopia

This article explores how factors such as gender and cross-religious communication frame and yield utopian perspectives in Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s literature and practice as educator and feminist. The article makes the case that Hossain’s body of work envisions utopia in complex, many-layered ways. Early in her creative career, as a member of the Muslim youth herself, Hossain created gender-just utopian visions that also embedded cross-religious dialogue and cooperation. She later became an educator, inspiring youth, particularly Muslim girls and young women, with utopian ideas and practices. The article concludes that analyzing Hossain’s writing in utopian frames, as well as examining her writing and work through Ruth Levitas’s approach to utopia as method, helps to explain Hossain’s inclusion of religion and spirituality in her oeuvre

Urban utopias : memory, rights, and speculation

UrbanUtopias_BarnitaBagchi_Ed._JUP_2020_1.pdf // https://dspace.library.uu.nl/bitstream/handle/1874/415282/UrbanUtopias_BarnitaBagchi_Ed._JUP_2020_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=

Education, women’s narrative, and feminist civil society activism: Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s feminist utopias

This paper will focus on two feminist utopian narratives by the Indian and Bengali Muslim feminist Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, the English work Sultana’s Dream (1905) and the Bengali work Padmarag, or The Ruby (1924), which I have recently compiled, translated (in the case of Padmarag), and introduced in a modern edition. I shall analyse and contextualise these narratives within Rokeya’s broader career as feminist, urban civil society activist, and educator. I shall move to a consideration of ho..

“Instruction a Torment”? Jane Austen’s Early Writing and Conflicting Versions of Female Education in Romantic-Era “Conservative” British Women’s Novels

Austen’s juvenilia is a fruitful entry point into the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century field of “conservative” female-authored fiction centred on the development and education of adult or near-adult women. Austen is, in her treatment of female education, a highly revisionist conservative, but also, in terms of adventurousness, range of ideas, and ambitions, much more conservative than public-minded conservative writers of the 1790s, such as Clara Reeve, or some of Austen’s own contemporaries, such as Mary Brunton. It is also possible to argue that Austen’s deep scepticism about the pressures of education as ideology operating on women makes her, by a double turn, not a conservative writer. The instability and unviability of radical and conservative as categories in opposition to each other in the context of Romantic-era British women’s writing is now recognized. However, it has not been recognized that this unviability has significant consequences for our understanding of Romantic-era, female-authored fiction about female education. Tensions and instabilities mark out the female novelistic field in this period. This field is far more of an unhomogenized, patchwork arena than has been supposed, and it does not lead to the clear-cut definition of a hegemonic, bourgeois domestic female subjectivity. The narrative is far more complex, and it is misleading to reduce to a linear model the curves, fluctuations, contradictions, and possibilities for female development found in Austen’s early treatments of female education, as well as in fiction by other contemporary or near-contemporary, bold, disturbing, adventurous, “conservative” delineators of female development such as Reeve or Brunton