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.
You can read this ebook online in a web browser, without downloading anything or installing software.
This ebook is available in file types:
This ebook is available in:
After you've bought this ebook, you can choose to download either the PDF version or the ePub, or both.
The publisher has supplied this book in DRM Free form with digital watermarking.
You can read this eBook on any device that supports DRM-free EPUB or DRM-free PDF format.
The publisher has supplied this book in encrypted form, which means that you need to install free software in order to unlock and read it.
To read this ebook on a mobile device (phone or tablet) you'll need to install one of these free apps:
To download and read this eBook on a PC or Mac:
The publisher has set limits on how much of this ebook you may print or copy. See details.