"Mother-weights" and lost fathers: parents in South Asian American literature

That parent-child relationships should play a significant role within South Asian American literature is perhaps no surprise, since this is crucial material for any writer. But the particular forms they so often take – a dysfunctional mother-daughter dynamic, leading to the search for maternal surrogates; and the figure of the prematurely deceased father – are more perplexing. Why do families adhere to these patterns in so many South Asian American texts and what does that tell us about this œuvre? More precisely, why are mothers subjected to a harsher critique than fathers and what purpose does this critique serve? How might we interpret the trope of the untimely paternal death? In this article I will seek to answer these questions – arguably key to an understanding of this growing body of writing – by considering works produced between the 1990s and the early twenty-first century by a range of South Asian American writers

Narrative techniques and subversion in the novels of Edith Wharton.

There are two branches of scholarship on Edith Wharton. One branch tends to focus upon a comparison of her novels with her life, and tends to document her work as that of a social historian and custodian of manners of old New York. The other branch, represented by feminist critics, uses a Marxist approach to read the thematics of Wharton's novels, and argues that her heroines are perched between the cusp of the "old" and the "new" woman. This study of Wharton extends and intertwines both these lines of scholarship to argue that Wharton's novels must be read against her life, and that the critical focus must be kept on her "new" woman, who, as the gendered speaking subject, speaks from the margins of cultural edifices. This study will focus on the idea of the splintered self, particularly the quandaries of the gendered self, an issue that shapes and determines the form of her narratives. This analysis shows that in the intersection of her fiction, her letters, and her autobiography, Wharton's gendered speaking subject enunciates a radical critique of the culture in which she lived

Indian feminism in an international framework

In the heritage of imperialism, one of the peculiar by-products is the 'emancipated' woman in the decolonized nation, not her sister in metropolitan space, whom we know much better. However unwilling she may be to ac knowledge this, part of the historical burden of that 'emancipated' postcolonial is to be in a situation of tu-toi-ing with the radical feminist in the metropolis

Dermographia written on the skin or, how the Irish became white in India

This article meditates on the meaning of skin and its politics and is divided into two parts. The first part is concerned with a historical/cultural examination of skin, linking it to theories of embodiment and colonialism/racism. In the second part, Rudyard Kipling's Kim is examined for its positing of the ambivalent-skinned Irish protagonist. The article concludes by scripting in the notion of postwhiteness, and attempts to provide a reading of skin alternative to the Cartesian comprehension of the mind-body split