{"title":"Ethnicity, cultural hybridity & Felanee: women question in India’s Northeast","authors":"Debajyoti Biswas, Rupanjit Das","doi":"10.1080/14797585.2023.2260577","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTWomen and children have often been affected by conflicts taking place in India’s Northeast. Although human rights abuse by armed forces and militias has been addressed in academia time and again, the weaponisation of ‘rape’ has not declined in the region as evinced by the recent incident in Manipur. As such this essay argues that solidarity among women can not only prevent such heinous crimes but can also dismantle the patriarchal structures that breed rape cultures. Further, literature can work as an agency through which such consciousness of protest and solidarity can be generated. By taking into account the political and cultural discourses of this region and its manifestation in literary works with reference to Arupa Patangia Kalita’s novel The Story of Felanee the essay argues that ethnic assertions diminish the rights of women due to the patriarchal nature of these societies. Since the inter-ethnic conflicts are engineered by the patriarchs of a community in which the women are hapless sufferers, Felanee’s resilience, like the grannies of Shaheen Bagh, exemplifies resistance against oppressive structures. The essay explores the literary representation of patriarchal conditioning of ethnic resurgence, its contestation with cultural hybridisation, and the subsequent dehumanisation of women.KEYWORDS: FelaneeNortheast Indiarapecultural hybridityconflict Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.","PeriodicalId":44587,"journal":{"name":"Journal for Cultural Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5000,"publicationDate":"2023-09-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal for Cultural Research","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14797585.2023.2260577","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"CULTURAL STUDIES","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
ABSTRACTWomen and children have often been affected by conflicts taking place in India’s Northeast. Although human rights abuse by armed forces and militias has been addressed in academia time and again, the weaponisation of ‘rape’ has not declined in the region as evinced by the recent incident in Manipur. As such this essay argues that solidarity among women can not only prevent such heinous crimes but can also dismantle the patriarchal structures that breed rape cultures. Further, literature can work as an agency through which such consciousness of protest and solidarity can be generated. By taking into account the political and cultural discourses of this region and its manifestation in literary works with reference to Arupa Patangia Kalita’s novel The Story of Felanee the essay argues that ethnic assertions diminish the rights of women due to the patriarchal nature of these societies. Since the inter-ethnic conflicts are engineered by the patriarchs of a community in which the women are hapless sufferers, Felanee’s resilience, like the grannies of Shaheen Bagh, exemplifies resistance against oppressive structures. The essay explores the literary representation of patriarchal conditioning of ethnic resurgence, its contestation with cultural hybridisation, and the subsequent dehumanisation of women.KEYWORDS: FelaneeNortheast Indiarapecultural hybridityconflict Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
期刊介绍:
JouJournal for Cultural Research is an international journal, based in Lancaster University"s Institute for Cultural Research. It is interested in essays concerned with the conjuncture between culture and the many domains and practices in relation to which it is usually defined, including, for example, media, politics, technology, economics, society, art and the sacred. Culture is no longer, if it ever was, singular. It denotes a shifting multiplicity of signifying practices and value systems that provide a potentially infinite resource of academic critique, investigation and ethnographic or market research into cultural difference, cultural autonomy, cultural emancipation and the cultural aspects of power.