Poetic Negotiations: Salad Bowl Feminism in Selected Poetry of Fehmida Riaz, Pat Mora and Joan Loveridge-Sanbonmatsu
The research attempts to evaluate the depiction of women's oppression in specific postcolonial contexts at the hands of the interlocked power pattern formed by manifold factors like patriarchy, class conflict, religion, ethnicity and imperialism in the selected poetry of the renowned Pakistani poetess Fehmida Riaz, the Latino American Poetess Pat Mora, and the Japanese poetess Sanbonmatsu. It applies the theory of Postcolonial Feminism to bring to the fore the oppression of postcolonial women at the intersection of gender, class, race, religion and culture, hence, offering a critique of Western Feminist discourse and its slogan of sisterhood, which tends to erase heterogeneity in women's situations across the globe. The theory of Third World Feminism as well as the portrayals in these poetic compositions from a variety of postcolonial social formations, highlight the fact that postcolonial women are not a monolithic and archetypal suffering category as presented in Western discourses; instead, their resistant agency and subversive subjectivity also stands at the center of their creative writings.
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Postcolonial Feminism, Hegemonic Feminist Discourse, Intersectionality, Patriarchy, Race, Class, Nationality
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(1) Kalsoom Khan
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Government Guru Nanak Postgraduate College, Nankana Sahib, Punjab, Pakistan.
(2) Mumtaz Ahmad
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Government Guru Nanak Postgraduate College, Nankana Sahib, Punjab, Pakistan.
(3) Malik Mujeeb ur Rahman
Lecturer, Department of English, Minhaj University, Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan.
The Awakening's Rediscovery: A literary Stimulus for Raising Women's Struggle in Pakistan
The awakening has spoken to women's issues across time in many corners of the world regardless of caste, faith, nationality. Being a semi-autobiographical American-Novel, The Awakening was a catharsis against the late-19th-century Victorian constraints on Southern American women. The text challenged the hold of Victorian shackles on women's social, personal, marital, and sexual rights. Although the text had poor critical reception in its own time, it was reaccredited in the 1950s. Since then, the novel has kept on enlightening its readers through its powerful female-characters across times and cultures. This study revisits how the text reflected women's individualism; how readers responded to it, and how it has contributed a change to women's position. The analogy also signifies the degree to which the study could encourage the suppressed women's voice in Pakistan against—social, personal, marital, sexual —injustices that are done to them under cultural shackles, religious romanticizing, and androcentric norms.
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The Awakening; feminism; women; late 19th-century; patriarchy; Pakistan; USA
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(1) Imran Ali
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Fatima Jinnah Women University (FJWU), Rawalpindi, Punjab, Pakistan.
(2) Uzma Imtiaz
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Fatima Jinnah Women University (FJWU), Rawalpindi, Punjab, Pakistan.
(3) Zainab Akram
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Sardar Bahadur Khan Women University, Quetta, Baluchistan, Pakistan.
Women, History And Faith: Suleri's Critique Of Pakistan's National Culture In Meatless Days And Boys Will Be Boys
Sara Suleri is divided between her fascination for her father's strong character and her repulsion for the consequent effect on woman's space in family life, connoting a critique of Pakistani patriarchal society in which women, irrespective of their social status, suffer from marginalization. Although Suleri's Boys Will Be Boys is an elegy for her father, as she announces in the sub-title of the work, she manages her tilt toward her father despite her advocacy of the woman's space miserably shrunk to domestic life in Pakistani society. Besides womenÂ’s position, she questions the dominant version of history and the state's political manipulation of religion for ulterior motives. She is close to Boehmer's theorization of the elitist continuities and intimacies with a view that develops from geographically and historically multiple contexts and histories. Her role as a native intellectual is two-pronged: her view is colored by Western discourse, but her status as a 'representative' Pakistani voice is also significant. This article analyzes how far Suleri's representation of women, religion and history of Pakistani society is colored by Western context.
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Pakistani Literature in English, Nation, Representation, Feminism, Patriarchy, Gender, Sara Suleri
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(1) Ghulam Murtaza
Associate Professor, Department of English, GC University Faisalabad, Faisalabad, Punjab, Pakistan.
(2) Mazhar Hayat
Professor, Department of English, GC University Faisalabad, Faisalabad, Punjab, Pakistan.
(3) Syed Ali Waqar Hashmi
Research Assistant, Department of English, GC University Faisalabad, Faisalabad, Punjab, Pakistan.
Unmasking the Alternative Micro Feminist Narratives in Anna Karenina: A Postmodernist-Deconstructive Perspective
The present study means to investigate Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy in the light of eclectic theoretical framework consisting of Feminism, Postmodernism, and Deconstruction. The overt dominant patriarchal metanarrative is to be shown as problematized by the existence of the alternative micro feminist narrative stands. These alternative strands challenge and subvert the absolutist patriarchal narrative. The transcendental position of patriarchy as an absolute stands deconstructed by the play of alternative micro-narrative strands of feminist resistance. The study also means to show that subjectivities of major characters are self-differentiated, fractured and fragmented. This also implies that patriarchal metanarrative and alternative feminist narrative strands continually displace each other, instead of going for mutual synthesis. Seen through the lens of chosen theoretical framework, Anna Karenina becomes a site of pluralism and multiplicity, a story of resistance to the transcendental patriarchal presence.
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Suppression, Patriarchy, Ideology, Schizophrenia, Resistance
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(1) Muhammad Ayub Jajja
Associate Professor,Department of English,The Islamia University of Bahawalpur, Bahawalpur Punjab, Pakistan.