Susan Visvanathan’s new work, Phosphorus and Stone is composed in the lucid but subversive style that characterises her feminist writings. In this novella she examines a fishing hamlet from the startling perspectives of the bourgeois enclaves set both in a village called Valli, Kerala, and in the suburbs of Chennai and Bangalore.This is the story of a young woman and her refusal to be betrayed by death, obsession or love. It engages with the activist concern for the fisher people as well as the problematic of middle-class loyalties and the antagonisms of sect and gender. The most complex narrative, in this slim volume, is the apocryphal reading, from a feminist perspective, of Jesus’ resurrection.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Susan Visvanathan
He teaches Gender and Cultural Studies at the Centre for the study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University and at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her first book The Christians of Kerala: History, Belief and Ritual amongst the Yakobawas Published by OUP, Madras in 1993. Since then she has been engaged in dialogue theories, gender studies and a slowly unfolding study of the Fisherpeople in Kerala. Her chief interest remains historical method in sociology. Susan Visvanathan has ben a Fellow at Nehru Memorial Museun (1989-1992) and an Honorary Fellow at Indian Institute of Advanced Study on the Religion and Culture Project(1990-1995). She has co-edited two issues of the IIC Quarterly with Geeti Sen on Kerala (1995) and Women and the Family (1997). She was the Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow to Queens university at Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1997.
There are no reviews yet.