Since the second half of the twentieth century, there has been a commitment on the part of women writers and scholars to revise and rewrite the history and culture of colonial and post-colonial women. This collection intends to enter a forum of discussion in which the colonial past serves as a point of reference for the analysis of contemporary issues.This volume will examine topics of women’s identities and bodies through literary representations and historical accounts. In other words, the aim is to reconstruct women’s identities through the representations of their bodies in literature and to analyse women’s bodies historically as sites of abuse, discrimination and violence on the one hand, and of knowledge and cultural production on the other.The chapters of this book will contribute to the formation of a new representation of women through history and literature which fights traditional stereotypes in relation to their bodies and identities. Focusing on female bodies as maternal bodies, as repositories of history and memory, as sexual bodies, as healing bodies, as performative of gender, as black bodies, as migrant and hybrid bodies, as the objects of regulation and control, and as victims of sexual exploitation and murder, the different articles contained in this book will examine issues of space, power/knowledge relations, discrimination, the production of knowledge, gender and boundaries to produce new identities for women which contest and respond to the traditional ones.The volume is addressed to a wide readership, both scholars and those interested in investigating the dynamics of the female body, and the social and cultural conceptualizations of our multicultural and multiethnic contemporary societies in relation to it, without forgetting the historical and colonial roots of these new representations.
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 9781443836272
Number of pages: 175
Dimensions: 212 x 148 mm
"This illuminating collection of essays revises the ways in which the bodies and identities of colonized women have been presented in literature by colonial and postcolonial female writers. Many of the contributors write of how those selfhoods and physiques come to the surface as the bearers of stereotypes, harassment, discrimination or sexual exploitation. […]Through its examination of female bodies and selves in colonial literature and history, this volume engages readers in a fascinating discussion of the dynamics of social and literary representations of otherness, female identity, and cultural amalgamation, taking as a starting point the very origins of it all – the body."- Isabel María Andrés-Cuevas, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, (2013)"This is an exciting collection of essays and an outstanding addition to a growing corpus of feminist literary and cultural studies emerging from Spain, of which it is hoped we will see more, since all the essays provide much food for thought concerning the central role of the body in the construction of women’s writing and in the process of women’s/queer identity built with the help of a strong historical focus and supported by a suitable feminist methodology." - Pilar Cuder-Dominguea, Miscelanea: A Journal of English and American Studies, 48 (2013), 151-164.
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