“Confronting Hidden Histories through Mythmaking in the Indo-Caribbean Diaspora.” Victoria V. Chang, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago.
According to Mariam Pirbhai, “Indo-Caribbean women novelists arguably work in tandem with historians in the memorialisation and excavation of women’s narratives, for they not only strive to fill in historical gaps but also to mobilize these stories as models of cultural and feminist agency for present generations” (Pirbhai, 47). Indo-Trinidadian writer Ramabai Espinet joins this proud tradition of “reconstitution”. Her sole novel, The Swinging Bridge, like so many novels by Caribbean writers, places memory at its centre. The protagonist, having confronted her family’s failure to adequately share and record the past, must now “re-member” it through the memories of those who are now present and with the fragments that have remained from this former time.
In her quest, the sites of her childhood village and ancestral home become the places at which memory is excavated and the hidden stories of her maternal ancestors revealed. Their courage and agency, Mona discovers, while belonging to the past, are yet able to resist patriarchal/religious/colonial silencing of female histories to enrich and empower the present. While traumatic, even shameful memories are brought to the fore, the past becomes something that can be celebrated after it is confronted – enjoyed after it is pieced together and properly mourned. The result is a sense of identify rooted in mythologized memory that resists traditional notions of female passivity – an identity rooted in remembering and resulting in the perpetuation of a rich legacy of female artistry, proving that the rewards of memorialization are well worth the labour involved.
Victoria V. Chang currently holds a BA and MA in Literatures in English from the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago. She is currently a full-time, PhD – Literatures in English candidate at that institution and works as an academic Tutor in the Literary, Cultural and Communication Studies (LCCS) department. Her core research interests pertain to issues of gender, identity, culture and ethnicity, as well as nationhood. Presently, her thesis is under examination and focuses on literary representations of female, Indo-Trinidadian identities in the novel form, with added emphasis on the ways in which select fictional characters are constructed in light of, and in response to, historical stereotypes of East Indian women in the Caribbean. She was one of two Caribbean scholarship recipients of the “Other Universals” project, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in the United States.
“‘Collective Amnesia’: Analysing the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971 through the Intersection of Gender and Historiography.” Pooja Yadav, University of Delhi.
Official documents on war focus on numbers, ‘facts’, and ‘collateral damage’ through hypernationalist perspectives on the ‘enemy’. The stark invisibility of women in State based narratives, posits literature as an important site used as tool to shed light on various issues of sexual violence, trauma, as well as idenity during the War of 1971. In this paper I use the theoretical framework of Yasmin Saika’s seminal text Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971 to excavate the silenced women’s histories as part of a nationalist project in Bangladesh. This allows one to move away from neat binaries of the ‘good’ soldier versus the ‘evil’ one, as Saika shows that women from different ethnicities were targeted across the region for belonging to the ‘wrong’ side. Questions of ‘belonging’, collective memory and its expression in public history, continues to contribute to monolithic discourses on nationalism, often based on reconstructing the ‘Other.’ Saika’s text in this context acts as a tool of historiography, shedding light on alternative readings of history. The central question of the paper is framed around the placement of women on the fringes of society, which is heightened during wars, placing the hypothesis on the lack of agency granted to women to articulate or archive their experiences in patriarchal societies. The objective of this research is to delve into the intersection of historiography and literature through the lens of gender in conflict zones in order to gain nuanced understandings of war, questioning contemporary discourses on citizenship and law amidst larger frameworks of patriarchy in South Asia and ‘collective amnesia’. Rereading the testimonies of the survivors of the 1971 war sheds light on gendered conflict and the role of memory in achieving justice.
Pooja Yadav is a graduate student at the Department of Psychology at the University of Delhi. She completed her B.A (Hons) in Psychology from Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi. Her research interests are in the field of Clinical Psychology and Cross- Cultural Psychology. She has a keen interest in the interdisciplinary nature of literature, gender and psychology. She grew up in Turkmenistan, England, Nepal, Australia and Bangladesh before relocating to India for university.
“Discovering Alternative Futures through Women’s Collective Memory in Ecofeminist Literature.” Tayla Straub, Stony Brook University.
Women’s collective memory, both in Eastern and Western contexts, includes their longstanding exploitation and the exploitation of nature, which has been illuminated in literature by ecofeminist authors such as Han Kang and Barbara Kingsolver. These authors craft alternative futures that resist this oppression, as demonstrated in Barbara Kingsolver’s novels Prodigal Summer, Flight Behavior and Unsheltered and Hang Kang’s The Vegetarian and “The Fruit of my Woman.”
In my presentation, I will explore the ways in which Kang and Kingsolver’s ideas of the future, crafted with their remembering of women’s long history of oppression, identify methods for women to consume, manipulate, and modify nature to benefit both themselves and the environment. Memory becomes a cornerstone for crafting alternative futures that free both women and nature from their extensive oppression in the modern era, particularly in ecofeminist works. I will also explore the tension in memory, particularly regarding how men’s memories can be used to undermine women and nature’s identities. For example, when Yeong-hye, the main female character in Kang’s The Vegetarian, slits her wrists after being mentally and emotionally abused, her husband likens her to a wild animal. How does one’s gender and their disparate experiences under capitalist patriarchy govern their perception of a wild animal and how do their collective memories govern their attitudes towards the environment? I argue that because men have a collective memory of exploiting animals, this comment was meant to place Yeong-hye into further subordination; however, Yeong-hye views nature as powerful, and uses this comment to fuel her anti-patriarchal agenda throughout the text. While employing memory in literature to address social and political strife can perpetuate exclusion, as we see above, it ultimately becomes a tactic for women and nature’s future survival and growth, as demonstrated by the works of Barbara Kingsolver and Han Kang.
Tayla Straub recently received her Master’s of Arts in English at Stony Brook University, after receiving her BA in English with honors and Anthropology there. Tayla recently published her MA thesis, “Could man ever be for anything?”: Ecofeminism and the Anthropocene in the Works of Barbara Kingsolver and Han Kang, and plans to continue her research on ecofeminist critiques of the Anthropocene and portrayals of gendered violence in an English doctoral program later this year. She is actively involved in LI Against Domestic Violence, and volunteers there weekly to aid the non-profit in educating local residents on dating violence and providing resources for survivors.
