scholarly journals Gendered Subaltern in Abhi Subedi’s Dreams of Peach Blossoms

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-145
Author(s):  
Sanjeev Niraula
Keyword(s):  
Sixth Century ◽  
Grand Narrative ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Ruling Class ◽  
Subaltern Studies ◽  
Painful Experience ◽  
Partha Chatterjee ◽  
Mainstream Culture ◽  
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

This paper examines the consciousness of gendered subaltern in Abhi Subedi’s poetic play Dreams of Peach Blossoms and looks at how Subedi deconstructs the existing historiography to bring forth the issue of gendered subaltern who have been subjected to the hegemony of the ruling class. Drawing on insights and postulations from Subaltern Studies theorists such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Partha Chatterjee, Gautam Bhadra and others, this paper examines the pain and agonies of female characters that are glossed over in the grand narrative of the mainstream culture. This paper concludes that while exploring the painful experience of women erased from the pages of history, Subedi is focused on the Maiju culture that began since Bhrikuti’s marriage to a Tibetan King in the sixth century and reveals the injustice of patriarchy against women with an aim to make correction in such distortions of history.

scholarly journals Antonio Gramsci e a tradução do Marxismo na Índia

2015 ◽  
pp. 179-192
Author(s):  
Camila Massaro de Góes
Keyword(s):  
Antonio Gramsci ◽  
Subaltern Studies ◽  
Partha Chatterjee ◽  
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Esse artigo possui o objetivo de apresentar os resultados de um estudo exploratório sobre a apropriação do pensamento político e social de Antonio Gramsci no âmbito dos chamados Subaltern Studies, destacando os trabalhos de Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gyanendra Pandey, Partha Chatterjee, Ranajit Guha e Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Por meio desse estudo pretendeu-se identificar as formas de tradução do pensamento gramsciano e, principalmente, dos conceitos de hegemonia e subalterno pelos Subaltern Studies e individualizar a contribuição específica destes para a compreensão dos processos de constituição de uma direção político-cultural na sociedade.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Relevance for Communication Studies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raka Shome
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Ethical Responsibility ◽  
Communication Studies ◽  
Literary Critic ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
The West ◽  
Subaltern Studies ◽  
Radical Alterity ◽  
Gayatri Spivak ◽  
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Gayatri Spivak is one of the foremost intellectuals of the 20th and 21st centuries. Although a literary critic, her work can be seen as philosophical as it is concerned with how to develop a transnational ethical responsibility to the radical “other,” who cannot be accessed by our discursive (and thus institutionalized) regimes of knowledge. Regarded as a leading postcolonial theorist, Spivak is probably best seen as a postcolonial Marxist feminist theorist, although she herself does not feel comfortable with rigid academic labeling. Her work is significantly influenced by the deconstructionist impulses of Jacques Derrida. Additionally, the influence of Gramsci and Marx is prominent in her thinking. Spivak’s work has consistently called attention to the logics of imperialism that inform texts in the West, including in Western feminist scholarship. Relatedly, she has also written significantly on how the nation, in attempting to represent the entirety of a population, cannot access otherness or radical alterity. This is best seen in her work on the subaltern and in her intervention into the famous Indian group of Subaltern Studies scholars. Other related foci of her work have been on comprehending translation as a transnational cultural politics, and what it means to develop a transnational ethics of literacy.

All the World is Staged: Intellectuals and the Projects of Ethnography

1992 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 495-510 ◽  
Author(s):  
C Katz
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
White Male ◽  
Ruling Class ◽  
Subaltern Studies ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Concrete Experience ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject

Feminism, decolonization, and ‘new social movements’ have decentered the geopolitical power of the ‘First World’ and ruptured the relations of exploitation, domination, and imperialism that undergird it and the authority of the white, male, ruling class, Western subject. The tensions and reorientations in the macrological sphere resonate in social and cultural discourse where feminist theory, poststructuralism, and subaltern studies have called into question the subject positions associated with these relations of power. Rather than making clear that all observers and commentators stand someplace, this ‘sea change’ left many intellectuals adrift, flirting with disabling relativism. Given the projects of representing how others stand and understanding the ground on which they stand, ethnographers have been late to recognize their complicity in masking their own positions as they construct the objects of their inquiry. As intellectuals operating in a postcolonial world, we must take seriously Spivak's admonition about representation as a staging of the world in a political context and begin to connect the ‘micrological textures of power’ with larger political-economic relations. In this expanded field, we can no longer valorize the concrete experience of oppressed peoples while remaining uncritical of our role as intellectuals. Neither can we presume to speak for or about peoples and nations as if they were outside of the contemporary world system, refusing to recognize that our ability to construct them as such is rooted in a larger system of domination. In this paper the author develops these themes by offering a critique of familiar modes and practices of representation and draws on ethnographic research in New York City and rural Sudan to argue that by interrogating the subject positions of ourselves as intellectuals as well as the objects of our inquiry we can excavate a ‘space of betweenness’ wherein the multiple determinations of a decentered world are connected. Appropriating this knowledge we may develop enabling analyses of power and difference to find collective paths toward change.

scholarly journals Aesthetic Image of the Animal Epithet in Alice Walker's Short Story "Everyday Use"

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (5) ◽  
pp. 120
Author(s):  
Shaimaa Hadi Radhi
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Black Woman ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Alice Walker ◽  
The Other ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Ruling Class ◽  
White Males ◽  
Short Narrative

In her short story Everyday Use, the African American writer Alice Walker labels her female characters Mrs. Johnson, and her two daughters: Maggie, and Dee by associating them with an animal quality. In my present paper I attempt to show the central and pivotal role played by the mechanism of 'Animal Epithet' in order to investigate to what extent does the writer apply the theory of 'Womanism' to her short fiction's protagonist and the other characters. Walker wants the reader to share her investigation journey in order to find a logical answer for the crucial questions raised in the research-paper: Why does Walker portray female characters by comparing them to animals? How does Walker manage to treat this topic aesthetically? What portrait of black woman does she prove? To answer these central questions, Walker is committed to construct her short narrative work on the base of the key elements of inversion, signifying, and quilting-like. Walker, as a womanist and animal activist is defiant and ridiculous of the mainstream agent of humanism represented by white males. She aesthetically inverts the meaning of the negative, dehumanizing image devised and everyday used by the men of ruling class into aesthetic and positive one to represent the identity of black women.

Peasant-Based Societies in Chris Wickham’s Thought

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 194-220
Author(s):  
Carlos Astarita
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Theoretical Basis ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Ruling Class ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Peasant Communities ◽  
Fugitive Slaves ◽  
Long Run

AbstractThis engagement with Chris Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages argues that Germanic kings settled as political authorities in fiscal lands, and granted districts to some of the loyal members of their entourage over which they exercised power. This process relates to the fact that kings preserved fiscus-taxes, but that system had already deteriorated and finally disintegrated in the sixth century. In the long run, the problem was expressed in an organic crisis of the ruling class. In consequence, popular revolts against taxation ensued. These revolts are an indicator that the collapsed ancient machinery of domination was not replaced by another in the short term, thus giving way to a political vacuum. The fugitive slaves or serfs reflected in the laws are an indicator pointing in the same direction. Under these conditions free peasant-communities multiplied. These events take us to the concept of peasant-mode societies that Wickham contributes to our understanding of the period. Despite the importance he attaches to this concept, he observes nuances; not in all regions, he claims, did peasant-logic prevail. The evidence allows us, on the contrary, to extend the scope of the concept and to establish a single theoretical basis for the construction of the feudal system on a European scale.

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