Clean and Green

This short story examines the class and caste dimensions of gender under economic liberalization in India through the experiences of its protagonist, Rani. It elicits the ways the new economic model purportedly ushers in a new modernity, even as the conditions of the poor remain the same within historically established social hierarchies and the damage inflicted on the environment.

The Feminization of Translation

The awarding of the 2016 Man Booker International Prize to Deborah Smith’s English translation of The Vegetarian brought global recognition to emergent Korean literature, but domestically it has sparked outrage among numerous Korean scholars who believe the literal inaccuracies in Smith’s translation have brought about a “national disgrace.” Situating this overheated reaction in the larger context of the colonial history of Korean nationalism, this article points out the irony that the “noble cause” of anti-imperialist resistance has historically led to the silencing of women’s voices in the context of preserving and transmitting an idea of quintessential Korean culture to an international audience. Such nationalist tendencies demand the “feminization” of the translator—requesting her to be barely visible while performing a self-effacing humility in deference to the putatively “original” culture. In contrast to this tendency, reading Han’s original and Smith’s translation together makes visible the damages that both colonization and nationalism have inflicted on the representation of female experiences. In the end, what truly scandalizes nationalist critics is not the failure of the translator to accurately convey Korean experiences, but the success of the translation in conveying an area of Korean experience they tend to neglect: that of female subjectivity.

Letter-Poems to Shauki Masi

An extension of an ongoing haunted queer diasporic kinship practice, this piece consists of letter-poems written to the author’s ancestor, Shauki Masi, who passed away several years ago. In this way, the author offers queer Muslim meditations on the five pillars of Islam: salat (ritual of daily prayer), zakat (alms), sawm (ramzaan), hajj (pilgrimage), and shahadah (declaration of faith). The five pillars of Islam offer a praxis through which Muslims can (re)balance their relationships, communities, and therefore the world.

Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization (AAPSO) Presidium Committee Nairobi Preparations

The Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization’s (AAPSO) Presidium Committee on Women met to prepare for the United Nations Conference on Women in Nairobi, Kenya. The committee aimed to tackle the impact of colonialism and imperialism and the ways they disproportionately impacted the lives of women. The AAPSO wanted to do this through a series of workshops focusing on the status of women in apartheid South Africa, the destabilization of women and children in Africa and Asia, the burden of debt in developing countries, and the subversive role of transnational corporations in mass media. The committee also recognized that women, particularly in Africa and Asia, formed the forefront of resistance movements, driving the struggle. This meeting shows that the Presidium Committee on Women optimistically saw women’s social justice as an integral component to the larger anticolonial and anti-imperial project.

Engendering Protest and Rethinking “Azadi” in Kashmir in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider

Women living in the South Asian conflict zone of Kashmir have been represented by mainstream media and film as mainly victims of the Indian state power’s political and sexual violence, as protestors who are supporting their men’s insurgency in Kashmir, or as aligned with local Islamic militant groups. This obscures their nuanced testimonies, political objectives, and multivalent agencies within the conflict zone. The author shows how Vishal Bharadwaj’s 2014 film Haider, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, disrupts such erasures to highlight Kashmiri women’s lived experiences in the conflict zone at intersections of everyday and extraordinary violence. By close reading scenes from the film via cinematic structure, dialogue, acting, camerawork, and mise-en-scène, the author shows how Haider not only mounts a scathing critique of the Indian occupation of Kashmir but also underscores the need for more capacious considerations of postcolonial feminisms as emergent from lived experiences versus adhering to established checklists approved by Euro-American feminism. The film’s investments in its female protagonists—Ghazala and Arshia—more than the men also uncovers the former’s redefinitions of azadi (freedom) as not just about Kashmiri political autonomy from India and Pakistan but also about nonviolence, equality, and justice for women and by extension all marginalized populations in Kashmir.

The Mythical Courtesan

This article interrogates how and why courtesan identities are simultaneously embraced and disavowed by Brahman dancers. Using a combination of ethnographic and critical feminist methods, which allow the author to toggle between the past and the present, between India and the United States, and between film analysis and the dance studio, the author examines the cultural politics of the romanticized and historical Indian dancer—the mythical courtesan. The author argues that the mythical courtesan was called into existence through film cultures in the early twentieth century to provide a counterpoint against which a modern and national Brahmanical womanhood could be articulated. The author brings together a constellation of events that participated in the construction of Indian womanhood, especially the rise of sound film against the backdrop of growing anticolonial and nationalist sentiments in early twentieth-century South India. The author focuses on films that featured an early twentieth-century dancer-singer-actress, Sundaramma. In following her career through Telugu film and connecting it to broader conversations about Indian womanhood in the 1930s and 1940s, the author traces the contours of an affective triangle between three mutually constituting emotional points: pleasure, shame, and disgust.