Speaking of the Self

Gender, Performance, and Autobiography in South Asia

Anshu Malhotra, Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Anshu Malhotra, Siobhan Lambert-Hurley

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780822359913, 9780822359838
• eBook ISBN: 9780822374978
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Many consider the autobiography to be a Western genre that represents the self as fully autonomous. The contributors to Speaking of the Self challenge this presumption by examining a wide range of women's autobiographical writing from South Asia. Expanding the definition of what kinds of writing can be considered autobiographical, the contributors analyze everything from poetry, songs, mystical experiences, and diaries to prose, fiction, architecture, and religious treatises. The authors they study are just as diverse: a Mughal princess, an eighteenth-century courtesan from Hyderabad, a nineteenth-century Muslim prostitute in Punjab, a housewife in colonial Bengal, a Muslim Gandhian devotee of Krishna, several female Indian and Pakistani novelists, and two male actors who worked as female impersonators. The contributors find that in these autobiographies the authors construct their gendered selves in relational terms. Throughout, they show how autobiographical writing—in whatever form it takes—provides the means toward more fully understanding the historical, social, and cultural milieu in which the author performs herself and creates her subjectivity.

Contributors: Asiya Alam, Afshan Bokhari, Uma Chakravarti, Kathryn Hansen, Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Anshu Malhotra, Ritu Menon, Shubhra Ray, Shweta Sachdeva Jha, Sylvia Vatuk
 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Gender, Performance, and Autobiography in South Asia / Anshu Malhotra and Siobhan Lambert-Hurley
• Part I. Negotiating Autobiography: Between Assertion and Subversion
• Part II. Forms and Modes of Self-Fashioning
• Part III. Destabilizing the Normative: The Heterogeneous Self
• Select Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index