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4 Family matters: Euro-American orphans, the bildungsroman, and kinship building Implicit in a phrase like ‘loved ones’ is an open-ended notion of kinship that respects the principles of choice and self-determination in defining kin, with love spanning the ideologically contrasting domains of biological family and families we create. (Weston, 1997: 183) As we have seen in Chapter 3, contemporary orphan tales typically foreground alternative, or non-normative, families. In this chapter we focus on John Irving’s The Cider House Rules (1985), and Kaye Gibbons
characteristics of a science-fiction film. It could be seen as a piece of pro-life propaganda and a heavy vehicle for family values. However, the ideological reappropriation of family matters by right-wing and far-right political movements does not necessarily imply that family is in itself a ‘right-wing’ or conservative issue. One way of understanding these apparent contradictions would be to consider the specificity of France and French feminists with regard to motherhood. Indeed, motherhood has always been a tricky issue for feminists
Rohinton Mistry is the only author whose every novel has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Such a Long Journey (1991), A Fine Balance (1995) and Family Matters (2002) are all set in India's Parsee community. Recognised as one of the most important contemporary writers of postcolonial literature, Mistry's subtle yet powerful narratives engross general readers, excite critical acclaim and form staple elements of literature courses across the world. This study provides an insight into the key features of Mistry's work. It suggests how the author's writing can be read in terms of recent Indian political history, his native Zoroastrian culture and ethos, and the experience of migration, which now sees him living in Canada. The texts are viewed through the lens of diaspora and minority discourse theories to show how Mistry's writing is illustrative of marginal positions in relation to sanctioned national identities. In addition, Mistry utilises and blends the conventions of oral storytelling common to the Persian and South Asian traditions, with nods in the direction of the canonical figures of modern European literature, sometimes reworking and reinflecting their registers and preoccupations to create a distinctive voice redolent of the hybrid inheritance of Parsee culture and of the postcolonial predicament more generally.
Family Matters 125 5 Running repairs: corruption, community and duty in Family Matters it is their characters, indeed, that make people what they are, but it is by reason of their actions that they are happy or the reverse. (Aristotle, Poetics, Book 6) O The world as evil let us not resign, But be good whilst to good we still incline. Nor good nor bad forever will remain; Let us in memory the good retain. (The Shah-Namah of Fardusi, trans. Alexander Rogers, p. 60) N 6 December 1992, the Babri Mosque at Ayodhya was destroyed by a large crowd of Hindu
Bordering intimacy is a study of how borders and dominant forms of intimacy, such as family, are central to the governance of postcolonial states such as Britain. The book explores the connected history between contemporary border regimes and the policing of family with the role of borders under European and British empires. Building upon postcolonial, decolonial and black feminist theory, the investigation centres on how colonial bordering is remade in contemporary Britain through appeals to protect, sustain and make family life. Not only was family central to the making of colonial racism but claims to family continue to remake, shore up but also hide the organisation of racialised violence in liberal states. Drawing on historical investigations, the book investigates the continuity of colonial rule in numerous areas of contemporary government – family visa regimes, the policing of sham marriages, counterterror strategies, deprivation of citizenship, policing tactics, integration policy. In doing this, the book re-theorises how we think of the connection between liberal government, race, family, borders and empire. In using Britain as a case, this opens up further insights into the international/global circulations of liberal empire and its relationship to violence.
Anthropology after Gluckman places the intimate circle around Max Gluckman, his Manchester School, in the vanguard of modern social anthropology. The book discloses the School’s intense, argument-rich collaborations, developing beyond an original focus in south and central Africa. Where outsiders have seen dominating leadership by Gluckman, a common stock of problems, and much about conflict, Richard Werbner highlights how insiders were drawn to explore many new frontiers in fieldwork and in-depth, reflexive ethnography, because they themselves, in class and gender, ethnicity and national origins, were remarkably inclusive. Characteristically different anthropologists, their careers met the challenges of being a public intellectual, an international celebrity, an institutional good citizen, a social and political activist, an advocate of legal justice. Their living legacies are shown, for the first time, through interlinked social biography and intellectual history to reach broadly across politics, law, ritual, semiotics, development studies, comparative urbanism, social network analysis and mathematical sociology. Innovation – in research methods and techniques, in documenting people’s changing praxis and social relations, in comparative analysis and a destabilizing strategy of re-analysis within ethnography – became the School’s hallmark. Much of this exploration confronted troubling times in Africa, colonial and postcolonial, which put the anthropologists and their anthropological knowledge at risk. The resurgence of debate about decolonization makes the accounts of fierce, End of Empire argument and recent postcolonial anthropology all the more topical. The lessons, even in activism, for social scientists, teachers as well as graduate and undergraduate students are compelling for our own troubled times.
:16 pm 172 Rohinton Mistry of that documentary realism sometimes seen as symptomatic of the author’s writing. It also uses a variety of literary tropes and discourses as it weaves its narrative fabric, creating a quilt which sustains and supports both characters and readers as they experience the giddy fluctuations of a menacing, topsy-turvy world. Even in the ostensibly more traditional Family Matters, similar issues of corruption versus integrity are explored. Here, notions of the multiple and sometimes conflicting demands of duty are set alongside filial loyalty
believable interior life.’22 Other legitimate criticisms include the charge of a tendency to sentimentality. In a review of Family Matters, Adam MarsJones comments that the novel ‘moves to a close on a surge of pious sentiment’, and accuses Mistry of differentiating between the ‘significant’ and ‘arbitrary’ fates of his characters according to whether or not they are Parsis: a charge which is perhaps a little harsh yet understandable in a text with a more intrinsic focus than the previous, expansive tour de force.23 It is certainly the case that the fountain of domestic
from time to time to give greater weight to his words, he asks everyone’s news, tells jokes and comments on current family matters. The gathering hangs on his every word, with laughter and exclamations accompanying the conclusion to each anecdote. Most of them – apart perhaps from the very youngest – already know most of Abu Nadil’s stories. But they still appreciate the way he tells them, the comical
– Such a Long Journey (1991), A Fine Balance (1995), and Family Matters (2002), receive a host of literary prizes, and achieve recognition as one of the most important contemporary writers of postcolonial literature. Mistry draws his inspiration both from sharply recalled childhood experiences and from the upheavals of migration. However, as always with such intense and apparently personal narratives, the relationship between fiction and autobiography is hard to determine. Certainly there are overlaps between the events and life choices of the writer and some of his