Gender and the politics of war historiography in Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra

Buchi Emecheta’s novel about the Nigerian Civil War, Destination Biafra (1982), challenges war historiography in ways that scholarship designating it a “female perspective” on the conflict can sometimes overlook. This article focuses on how Emecheta deploys a dual narrative approach that weaves an omniscient narrator with diverse Nigerian women’s points of view in order to position their lived experiences and subjective knowledges as collectively amounting to the definitive history of the Civil War. This draws the reader’s attention to the gendered effects of the civil war as the lens whereby which all facets of the war can be understood - even and especially its macro causes in neocolonialism and petrocapitalism. By writing women who know the economic imperatives behind the conflict; exercise agency under dangerous circumstances; and employ methods of survival that safeguard others, Emecheta reveals the gendered politics of war historiography, and tests these politics by collapsing distinctions between what is habitually conceived of as the war front (and therefore to be narrated by active combatants), and everywhere else (to be narrated by witnesses, refugees, or survivors). Destination can therefore be understood as an attempt to intervene directly in historiographical method, as it rejects the designation of women’s war experiences as mere addenda and questions gendered expectations of where to look for and find historical truths.

FROM PERIPHERY TO CENTRE: EXPLORING GENDERED NARRATIVES IN SELECT FICTIONS OF SUCHITRA BHATTACHARYA

The issue of women empowerment breaking the boundaries of patriarchy is the locus of the narrative based on the female experience. The representation of the female perspective in a narrative constructs an alternative discursive narrative, different from that of the male narrative. And once, when the perspective is changed, the whole narrative got changed. Suchitra Bhattacharya's lady detective fiction based on detective Mitin aka Pragyaparamita Mukherjee introduces detective literature from female experience, quite unlike the conventional detective genre, exploring gendered experience in terms of intelligence and its relation with the discourse of power. These fictions encode female experience within the web of the narrative, opening the door of a new prospect towards detective literature. The lady detective literature, as it was developed, was resistance against the male narrative of the detective literature and the subverted female presentation of it. It brings forward the women agency that was previously denied by patriarchy and reconstitutes the ways of interpreting a text incorporating women in the center. The narrative establishes and celebrates the thinking capability of women negated in the male narrative. Henceforth, the argument is how and to what extent the female narrative achieves its hold over discursive power, and succeeds in bringing up a whole new thread by subverting the discursive narrative of the androgenous stratum.

La Première Guerre mondiale dans l’opérette de langue allemande à l’exemple de l’opérette Im Konzentrationslager (1917) de Helene Fürnkranz

Der Beitrag befasst sich mit der Operette einer im Lager Garaison (Hautes-Pyrénées) internierten Österreicherin. Im Ersten Weltkrieg wurden Familien deutscher und österreichischer Zivilisten in diesem französischen Lager versammelt. Helene Fürnkranz‘ Operette, deren Titel Im Konzentrationslager auf die offizielle Bezeichnung des Lagers zurückgreift, schildert das Leben der Internierten, wobei sie sich weitgehend auf die Biografie und die Erlebnisse der Autorin im Lager stützt. Das Werk ist insofern einzigartig, als es den Stand-punkt einer Person österreichischer Herkunft auf französischem Boden während des Ersten Weltkriegs, und noch dazu jenen einer Frau, vermittelt. Darüber hinaus zählt es zu den seltenen Operetten, die den Krieg zum eigentlichen Thema und nicht nur zum Hintergrund des Geschehens machen. Angestrebt wird hier ein Vergleich dieses Opernlibrettos mit einigen Werken des deutschsprachigen Operettenkanons (Gold gab ich für Eisen und Die Csárdasfürstin von Emmerich Kálmán, Die Rose von Stambul von Leo Fall und Viktoria und ihr Husar von Paul Abraham), wobei zuerst die realistische Darstellung des Krieges untersucht wird, dann die humoristische Dimension und die Inszenierung des Konfliktes, sowie schließlich die Bedeutung der weiblichen Perspektive, die sich im Stück als vorherrschend erweist. L’article étudie le cas d’une opérette écrite par une femme d’origine autrichienne internée au camp de Garaison (Hautes-Pyrénées) où furent regroupées des familles de civils allemands et autrichiens durant la Première Guerre mondiale. Cette opérette d’Helene Fürnkranz, dont le titre reprend la dénomination officielle du camp, évoque précisément la vie des internés en s’inspirant largement de la biographie de l’auteure et de son expérience à Garaison. L’œuvre est originale en tant qu’elle offre le point de vue d’une Autrichienne en France pendant la Première Guerre mondiale, d’une femme également, et qu’il semble s’agir d’une des rares opérettes qui fasse du conflit son sujet même et non un simple arrière-plan. En mettant ce livret en perspective avec quelques opérettes plus canoniques du répertoire de langue allemande (Gold gab ich für Eisen et Die Csárdasfürstin de Emmerich Kálmán, Die Rose von Stambul de Leo Fall et Viktoria und ihr Husar de Paul Abraham), l’article examine tout d’abord la représentation réaliste de la guerre qui se dégage de l’opérette de Fürnkranz, puis le traitement léger et humoristique qui en est fait et la mise en scène de la guerre, avant de s’interroger sur la portée de la perspective féminine, qui est centrale dans la pièce. The article studies the case of an operetta written by a woman of Austrian origin interned at the Garaison camp (Hautes-Pyrénées) where German and Austrian civilian families were gathered during the First World War. This operetta by Helene Fürnkranz, whose title takes the official name of the camp, evokes precisely the life of the internees, drawing in large amounts on the author's biography and her experience at Garaison. The work is original in that it offers the point of view of an Austrian citizen in France during the First World War, a woman as well, and seems to be one of the few operettas that makes the conflict its very subject and not just a background. Putting this libretto into perspective with some of the more canonical operettas in the German-language repertoire (Gold gab ich für Eisen and Die Csárdasfürstin by Emmerich Kálmán, Die Rose von Stambul by Leo Fall and Viktoria und ihr Husar by Paul Abraham), the article first examines the realistic portrayal of war in Fürnkranz's operetta, then the light and humorous treatment and staging of the war, before considering the significance of the female perspective, which is central to the play.

Merging Fact, Fiction and Myth: Reading TD Ramakrishnan’s Sugandhi Enna Aandaal Devanayaki as a Historiographic Metafiction

TD Ramakrishnan’s novel Sugandhi Enna Aandaal Devanayaki is a mixture of the mythological, metaphysical and historical into a fictional space which transcends the boundaries of nation. The novel is a quest for retelling the historical trauma of Sreelanka. In the search for Sugandhi a Tamil liberation activist, the narrator stumbles upon the mythical Sugandhi from the folklore, creating tension between faction and reality. In the search for the mythical Sugandhi Ramakrishnan uses ‘SusinaSupina’ and arrives at Devanayaki belonging to 7th century AD Pallava Dynasty. As fact, fiction and myth blur into the contemporary social space, the myth of Devanayaki merges with Rajani Thirinagame creating the notion of the alternate history from a female perspective. In the novel History blurs into myth, reality into fiction, contemporary into past, individual into society and body into spirit.TD Ramakrishnan deconstructs the millennium old Tamil- Sinhalese political history using the alternate history from mythology and folklore. This paper is an attempt to read the novel Sugandhi Enna AandaalDevanayaki as a Historiographic metafiction.

"At Least I Have the Flowers of Myself": Revisionist Myth-Making in H.D.'s "Eurydice"

Taking its cue from the rediscovery of H.D.’s works initiated in the 1980s, this article aims to advance the efforts destined to recover the modernist poet’s revisionist legacy and, in particular, her revisionary myth-making. To this end, adopting a myth-criticism interpretative approach, I will analyse one of the most relevant examples of H.D.’s work in this respect: her lyric poem “Eurydice” (1925). In particular, I will examine H.D.’s ‘tactics of revisionary mythopoesis’, that is, narrative strategies which distance her poem from the dominant account of the myth and that enable the poet to contest the established classical tradition. The examination will ultimately bring to the surface H.D.’s invaluable contribution to the re-shaping and re-writing of myth from a female perspective and the way in which she created a different, subverted, version of the classical account.