Transnational Discourses On Class Gender And Cultural Identity

This exploration of class, feminism, and cultural identity (including issues of race, nation, colonialism, and economic imperialism) focuses on the work of four writers: the Mozambican Mia Couto, the Portuguese José Saramago, the Brazilian Clarice Lispector, and the South African J. M. Coetzee. In the first section, the author discusses the political aspects of Couto's collection of short stories Contos do nascer da terra (Stories of the Birth of the Land) and Saramago's novel O ano da morte de Ricardo Reis (The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis). The second section explores similar themes in Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K and Lispector's A hora da estrela (The Hour of the Star). Marques argues that these four writers are political in the sense that they bring to the forefront issues pertaining to the power of literature to represent, misrepresent, and debate matter related to different subaltern subjects: the postcolonial subject, the poor subject (the "poor other"), and the female subject. She also discusses the "ahuman other" in the context of the subjectivity of the natural world, the dead, and the unborn, and shows how these aspects are present in all the different societies addressed and point to the mystical dimension that permeates most societies. With regard to Couto's work, this "ahuman other" is approached mostly through a discussion of the holistic, animist values and epistemologies that inform and guide Mozambican traditional societies, while in further analyses the notion is approached via discussions on phenomenology, elementality, and divinity following the philosophies of Lévinas and Irigaray and mystical consciousness in Zen Buddhism and the psychology of Jung.

In this era of increasing global mobility, identities are too complex to be captured by concepts that rely on national borders for reference. Such identities are not unified or stable, but are fluid entities which constantly push at the boundaries of the nation-state, thereby re-defining themselves and the nation-state simultaneously. Contemporary literature pays specific attention to internal and external notions of belonging ("Politics of Motion") and definitions of self resulting from interpersonal relationships ("Politics of Longing"). This collection looks at texts by authors who are British, American, or Canadian, but for whom a self-definition according national parameters is insufficient.

"Reading with a Difference is a collection of eighteen essays that examines how issues of gender, race, and cultural identity inform texts from the seventeenth century to the present. Together the contributions document recent significant shifts occurring in the theoretical approach to the texts they study and illustrate how shifts in each of these categories affect how the others are viewed." "The first section of this anthology explores the notion that identity - particularly gender identity - is a cultural construct. The essays in the second section consider ways in which race and gender intersect with cultural identity and how encounters between different cultures challenge any identity constructed in isolation." "First published in the journal Criticism, these essays offer no blueprint for reading. Instead they encourage a rereading of canonical texts and a questioning of how these texts face matters of gender, race, and cultural identity; how they respond to the differences and the incongruities within the cultures from which they arise; and to which they speak."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

In Transnational America, Inderpal Grewal examines how the circulation of people, goods, social movements, and rights discourses during the 1990s created transnational subjects shaped by a global American culture. Rather than simply frame the United States as an imperialist nation-state that imposes unilateral political power in the world, Grewal analyzes how the concept of “America” functions as a nationalist discourse beyond the boundaries of the United States by disseminating an ideal of democratic citizenship through consumer practices. She develops her argument by focusing on South Asians in India and the United States. Grewal combines a postcolonial perspective with social and cultural theory to argue that contemporary notions of gender, race, class, and nationality are linked to earlier histories of colonization. Through an analysis of Mattel’s sales of Barbie dolls in India, she discusses the consumption of American products by middle-class Indian women newly empowered with financial means created by India’s market liberalization. Considering the fate of asylum-seekers, Grewal looks at how a global feminism in which female refugees are figured as human rights victims emerged from a distinctly Western perspective. She reveals in the work of three novelists who emigrated from India to the United States—Bharati Mukherjee, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and Amitav Ghosh—a concept of Americanness linked to cosmopolitanism. In Transnational America Grewal makes a powerful, nuanced case that the United States must be understood—and studied—as a dynamic entity produced and transformed both within and far beyond its territorial boundaries.

This book is about how the marketing of transnational cultural commodities capitalizes on difference and its appeal for cosmopolitan consumers in our postmodern globalized world. At what price? What ethical and political conundrums does the artist/writer/reader confront when going global? This volume analyzes why difference - whether gender, sexual, racial, ethnic, or linguistic - has become such a prominent element in the contemporary cultural field, and the effects of this prevalence on the production, circulation and reception of cultural commodities in the context of globalization. At the intersection of globalization, diaspora, postcolonial and feminist studies in world literature, these essays engage critically with a wide variety of representative narratives taken from diverse cultural fields, including humanitarian fiction, multilingual poetry, painting, text-image art, performance art, film, documentary, and docu-poetry. The chapters included offer counter-readings that disrupt hegemonic representations of cultural identity within the contemporary, neoliberal and globalized landscape.

The acceleration of economic globalization and the rapid global flows of people, culture, and information have intensified the importance of developing transnational understandings of contemporary issues. Transnational feminist perspectives have provided a unique outlook on women’s lives and have deepened our understanding of the gendered nature of global processes. Transnational Feminism in the United States examines how transnational perspectives shape the ways in which we create and disseminate knowledge about the world within the United States, and how the paradigm of transnational feminism is affected by national narratives and public discourses within the country itself. An innovative theoretical project that is both deconstructive and constructive, this bookinterrogates the limits of feminist thought, primarily through case studies that illustrate its power to create new fields of research out of traditionally interdisciplinary lines of inquiry. Leela Fernandes discusses ways to approach, analyze, and capture processes that exceed and unsettle the nation-state within the transnational feminist paradigm. Examining the links between power and knowledge that bind interdisciplinary theory and research, she shines new light on issues such as human rights as well as academic debates about transnational feminist perspectives on global issues. A thought-provoking analysis, Transnational Feminism in the United States powerfully contributes to the field of Women’s Studies and related cross-disciplinary scholarship on feminist theory and gender from a global perspective.

Latin American Identities After 1980 takes an interdisciplinary approach to Latin American social and cultural identities. With broad regional coverage, and an emphasis on Canadian perspectives, it focuses on Latin American contact with other cultures and nations. Its sound scholarship combines evidence-based case studies with the Latin American tradition of the essay, particularly in areas where the discourse of the establishment does not match political, social, and cultural realities and where it is difficult to uncover the purposely covert. This study of the cultural and social Latin America begins with an interpretation of the new Pax Americana, designed in the 1980s by the North in agreement with the Southern elites. As the agreement ties the hands of national governments and establishes new regional and global strategies, a pan–Latin American identity is emphasized over individual national identities. The multi-faceted impacts and effects of globalization in Bolivia, Ecuador, Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and the Caribbean are examined, with an emphasis on social change, the transnationalization and commodification of Latin American and Caribbean arts and the adaptation of cultural identities in a globalized context as understood by Latin American authors writing from transnational perspectives.

First published in 1999.Jyoti Puri draws on post-colonial and feminist theory to focus on how women in current-day India conceptualize their gender and sexuality. She provides a groundbreaking ethnographic study based on fifty-four middle- and upper-class Indian women, ranging from the ages of fifteen to thirty-eight. She argues that these women's narratives are shaped by not only the nation-state, but by transnational processes as well. Woman, Bodyand Desire in Postcolonial India connects important issues of class an nationhood to the emerging sense of female identity in India, covering previously neglected topics such as menstruation, gay and straight sexual experience, sexual harassment and assault, marriage and motherhood. Puri discovers that attitudes about sexuality and gender are surprisingly similar in India and Western countries.

This book explores the unstudied nature of diaspora among young Korean, Japanese and Chinese women living and studying in the West. Why do women move? What are the actual conditions of their transnational lives? How do they make sense of their transnational lives through the experience of the media? Are they becoming cosmopolitan subjects? Exploring the key questions within their particular socio-economic and cultural contexts, this book analyzes the contradictions of cosmopolitan identity formation and challenges the general assumptions of cosmopolitanism. It considers the highly visible, fastest growing, yet little studied phenomenon of women’s transnational migration and the role of the media in everyday life, offering detailed empirical data on the nature of the women’s diaspora. Drawing on a wide range of perspectives from media and communications, sociology, cultural studies and anthropology, the book provides an empirically grounded and theoretically insightful investigation into this evolving phenomenon.