Gender Globalization And Beyond In Karen Tei Yamashitas Tropic Of Orange And Jhumpa Lahiris The Interpreter Of Maladies

This thesis explores two major concepts: globalization and diaspora and their impact on the literary representation of women in Jhumpa Lahiri's collection of short stories The Interpreter of Maladies and Karen Tei Yamashita's novel Tropic of Orange. In the first chapter, using Vijay Mishra's theory on the Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary, the thesis examines the diasporic state of Mrs. Sen through Mishra's notion of "impossible mourning". I juxtapose Mrs. Sen's character to two other female characters to argue that mobility and crossing borders do not affect all women equally, especially if they come from different social class and caste backgrounds. In addition, I compare Mrs. Sen's diasporic condition to her husband's to contend that the impact of immigration is more beneficial to him than her. This thesis, hence, rethinks some of the reasons why people migrate across the world and its various impacts on individuals, especially women whose displacement often curtails rather than expands their mobility, freedom and independence. In the second chapter, therefore, I use Chandra Talpade Mohanty's Feminism without Borders to highlight the difference between Western women and so-called Third World women. Furthermore, using Mohanty's essay "'Under Western Eyes' Revisited," which condemns the detrimental effects of capitalism and globalization and promotes an anti-capitalist and anti-global project based on solidarity, I study the characterization of Emi and Rafaela, two central characters of Yamashita's novel, within the context of globalization and its deviant operations. Referring to the criminal and criminalizing operative modes of global capitalism, including organ and sex trafficking, deviant globalization is a critical concept in this thesis through which I read Yamashita's novel and its female characters' complicity with and resistance to global capitalism.

Karen Tei Yamashita’s novels, essays, and performance scripts have garnered considerable praise from scholars and reviewers, and are taught not only in the United States but in at least half a dozen countries in Asia, South America, and Europe. Her work has been written about in numerous disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Karen Tei Yamashita: Fictions of Magic and Memory is the first anthology given over to Yamashita’s writing. It contains newly commissioned essays by established, international scholars; a recent interview with the author; a semiautobiographical keynote address delivered at an international conference that ruminates on her Japanese American heritage; and a full bibliography. The essays offer fresh and in-depth readings of the magic realist canvas of Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990); the Japanese emigrant portraiture of Brazil-Maru (1992); Los Angeles as rambunctious geopolitical and transnational fulcrum of the Americas in Tropic of Orange (1997); the fraught relationship of Japanese and Brazilian heritage and labor in Circle K Cycles (2001); Asian American history and politics of the 1960s in I Hotel (2010); and Anime Wong (2014), a gallery of performativity illustrating the contested and inextricable nature of East and West. This essay-collection explores Yamashita’s use of the fantastical, the play of emerging transnational ethnicity, and the narrative tactics of reflexivity and bricolage in storytelling located on a continuum of the unique and the communal, of the past and the present, and that are mapped in various spatial and virtual realities.

What is globalization? How is it gendered? How does it work in Asia and the Pacific? The authors of the sixteen original and innovative essays presented here take fresh stock of globalization’s complexities. They pursue critical feminist inquiry about women, gender, and sexualities and produce original insights into changing life patterns in Asian and Pacific Island societies. Each essay puts the lives and struggles of women at the center of its examination while weaving examples of global circuits in Asian and Pacific societies into a world frame of analysis. The work is generated from within Asian and Pacific spaces, bringing to the fore local voices and claims to knowledge. The geographic emphasis on Asia/Pacific highlights the complexity of globalizing practices among specific people whose dilemmas come alive on these pages. Although the book focuses on global, gendered flows, it expands its investigation to include the media and the arts, intellectual resources, activist agendas, and individual life stories. First-rate ethnographies and interviews reach beyond generalizations and bring Pacific and Asian women and men alive in their struggles against globalization. Globalization cannot be summed up in a neat political agenda but must be actively contested and creatively negotiated. Taking feminist political thinking beyond simple oppositions, the authors ask specific questions about how global practices work, how they come to be, who benefits, and what is at stake. Contributors: Nancie Caraway, Steve Derné, Cynthia Enloe, Kathy Ferguson, Maria Ibarra, Gwyn Kirk, Sally Merry, Virginia Metaxas, Min Dongchao, Monique Mironesco, Rhacel Parrenas, Lucinda Peach, Vivian Price, Jyoti Puri, Judith Raiskin, Nancy Riley, Saskia Sassen, Teresia Teaiwa, Chris Yano, Yau Ching.

As 'globalization' moves rapidly from buzzword to cliche, evaluating the claims of neoliberal capitalism to empower and enrich remains urgently important. The authors in this volume employ feminist, ethnographic methods to examine what free trade and export processing zones, economic liberalization, and currency reform mean to women in Argentina, Sri Lanka, Mexico, Ghana, the United States, India, Jamaica, and many other places. Heralded as agents of prosperity and liberation neoliberal economic policies have all too often refigured and redoubled the burdens of gender, race, caste, class, and regional subordination that women bear.

We are still only beginning to understand the increasingly complex set of interdependencies among gender, health and globalization. This book brings together a diverse group of distinguished scholars and activists to explore the new risks and freedoms for men and women in a global society and their health determinants. They map the gendered impact of these processes and present a health landscape that takes us beyond nation states into trans-border flows of capital, people, goods and services. Each chapter begins with a global analysis of specific trends followed by two 'In Perspective' pieces by authors from contrasting disciplines and geographies.

In short the volume serves as both a lucid introduction to a challenging author and a valuable resource for students and scholars.

The visionary masterpiece, tracing a riverboat crew's dreamlike jungle voyage ... 'My new all time favourite book ... A magnificent, breathtaking and terrifying novel.' T sitsi Dangarembga 'An exhilarating experience ... Makes visions real and reality visions ... Genius.' Jamaica Kincaid 'A masterpiece: I love this book for its language, adventure and wisdoms.' Monique Roffey 'Revel in the inviolate, ever-deepening mystery of Wilson Harris's work.' Jeet Thayil 'The Guyanese William Blake . Such poetic intensity.' Angela Carter I dreamt I awoke with one dead seeing eye and one living closed eye ... A crew of men are embarking on a voyage up a turbulent river through the rainforests of Guyana. Their domineering leader, Donne, is the spirit of a conquistador, obsessed with hunting for a mysterious woman and exploiting indigenous people as plantation labour. But their expedition is plagued by tragedies, haunted by drowned ghosts: spectres of the crew themselves, inhabiting a blurred shadowland between life and death. As their journey into the interior - their own hearts of darkness - deepens, it assumes a spiritual dimension, guiding them towards a new destination: the Palace of the Peacock ... A modernist fever dream; prose poem; modern myth; elegy to victims of colonial conquest: Wilson Harris' masterpiece has defied definition for over sixty years, and is reissued for a new generation of readers. 'One of the great originals ... Visionary ... Dazzlingly illuminating.' Guardian 'Amazing ... Masterly ... Near-miraculous.' Observer 'Staggering ... Both brilliant and terrifying.' The Times 'The most inimitable [writer] produced in the English-speaking Caribbean.' Fred D'Aguiar 'Extraordinary ... Courageous and visionary ... It speaks to us in tongues.' Pauline Melville

An apocalypse of race, class, and culture, fanned by the media and the harsh L.A. sun.

A young Hasidic Jew seeks his fortune in New York's Lower East Side. He turns from his religious studies to focus on the business world, where he discovers the high price of assimilation.

Jonathan Franzen is one of the most influential, critically-significant and popular contemporary American novelists. This book is the first full-length study of his work and attempts to articulate where American fiction is headed after postmodernism. Stephen Burn provides a comprehensive analysis of each of Franzen's novels - from his early work to the major success of The Corrections - identifying key sources, delineating important narrative strategies, and revealing how Franzen's themes are reinforced by each novel's structure. Supplementing this analysis with comparisons to key contemporaries, David Foster Wallace and Richard Powers, Burn suggests how Franzen's work is indicative of the direction of experimental American fiction in the wake of the so-called end of postmodernism.