Troubled resistance, troubling resistance
Homework, The Namesake and A Disobedient Girl
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In analysing three troubled and troubling figures of resistance, the fifth chapter evaluates some of the ways in which contemporary fiction by South Asian women writers problematises the purely positive and emancipatory connotations of nonviolent resistance as a concept and as a practice. The figures of distorted resistance considered in this chapter are consciously disparate: a middle-aged Indian male immigrant in Australia in Homework who agitates for Goa’s liberation following its annexation by the postcolonial Indian state, Moushumi in The Namesake, whose ostensibly transgressive decisions confound the line between (self-)destructive and constructive defiance and need to be understood in terms of her deep malaise about her identity as a second-generation Bengali-American, and finally Latha in A Disobedient Girl, who works as a domestic servant in Colombo and for whom the erotic emerges as the primary source and form of agentic behaviour while attempting to contest the socio-economic and affective status quo.

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