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Elusive Lives: Gender, Autobiography, and the Self in Muslim South Asia

Elusive Lives: Gender, Autobiography, and the Self in Muslim South Asia

Hardcover

Series: South Asia in Motion

Literary CriticismIslam

ISBN10: 1503604802
ISBN13: 9781503604803
Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr
Published: Jul 31 2018
Pages: 296
Weight: 1.30
Height: 1.00 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.10
Language: English

Muslim South Asia is widely characterized as a culture that idealizes female anonymity: women's bodies are veiled and their voices silenced. Challenging these perceptions, Siobhan Lambert-Hurley highlights an elusive strand of autobiographical writing dating back several centuries that offers a new lens through which to study notions of selfhood. In Elusive Lives, she locates the voices of Muslim women who rejected taboos against women speaking out, by telling their life stories in written autobiography. To chart patterns across time and space, materials dated from the sixteenth century to the present are drawn from across South Asia - including present-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Lambert-Hurley uses many rare autobiographical texts in a wide array of languages, including Urdu, English, Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi and Malayalam to elaborate a theoretical model for gender, autobiography, and the self beyond the usual Euro-American frame. In doing so, she works toward a new, globalized history of the field. Ultimately, Elusive Lives points to the sheer diversity of Muslim women's lives and life stories, offering a unique window into a history of the everyday against a backdrop of imperialism, reformism, nationalism and feminism.

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