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Voicing Against Caste and Discrimination: Musings from Telugu Dalit Literature
--Yeddu Vijaya Babu
The early nineteenth century Indian writers managed to bring about revolutionary changes in the society with their powerful writings against the social malevolence of casteism. Various Dalit protest movements during this period aimed at achieving the desired goals of social equality and de-stigmatized social identity for Dalits. Dalit writers of India have been waging a relentless struggle against suppression, exploitation, and hegemony. Reformatory elements such as self-respect and self-identity are reflected in the various genres of contemporary Dalit literary writings. Telugu Dalit writers in contemporary India are second to none in voicing their protest against casteism and discrimination. This paper explores the agony, musings, and vision of the contemporary Telugu Dalit writers with regard to Dalit ethnicity and plight.
© 2016 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Talking Difference: The Defiant Cartography of Dalit Women’s Poetry in Telugu and Marathi
--K Narasimha Rao
With a categorical shift in the twentieth century verse in Indian languages, there had been a serious concern about the social background of the poets and their audiences, including their involvement in some of the social movements on the subcontinent. Dalit writing, by the former untouchables of the Hindu society, in Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, and Telugu emerged during this period. In representing the exploitation of the ex-untouchables, the writings reflect the objective duality of life: the violent excesses of caste and class dimension. While this is the recurrent theme of male Dalit writings, Dalit women experience a triple oppression: of class, caste, and gender. In a situation where the organization of politics around difference has become a major feature, Dalit women’s organizing around the notion of difference is a logical outcome. They expressed the need for an independent identity by forming the National Federation of Dalit women. In the light of the above, this paper aims at studying the need for Dalit women to talk differently on the basis of external factor (non-Dalit forces homogenizing the issue of Dalit women) and internal factor (the patriarchal domination within the Dalit community). The paper focuses on such bearings borne in Dalit women’s poetry in Telugu and Marathi. It assumes that the social location of the speaker is more or less stable; therefore, “talking differently” can be treated as genuinely representative.
© 2016 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
From Diaries to Virtual Narratives: Breast Cancer and Feminism
--Raghavi Ravi Kasthuri and Sathyaraj Venkatesan
Breast cancer still remains a threat and poses challenges to the medical fraternity. Today, literary representations of breast cancer have evolved to be a separate subgenre of illness narratives which, as Thomas Couser (quoted in Hawkins 1993, xviii) observes, “is writing about the episode of one’s illness.” The growth of breast cancer movement and its literary narratives is primarily credited to the feminist movements of the 1960s which facilitated the visibility to the disease and promoted breast cancer activism among masses. Feminism not only provided a voice to the breasted experience of women but shaped the ideologies of the breast cancer movement. The present paper seeks to investigate the influence of feminist movements on breast cancer activism and the paradigm shifts it created in the breast cancer discourse.
© 2016 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Haunting Past: The Mother Link to Inviting Roots in Chika Unigwe’s Night Dancer
--Ignatius Chukwumah
Chika Unigwe is a contemporary Nigerian writer whose works belong to the segment of the Nigerian literary tradition critics have articulated as “third generation writing.” Her group includes Ben Okri, Chimamanda Adichie, Helon Habila, and others. Though much neglected, her works, like her contemporaries’, in no small way comment on the circumstances of modern life in Nigeria. Focusing on Unigwe’s (2013) Night Dancer and drawing on Balaev’s strand of trauma theory that details, through memory, the influence of perception, society, and other postcolonial contextual factors on a trauma victim, this paper seeks to give a productive interpretation of the immediate and remote causes of the main character’s traumatizing search for and discovery of her roots, cast light on her mother’s equally traumatized adult life and death, and explain the role memory plays in the text. Night Dancer, thus, opens up a new chapter of the postcolonial woman in African literature, where she transits from the stage of aiding freedom fighters, standing beside her husband to reap the good of the newly independent nation, and desiring to have children, to that of fending for herself and her child(ren) alone, however she does it.
© 2016 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Women in Diaspora: A Study of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Fiction
--C V Padmaja
Life for women in diasporic situations can be doubly painful as they struggle with the material and spiritual insecurities of exile, the demands of family and work, and the claims of old and new patriarchies. The women are also subjected to insidious racial discrimination and have to struggle against this in almost all walks of life. The discrimination affects them in different ways—from the general to the personal. In the case of Indian-American woman, she is left a “hyphenated” entity, struggling to come to terms with her new life. The works of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni reflect many aspects of diaspora and the experiences of the immigrant women in the host countries. This paper showcases how the female protagonists of Divakaruni’s short story collection, Arranged Marriage, and two novels—Sister of My Heart and The Mistress of Spices—deal with their forcible migration to the West.
© 2016 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Deromanticizing the Diasporic Life: Benyamin’s Goat Days
--V Rajasekaran and Jasmine Jose
According to Maharaj (2008, 23), “The Indian diaspora may be regarded as international phenomena—it has a presence in more than 100 countries globally.” In recent times, the evolving role of migrants in the labor markets of the Gulf countries has attracted many people from developing countries like India. The people of the southern part of India, particularly Keralites and Tamils, have considered the Gulf a “promised land” for pursuing a good career and to attain economic stability. The “Gulf boom” is a period in the recent history of Kerala during which a large number of people have gone to the Gulf countries with great hopes and dreams. These people are ready to do all kinds of jobs and are willing to work hard. They put in a lot of efforts into their jobs and save most of their earnings. A visa to Gulf is like a treasure even at this point of time. Even the popular media cultivated this image of “gulf” as a “promised land.” While the flashy nature of the Gulf countries has enchanted many people, for others, it has been like a mirage in a desert. Only after reaching there, they realize that those dreams still remain dreams and are not realized. This is well evident in the novel Goat Days written by Benyamin, which this paper focuses on.
© 2016 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Fadia Faqir Writes Back: Nisanit as a Resistance Novel
--Sowmya Srinivasan
This paper justifies resistance in the face of power by posing colonialism as the pivotal beginning point of establishment of power, its political, social, and economic operations and ideologies, and the aggressive territorial encroachments followed by enforcement of Western laws. The objective of the paper is to initiate an understanding of the relationship between power and resistance in Faqir’s (1987) novel Nisanit that captures Palestine in its crucial hours of political and social crises. Resistance, in the novel, depends on the magnitude of empowerment that may be destructive or transformative. While the empowered rebellious characters, Saqi and Shadeed, defeat power by destroying themselves, transformative resistor, Eman breaks the Oriental image of an Arab stereotype. The anticolonial movements, the refugee camps, and the Fedayeen groups stand uniquely empowered in the novel to resist dominance.
A Comparative Evaluation of Achilles and Râma, the Protagonists of the Iliad and the Râmâyana
--G R K Murty
Homer’s Iliad is a poem on Achilles—who “has allowed thymos to dominate his soul” (Edmundson 2012)—and his wrath. Râma of Vâlmîki’s Râmâyana is a man of righteousness, with an admirable admixture of wisdom and strength, courage and compassion, conviction and consideration, dedication and detachment—the basic virtues that make a man complete. Reading about Achilles’ blind submission to pride and anger and his craving for glory and enduring fame even after death that brought endless sufferings to his own side and ultimately to himself makes a reader wearisome. On the other hand, Râma’s submission to dharma even in the midst of the malice of circumstances, that too, more by the glory of his own choice, bestows a grace, a dignity, and a significance to his character. If poetry is “a vehicle of inspiration” for building the ideal human society, obviously, Râma becomes the choice to idealize, and that is what this paper attempts to delineate.
© 2016 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Exposing Cultures Through Online Newspapers
--Shanina Maria
This paper looks at online newspapers as a source of cultural information and analyzes the ways in which they can be used to develop the students’ cultural awareness. The levels of linguocultural competence are stated and described. Examples of exercises, which can be used to build the linguocultural competence, are given according to the levels of the students’ competence. Recommendations to teachers on working with texts of online newspapers are formulated in accordance with the peculiarities of their electronic format.
© 2016 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Good and Poor EFL Readers: Understanding Their Problems Through Self-Assessment
--Yunisrina Qsimullah Yusuf, Dian Fajrina, and Riski Aida Fitri
This study examines EFL students’ reading problems in the narrative text through self-assessment. The data were collected from one hundred and thirty-six second grade students from a high school in Banda Aceh, Indonesia. The students were classified into two groups—good and poor readers—based on the correct answers of their reading test. Sixty-one respondents were classified as good readers and seventy-five respondents as poor readers. These students were then asked to fill in a twenty-item closed-ended questionnaire on their reading problems. Their responses were distributed into a table of frequency and percentage. The findings showed that good readers had three reading problems, whilst the poor readers had eleven problems. Differences and similarities in the reading problems of both groups of readers were also found and discussed. The study suggests that recognizing students’ reading problems can assist teachers in preparing and designing teaching lessons that essentially support students in resolving their reading problems. Furthermore, by specifically understanding the problems that good and poor readers have, teachers can assemble their students into good and poor readers in classroom activities to gain more effective results in learning.
© 2016 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
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