Resistance and its Discontents in South Asian Women's Fiction

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Resistance and its discontents in South Asian women's fiction examines the literary representation of a fascinating range of resistances enacted in response to various forms of oppression, and addresses the expectations, contradictions, anxieties and even inaction that resistance can generate, particularly for women.

This book is an examination of how English-language fiction by women writers from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka has grappled with the idea and practice of resistance. A valuable, original and timely contribution to the field of South Asian literary and cultural studies, this book extends and complicates existing debates about the meanings of resistance. It brings to the fore not only the emancipatory potential of resistance, but also the contradictions that it can encompass as well as the anxieties that it can generate, particularly for women. Focusing on novels and short fiction, the book explores fiction by Arundhati Roy, Kamila Shamsie, Tahmima Anam, Jhumpa Lahiri, Manju Kapur and Ru Freeman, amongst others.

Reviews

' Mirzas book is a sharp-eyed analysis of women and transgender characters in South Asian womens fiction.'
CHOICE
Reprinted with permission from Choice Reviews. All rights reserved. Copyright by the American Library Association.

'Maryam Mirza offers a provocative and nuanced discussion of resistance in postcolonial South Asian womens fiction and challenges the assumption that all such fiction is inherently resistant. She examines a range of South Asian women writers (resident and diasporic) including Arundhati Roy, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kamila Shamsie, Meena Kandasamy among others to explore the complexities of resistance. She argues that many of these writers go beyond challenging patriarchal and familial oppression in their writing and question socio-economic structures that are intertwined with gendered oppression. Mirzas theorization of resistance is a substantive addition to feminist and postcolonial scholarship, and her rich readings of different literary texts make a valuable contribution to feminist literary studies.'
Nalini Iyer, Professor of English, Seattle University

'Resistance and its Discontents in South Asian Womens Fiction is a rigorous and impassioned exploration of the concept of resistance in postcolonial literary studies. Challenging prevailing pieties and misgivings about the relevance of resistance, this monograph engages with the complexities and contradictions inherent in the term. By examining South Asian womens fiction, the book explores wider emancipatory politics around gender, class, caste, sexuality, and identity. Mirza also uncovers the slippery nature of resistance, highlighting the concepts centrality to questions of power and oppression. This book is an essential contribution to the field of postcolonial studies and a compelling excavation of resistance in South Asian womens writing.'
Claire Chambers, Professor of Global Literature, University of York

'Maryam Mirzas exploration of resistance in Anglophone fiction by contemporary women writers from South Asia and its diaspora, is both wide-ranging and exploratory. Her thematic analysis and close reading of over a dozen works of fictionnovels but also short storiesyields rich critical insights. At the same time, her comprehensive take on what counts as resistance in these narrativesnot just its heroic manifestations but also its limits, its contradictions, its marginality and even its absence in the reality of womens livesmakes this a provocative theoretical inquiry into female agency. Resistance and its Discontents in South Asian Womens Fiction makes a major contribution to postcolonial criticism as well as feminist theory.'
Rajeswari Sunder Rajan Formerly Global Distinguished Professor, New York University

Maryam Mirzas new book makes a major contribution to scholarship in postcolonial/world literature and South Asian literature. It highlights how multifarious the notion of resistance can become in literary narratives, and thus helps to complicate Manichaeistic understandings of resistance as they tend to be conceived of in postcolonial studies. Its breadth, depth, and level of detail are astonishing, and it offers a powerful interpretation of contemporary South Asian womens fiction through a novel reconception of resistance as a hermeneutical framework to approach postcolonial literature. Mirza draws on an inter-disciplinary and wide-ranging array of critical and theoretical resources in postcolonial theory and political notions of the self, alongside text-specific readings of the fictions under discussion, weaving it all together into a persuasive and gripping critical narrative.
Neelam Srivastava, Professor of Postcolonial and World Literature, Newcastle University

Author Bio

Maryam Mirza is Associate Professor of South Asian Literature in the Department of English Studies at Durham University, UK.