Date of Award
Spring 5-5-2023
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
English
First Advisor
Sonali Perera
Second Advisor
Tanya Agathocleous
Academic Program Adviser
Janet Neary
Abstract
Though Western scholarship tends to homogenize South Asian experiences, researchers and novelists shed light on different classes of South Asian postcolonial and migratory women who experience mutability, or the internal and external changes as a trauma response after British colonial rule ended and the 1947 Partition abruptly fractured national identity. Though this mutability has positive and negative transformative qualities, it also allows women characters the power to remove themselves from cycles of oppression, work towards healing, and transforming their physical bodies from sites of repressed trauma to sites of expression and agency. What binds them is not only their physical movement and migration, but the timeless and collectively shared trauma of acculturation and assimilation, in the face of determining their identities. This work investigates how mutability is represented in distinct postcolonial female characters in several of Saadat Hasan Manto’s short fiction stories on Partition, Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, Alka Joshi’s The Henna Artist, Mahasweta Devi’s “The Hunt”, and Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age.
Recommended Citation
Halim, Tasnim S., "Diasporic Women’s Mutability in South Asian Postcolonial Literature" (2023). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/hc_sas_etds/1015
Included in
Asian American Studies Commons, Asian Studies Commons, Literature in English, Anglophone outside British Isles and North America Commons, Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority Commons, Modern Literature Commons, Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons, South and Southeast Asian Languages and Societies Commons, Women's Studies Commons