English Language and Literature Commons^™

Dancing In The Diaspora: Remembering The Devadasis, Teresa Hubel

Teresa Hubel

Introduction:

In Canada, the classical dance bharatanatyam is both greater and less than an art form, greater because, unlike more common forms such as ballet or jazz dance, it offers its practitioners and its spectators something more than an opportunity to experience art or to be the vehicle for its expression, and less because what it offers along with its art is ethnicity. And in our multicultural society anything tagged as ethnic is caught in an intricate web of exaltation and denigration: by the very act of its celebration, which is frequently state-sponsored and state-endorsed, ethnicity is cast outside and …

From Tawa'if To Wife? Making Sense Of Bollywood's Courtesan Genre, Teresa Hubel

Teresa Hubel

Introduction: Although constituting what might be described as only a thimbleful of water in the ocean that is Hindi cinema, the courtesan or tawa'if film is a distinctive Indian genre, one that has no real equivalent in the Western film industry. With Indian and diaspora audiences generally, it has also enjoyed a broad popularity, its music and dance sequences being among the most valued in Hindi film, their specificities often lovingly remembered and reconstructed by fans. Were you, for example, to start singing "Dil Cheez Kya Hai" or "Yeh Kya Hua" especially to a group of north Indians over the …

The High Cost Of Dancing: When The Indian Women's Movement Went After The Devadasis, Teresa Hubel

Teresa Hubel

Introduction: On the other side of patriarchal histories are women who are irrecoverably elusive, whose convictions and the examples their lives might have left to us--their everyday resistances as well as their capitulations to authority--are at some fundamental level lost. These are the vast majority of women who never wrote the history books that shape the manner in which we, at any particular historical juncture, are trained to remember; they did not give speeches that were recorded and carefully collected for posterity; their ideals, sayings, beliefs, and approaches to issues were not painstakingly preserved and then quoted century after century. …

Charting The Anger Of Indian Women Through Narayan's Savitri, Teresa Hubel

Teresa Hubel

From the introduction: Written in the late 1930s, when a new irascibility crept into the largely female-produced discourse on the status of women in India, The Dark Room is about a particular woman's indignation and revolt. Savitri is a Hindu wife following in the glorified footsteps of other Hindu wives, such as her namesake from the Mahabharata and Sita of the Ramayana. Although she lives up to the ideals of servitude and devotion implicit in these powerful feminine figures, Savitri of The Dark Room is betrayed by a patriarchal system that allows her husband the freedom of infidelity but denies …

A Mutiny Of Silence: Swarnakumari Devi's Sati, Teresa Hubel

Teresa Hubel

Aim:To discuss how Swarnakumari Devi's family connections as much as her sex contributed to why her work faded from the memory of nationalist India.Introduction: The historical context that helped to produce the writing of Swarna-kumari Devi Ghosal also gives us a glimmer into some of the possible reasons why her work faded from the literary memory of nationalist India. Some of that context is hinted at in the back pages of her collection of short stories in English, published in 1919 by Ganesh and Co., Madras. Reminding us of the inescapable connection between capitalism and knowledge, these back pages are …

In Pursuit Of Feminist Postfeminism And The Blessings Of Buttercup, Teresa Hubel

Teresa Hubel

Introduction: I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in thinking that the term “postfeminism” is often and perhaps most frequently used—by the mainstream media generally and by actual people—as a kind of casual dismissal of feminism that comes implicitly coupled with the suggestion that the cutting-edge place to be these days, with regard to women, is the one where the old victim mentality has been sloughed off and a new flying-free-of-those-chains approach to gender in all its diversity and in all its equal opportunity has been boldly embraced. Given the terms of this unstated argument, any criticism of this postfeminism automatically …

Excavating The Expendable Working Classes In "The Imperialist", Teresa Hubel

Teresa Hubel

You can’t get much more middle class than Sara Jeanette Duncan’s turn-of-the-century novel The Imperialist. Its middle-classness calls out from virtually every page and through almost every narrative technique the novelist employs from her choice of theme—the debate over imperial federation, conducted some hundred years ago primarily in elite political circles—to her setting—the social world of the commercial classes who live in a prosperous southern Ontario town (which she names Elgin but which most critics suspect is Duncans own hometown of Brantford in very thin disguise)—and finally to her protagonists, the Murchisons, whose middle-class values are proudly paraded at every …