Many consider the autobiography to be a Western genre that represents the self as fully autonomous. The contributors to Speaking of the Self challenge this presumption by examining a wide range of women’s autobiographical writing from South Asia. Expanding the definition of what kinds of writing can be considered autobiographical, the contributors analyze everything from poetry, songs, mystical experiences and diaries, to prose, fiction, architecture and religious treatises. The authors they study are just as diverse: a Mughal princess, an eighteenth-century courtesan from Hyderabad, a nineteenth-century Muslim prostitute in Punjab, a housewife in colonial Bengal, a Muslim Gandhian devotee of Krishna, several female Indian and Pakistani novelists and two male actors who worked as female impersonators. The contributors find that in these autobiographies the authors construct their gendered selves in relational terms. Throughout, they show how autobiographical writing – in whatever form it takes – provides the means towards more fully understanding the historical, social and cultural milieu in which the author performs herself and creates her subjectivity.
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Speaking of The Self: Gender, Performance and Autobiography in South Asia
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Siobhan Lambert-Hurley
Siobhan Lambert-Hurley is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at Nottingham Trent University in the United Kingdom. Her research focuses on women, gender and Islam in South Asia with a particular emphasis on education, social and political organizations, the culture of travel, missionaries and autobiographical narratives. Her other publications include Muslim Women, Reform and Princely Patronage: Nawab Sultan Jahan Begam of Bhopal (2007), and Rhetoric and Reality: Gender and the Colonial Experience in South Asia (co-edited with Avril A. Powell, 2006).
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Bibliographic information
Title
Speaking of The Self: Gender, Performance and Autobiography in South Asia
Author
Edition
1st. ed.
Publisher
Zubaan, 2017
ISBN
9789385932380
Length
312p.
Subjects
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