It is a gendered world everywhere. We might talk about gender justice, campaign for it, we have not been able to eradicate the cultural borders, the hierarchical power system in our daily walks of life. Gender is performance. It totally depends on the person or society to assign roles on the self and community. If the individual choice harmonizes with the masses, which is rarely the case, there is no conflict. But generally, the patriarchal system, through regulation and control, curbs the individual choices. At times, the social construct is benevolent to restrict individual eccentricities, but mostly, as cultural histories of nations would unfold, the patriarchy operates as a crushing power system, where “might is right” too. This space in the Caesurae journal, is to discuss the issues of gender with its relevance to culture, subsuming the very subtexts of race, caste, class, religion and the processes of transculturation and transmutation. We look forward to articles based on:

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• Gender and religion

• Gender Activism

• Socio-cultural politics of the “Queer”

• Artistic interventions for foregrounding the voice of the gendered

• Gender and the Nation

• Feminism

• Gender and Performance

• Masculinist discourse

• Intertextualities of Gender discourse in literature

• Gender and popular culture/ mass media

• Gender in “His Story” and Her Stories.

 

This issue includes some very interesting essays on gender, varied in their themes of discourse. The featured article for the Caesurae Special Issue, January, 2017 by Professor Joan Ramon Resina, is in this section, writing about abjection and intertextualities of cultural discourse in literature. Muralidhar Sharma’s article writes about the changing cultural contours of the Thumri in Kathak dance performance. Parna Ghosh’s essay is on Travel Narratives during British Colonialism, in India, by the Indian women writers providing different layers implicit in the analysis: women/ Indian/ travel/ Writing.  There are articles on cross-cultural studies in literature and art by Nikita Rai and Panchali Mukherjee. In Nikita Rai’s essay, the cross-cultural artistic interventions are also about gender activism, or “artivism”. Kshamata Chaudhary’s article engages in a cultural discourse from the point of view of two women Dalit writers in India. Sonia Sahoo’s article discusses the early modern rogue narratives, as a cultural template to unravel the anxieties of Englishness in the wake of Great Britain’s dramatic exit from the European Union unleashing a disquieting culture war over the purported authenticity of English national identity.

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Hope to engage the readers in a nuanced gender discourse, and look forward to more such articles, sharing of perspectives and reports of  field work on gender for the next issue of Caesurae, in August-September, 2017.

 

Managing and Chief Editor

 

Contents

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1. Featured Article - Impossible Transit: Seduction of the Abject in Albert Sánchez Piñol’s Cold Skin - Joan Ramon Resina (Click Here)

 

2. Poetry, Performance, and the Courtesan: Changing Contours of the Thumri in Kathak - P.Muralidhar Sharma (Click Here)

 

3. ‘Her’ Story in the ‘History of Nationalism: Re-Reading Women’s Travel Narratives - Parna Ghose (Click Here)

 

4. ‘Bagaincha’: In Search of Our Nepali Mother’s Gardens -  Nikita Rai (Click Here)

 

5. Bama and Baby Kamble: Polemical Matrix from the Periphery -  Kshamata Chaudhary (Click Here)

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6. Resituating Brexit: Anxieties of Early Modern Cultural and Linguistic Translation – Sonia Sahoo (Click Here)

 

7. A Comparative Literary Study of Kabita Sinha’s “Eve Speaks  God”  and Margaret Atwood’s “Helen of Troy Does Counterto Dancing” - Panchali Mukherjee (Click Here) 

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