Ebook Engendering Transatlantic Literary Configurations

This book traces the cross-border literary pathways of Indian women’s writing, both within the nation and transnationally, across the U.S.A. and Britain. It investigates the ways in which the trope “woman,” a central one in the imagery of the postcolonial Indian nation, is re-negotiated when mobilized across the interpretative and disciplinary boundaries of Area Studies, Comparative Literature, and Gender Studies. Addressing the intellectual,visual, and literary work of—among others—Katherine Mayo, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Amitav Ghosh, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Amitava Kumar, Deepa Mehta, and Gayatri Gopinath, the book specifically engages the literary anthologiesof women’s writings publishedin the 1990s, and explores their significance both within the framework of themulticultural curricula of the U.S. andthe UK, and in comparison with the multicultural anthologies emerging from the British Asian and South Asian American diasporic experience. A critical analysisof these texts, a blend of academic essaysand short narratives, prompts a reflectionon the complex process of reading the gendered body across the apparatuses and institutions within which it is inscribed.