Author: Gloria Goodwin Raheja
Editor(s): Gloria Goodwin Raheja
Publisher: Kali/Women Unlimited
Year: 2003
Language: English
Pages: 243
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8186706585
Description
The essays in this volume address theoretical and ethnographic issues concerning oral traditions and women's speeches in diverse South Asian communities in north and south India and Nepal.
Grounded in an awareness of the colonial, postcolonial and academic textualizations that so often have prevented women’s speech from being heard or their silences understood, the papers work towers an interpretation of Women’s expressive genres as responding critically to dominant conventions and social practices, without reducing resistance to a simple or unequivocally oppositional voice, and without lapsing into a language that suggests a homogeneity that women’s speech does not possess, or an uncrossable boundary between the speech of men and that of women. In their ethnographic interpretation, the authors evoke some of the sites at which the oral traditions of South Asian men and women respond critically or ironically to one another, mirror one another, meld sympathetically with one another, or move to silence or subsume one another, while considering always the relations of power as well as community that frame each performance, each act of speaking.
Contents
GLORIA GOODWIN RAHEJA
Introduction
The Paradoxes of Power and Community:
Women’s Oral Traditions and the Uses of Ethnography
KIRIN NARAYAN
Singing form Separation: Women’s Voices in and about Kangra Folksongs
SARAH LAMB
The Beggared Mother: Older Women’s Narratives in West Bengal
JOYCE BURKHALTER FLUECKIGER
There are Only Two Castes: Men and Women:
Negotiating Gender as a Female Healer in south Asian Islam
ANN GRODZINS GOLD
Outspoken Women: representations of Female Voices
in a Rajasthani Folklore Community
KATHRYAN S MARCH
Two Houses and the Pain of Separation in Tamang
Narratives from Highland Nepal
GLORIA GOODWIN RAHEJA
Negotiated Solidarities: Gendered Representations of
Disruption a and Desire in North Indian Oral Traditions and Popular Culture
A K RAMANUJAN
A Flowering Tree: A Women’s Tales
About the Authors