Relocating Colonial Women in Resistance: An Interpretation of Rabindranath Tagore’s Nastanirh and Chaturanga

The Colonial Bengal of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a place of contradictions. For instance, despite certain evident advancements in the resolution of the women’s question, some of the emancipatory attempts of the period marked a rather dubious account of women’s liberation as patriarchal underpinnings hegemonized the efforts. Amid this complex backdrop, the colonial women’s position is further jeopardized by the western feminist scholarship that contrives colonial third world women as perennial victims and beneficiaries of emancipatory actions from the West. The paper attempts to relocate the colonial women and their resistance by negotiating the fissures in their construction. This study, informed by bell hooks’ (1990) postulations on margin and resistance, simultaneously seeks to form a bridge between the experiences of marginalized women beyond borders. Rabindranath Tagore’s Nastanirh (1901) and Chaturanga (1916) are chosen for close textual reading to examine the experiences of colonial women. The author’s women protagonists often embody the social dilemma of the period. Tagore’s Damini and Charu exist in the margin of resistance whilst Nanibala occupies the margin of deprivation. Significantly, Charu and Damini traverse the precarious “profound edges” of the margin to imagine a “new world” free of subjugation. Thus, the resistance offered by these women subverts the predominant conceptions of victimhood of colonial women, and it enables them to be posited as active agents.

Descolonizando narrativas sobre mulheres: a fotografia como potência

As narrativas sobre mulheres, mesmo dentro dos estudos feministas, podem ser entendidas como normativas e colonizadoras, especialmente quando se dão a partir de um olhar ocidental sobre as mulheres do terceiro mundo. A partir da análise do pensamento da autora indiana Chandra Talpade Mohanty, este artigo busca relacionar seu discurso com exemplos de mulheres fotógrafas que buscaram desconstruir essa estrutura hierárquica do olhar, como Claudia Andujar, Graciela Iturbide, Nair Benedicto e Susan Meiselas, além das reflexões da artista interdisciplinar Grada Kilomba, em diálogo com outros autores do campo da imagem. A fotografia pode ser considerada, assim, uma ferramenta de escrita de novas narrativas de resistência.Palavras-chave: Feminismo. Fotografia. Mulheres fotógrafas. AbstractNarratives about women, even within feminist studies, can be understood as normative and colonizing, especially when they are done from a western perspective on third world women. Based on the analysis of the thought of Indian author Chandra Talpade Mohanty, this article seeks to relate her discourse to examples of female photographers who sought to deconstruct this hierarchical structure of the gaze, such as Claudia Andujar, Graciela Iturbide, Nair Benedicto and Susan Meiselas, in addition to the reflections of the interdisciplinary artist Grada Kilomba, in dialogue with other authors in the field of image. Photography can thus be considered a tool for writing new narratives of resistance.Keywords: Feminism. Photography. Women photographers.

Konsep Feminisme Gayatri Chakrasvorty Spivak dan Upaya Membangun Keluarga Unggul (Kajian Feminisme Modern)

<em>Concept understanding is very necessary in various things as well as understanding about balancing roles in a family, it needs the understanding of feminism concept. The concept which initiated by Gayatri Chakrasvorty Spivak becomes a reference, as the identity of women in post-colonial feminism is understood as an awareness of women's differences. Third world women are considered to have a greater burden of oppression than first world women. The burden is based on colonial and imperial oppression of gender, race, ethnicity and religion, so that women's identity in postcolonial feminism is directed at a more productive domain to understand identity based on nationality awareness. Gayatri Chakrasvorty Spivak as one of the postcolonial theorists carefully sees that sexual oppression directed at third world women is an oppression that leads to subaltern sovereignty. Therefore, a transformation of subaltern women's awareness is needed by understanding the differences in women's experiences as the basis that woman empowerment is important to be able to form women who are more active and productive, and contribute positively to their families and communities. Overcoming subaltern in families who have a patriarchal tradition is certainly not easy, many things and efforts must be carried out. Providing space and opportunities for women is one of the efforts to uphold justice for women to take roles. Efforts to make a superior family can not be separated from the role of women. The existence of cooperation between parts of the family becomes the perfection and excellence of a family.</em>

The Portrayal of Traumatic Impacts of 9/11 in Fiction: A Counter Discourse of Third Worlds Female Trauma in Waldmans The Submission

The incident of 9/11 opened up new challenges for the Americans and people of the world. As the terrorists were men, the incident of 9/11 was generally seen as a masculine event thus erasing the traumatic sufferings of women. The present paper is aimed to trace the impact of Western culturally constructed trauma against the third world women. The major theoretical insights have been taken from Kaplan (2003)s Feminist Futures: Trauma, the Post-9/11 World and a Fourth Feminism. The analyzed data reveals that the identity of Asma Anwar as representative of third world women remains unstable. She has been represented as an object of no significance in the American society. We see that Asma Anwar as a woman of the third world had to bear the burden of history as well as her body

FROM ABSENCE TO RE(-)PRESENTATION: A READING OF THE FEMALE SUBALTERN’S BODY IN COETZEE’S WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS

This research paper explores an alternative mode of knowledge-production for the representation of the barbarian girl in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. In light of Chandra Mohanty’s critique pertaining the prominent academic methodologies that subsume all Third World women as homogenous and ahistorical subject of academic investigation, the paper offers an epistemological production of the barbarian girl’s representation without committing the act of ‘epistemic violence’: perceived from the realm of the metatextual instead from that of the textual, the girl’s somatic representation via its ‘presence by absence’ is recalcitrant and unyielding against the violence of imperialism.

Development

This chapter turns to the construction of a category within a category, “women in developing countries,” whose difference from the Western norm defined the severity of woman’s oppression and made her into the other of the woman worker. In the early post-WWII years, the ILO juggled a commitment to equality with designation of Third World women as the most needy of distinct programs. It promoted handicraft despite the resemblance of such labor to exploitative industrial home work. When addressing Women Workers in a Changing World in 1964, the ILO separated the situation of women in developing countries, whose income generation could be integrated into home labor, from women in industrialized regions whose family responsibilities interfered with their labor force participation. At the 1975 UN World Conference on Women, the meaning of development, like that of equality, was up for grabs in the ideological contest between state socialist and newly independent states against the former colonial states and market economies. ILO opposition to the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) intertwined with its attempt to provide Third World women with substantive equality.