Cerebration

SUNITI NAMJOSHI'S BUILDING BABEL: The Resignification of Babel’s Resistant Subjects

SIPHIWE IGNATIUS DUBE

(Siphiwe Ignatius Dube is a Doctoral Candidate at the Centre for the Study of Religion, in University of Toronto. He is pursuing his PhD in Religion and Literature and specializes in Critical Theory, Feminist and Postcolonial Theory.)

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Introduction


In the conclusionary remarks of her study on Suniti Namjoshi subtitled The Artful Transgressor, C. Vijayasree argues that in Namjoshi’s writing transgression is used as a mode of articulating resistance (158). Trangression as opposed to aggression, according to Vijayasree, affords Namjoshi’s fiction a transformative role rather than just a polemic one. The implication of course being that it is more useful to transform than to reject completely and start afresh. This theme of transformation, which Namjoshi addresses in her work Building Babel, is also present in the original myth of the Biblical narrative from which Namjoshi’s work is based: “Now the whole earth had one language and the same words…. Then they said, ‘Come let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves;’… Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth;” (Gen. 11:1, 4, 9). Other than the fear of being scattered upon the face of the earth, no other reason is given for the endeavor of building the tower in the Biblical narrative. Apparently transformation is just good and that’s that.

Similarly, in Namjoshi’s Building Babel there is no reason given for embarking on the building project except “perhaps an urgent need,” as one of the narrators suggests at the beginning (Namjoshi 30). This essay will be arguing that part of Namjoshi’s concern in Building Babel is with the notions of subjectivity and resistance, dealt with via a reworking of a familiar myth. My driving question will be this: How can one escape the strictures of a prior myth whilst trying to forge a new one without being totally overwhelmed and achieving nothing in the end – or confused as were the initial Babel builders and the women of Namjoshi’s new Babel? That is to say, how does subjectivity, and consequently myth, as an oppressive mode relate to subjectivity as a mode of transformative resistance, or myth as transformable and transforming? I will deal with this question via a reading of Namjoshi through Judith Butler’s ideas on subjectivity.

Subjectivity and Naming


In the chapter entitled “Subjection, Resistance, and Resignification: Between Freud and Foucault”, Judith Butler asks the following question: “What do we make of a resistance that can only undermine, but which appears to have no power to rearticulate the terms, the symbolic terms – to use Lacanian parlance – by which subjects are constituted, by which subjection is installed in the very formation of the subject? ” (88-89). Her answer, teased out via a Foucauldian analysis, which she offers at the conclusion of the chapter, is that “any mobilization against subjection will take subjection as its resource, and that attachment to an injurious interpellation will, by way of a necessarily alienated narcissism, become the condition under which resignifying that interpellation becomes possible” (104). That is to say, only by occupying and being occupied by that injurious term is resistance to it possible; meaning, resistance is the self-subversion of power. A resistance that only undermines is capable of only half the project of subjectivity. What kind of staying power, then, does a resistance achieved through resignification, as opposed to merely rejection, have?

Through the characters in Building Babel, Namjoshi suggests that such a resistance offers a subjectivity that is outside the terms of the dominant discourse. Namjoshi demonstrates that, “agency and victimhood are not mutually exclusive, … victims are also agents who can change their lives and affect other lives in radical ways,” as Obioma Nnaemeka argues with respect to current feminist analyses of African Literature in general (3). In the act of presenting to her readers familiar characters with defamiliarized traits and characteristics in their present reincarnation, Namjoshi affirms the possibility of re-reading myths without jettisoning the truths they embolden. Even though we know that characters such as Alice, Cinders, Little Red, Rap Rap, Lady Shy, and Snow White all belong to a generation of literature which limited their roles only to representing the ideal subjected (victim) woman in patriarchal discourse, at least in their present reincarnation they are able to escape being typecast and they define who they are for themselves. Hence the building of Babel is symbolic of the act of self-definition. This self-definition is not solipsistic though - it is only achieved through engagement with others.

This self-definition is articulated well at the end of the “Piece for Soloists” by all the sisters together: “‘The Sisterhood of Women will mean something!’ ‘We will bring our own words.’ ‘We will own our own words.’” (30). There is transgression of the normative discourse via self-definition. To be sure, the change is not always positive, for Lady Shy eventually mutates into the all too familiar Lady Shylock, and Alice turns out to be a power-hungry despot who takes control of language (108-109). What implications do such transmutations have then? What makes possible the fusion when there is so much difference? What makes possible the resignification when the signifieds are supposedly already concretely determined? And yet, what makes possible the transgression, or the resistance, or the subversion of the symbolic system of subjectification? These questions becomes even more interesting in light of the consideration that the symbolic system being challenged, reoccupied, and transformed represents the Name of the Father – at least as it is patriarchally constitutive and constituted. For the Biblical myth of Babel belongs to a tradition of the patriarchs in both its Jewish and Christian renderings.

Subjectivity and Change


In the same article referred to earlier, Butler suggests, along the lines of Foucault’s analysis of power, that the means of subversion, of resistance, or resignification are already present at the moment of production. Butler argues that “in Foucault the possibility of subversion or resistance appears (a) in the course of a subjectivation that exceeds the normalizing aims by which it is mobilized, for example, in ‘reverse discourse,’ or (b) through convergence with other discursive regimes, … Thus resistance appears as the effect of power, its self-subversion” (92-93). This understanding of the ambivalence of power, which is also its erotically seductive element, is what Butler transposes to the concept of subject. Butler argues that:


disciplinary discourse does not unilaterally constitute
a subject in Foucault, or rather, if it does, it simultaneously,
constitutes the condition for the subject’s de-constitution.
What is brought into being through the performative effect
of the interpellating demand is much more than a “subject,”
for the “subject” created is not for that reason fixed in place:
it becomes the occasion for a further making. (99)


In other words, the subject is a site of ambivalence “in which the subject emerges both as the effect of a prior power and as the condition of possibility for a radically conditioned form of agency” (Butler 15). Power, then, is both constitutive of and constituted by the subject. The subject acts as it enacts; the subject acts as it activates. Such an understanding of power and subjectivity suggests that the meaning of subject rests on - depends on – which one of the sites of subjectivity one attaches oneself to. One can either be a subjected subject or one can be a subjecting subject. Yet, at the same time, the alterity of either of these is already present. Understanding subjectivity as ambivalent, therefore, might, perhaps, help us understand the kind of transmutations and transformations that the various characters go through in Building Babel. This in itself, in turn, might offer partial answers to the questions posed at the end of the preceding paragraph – questions of possibilities in light of impossibilities.
Namjoshi takes it for granted that her characters need to reinscribe the discursive norms that have hitherto defined their existence. For even from the start the sheer idealism of building Babel is destabilized by the multiple points of view articulated by the various characters, thus calling into question the notion of sisterhood as stable and universal vis-à-vis differing and different individual interests. Instead of accepting their predefined roles, Namjoshi’s characters mutate and change depending on circumstance and need. For example, Alice, who prefers to be called Queen Alice or nothing (106), turns out to be the very embodiment of everything wrong with the current state of affairs in a patriarchally defined world. Coups and factions, nationhood and bloodshed are what one associates with her, such that the Cat finally condemns Babel saying, “Babel was no longer distinguishable from any other city. Perhaps it would disintegrate, perhaps not. Who cared?” (140). What’s noteworthy here is that Namjoshi does not delve into a criticism of her characters as morally despicable or any such legalist argument, but, instead, the argument we are left with at best has to do with the entrapping nature of language. Language is what traps Alice as much as it traps the author of the text. Therefore, the only way out of this is to re-charge language with new meanings and subvert its normativity. This is possible only through fluidity and openness. By leaving the text open to as much interpretation as possible, Namjoshi offers the readers and the characters an opportunity to escape the normative definitions of roles - the possibility to be active subjects who exercise power.

Consequently, it is this act of faith, in turn, which affirms that, “no subject is its own point of departure” (Butler 635). For, one has to be always thinking about how one’s exercise of power affects others around – a real concern for the Other. Therefore, affirming that there is no universal and unified subject that lies beyond the shifting temporal and spatial varieties of subjectivity. There is no unchanging Alice, Black Piglet, etc. eternal, but all these characters are already and always in the making. There is no fixed subject, however much myth might try to construct such a subject – the sand is always shifting. The Black Piglet’s constant change of abodes as well as her/his spirit’s restlessness are already an affirmation of a subject that seeks an identity, yet at the same time a subject that has an identity. The Black Piglet’s already given identity as a piglet is disturbed by its feminine character that forms bonds of sisterhood with the women of Babel – The Pig-Princess (82), and also by its masculine character as The Black Pig-Princeling (83). In addition, the transgression of the boundary between animal and human, as well as the gender transgression all attest to the challenge being posed to subjectivity as set and predefined. All the characters undergo a transcendence of the predefined roles, whether as characters from other myths or as participants in the building of the new Babel, they become part of the past, but are also more than their present incarnations as they hold the possibility of a different and an other future.

Displacement and Myth Reinscription


Elsewhere Butler argues the following in relation to materiality, in particular the body: “To deconstruct the concept of matter or that of bodies is not to negate or refuse either term. To deconstruct these terms means, rather, to continue to use them, to repeat them, to repeat them subversively, and to displace them from the contexts in which they’ve been deployed as instruments of oppressive power” (642). The displacement of body is not the same as a complete rejection of the body. Thus the remythification that occurs in Namjoshi’s text, through repeating a familiar myth on different terms, is the beginning of a different (re)-conceptualization of the Biblical myth of Babel. The remythification, and the character transformation/transmutation, is possible because meaning is not arrested in an unchanging symbolic system. It is precisely because within what the sign symbolizes is embedded that which it de-symbolizes, such that meaning is made in context, hence making possible the process of renegotiation of the terms of production – a kind of discursive reinscription.
Butler attests in the same aforesaid article that “the position articulated by the subject is always in some way constituted by what must be displaced for that position to take hold,…, by a set of exclusionary and selective procedures” (634). That is to say, as she argues further elsewhere in light of Foucault:


the subject who is produced through subjection is not
produced at an instant in its totality. Instead, it is in
the process of being produced, it is repeatedly produced
(which is not the same as being produced anew again
and again). It is precisely the possibility of a repetition
which does not consolidate that dissociated unity, the
subject, but which proliferates effects which undermine
the force of normalization. (93)


If we accept this constant indeterminacy of the subject suggested by Butler, we have to ask how does liberation figure into it? Who is liberated? Who or what must be displaced for subjectivation to occur? If myth can be destabilized, what gives staying power to the reengaged myth, and how does the new myth guard itself against negative remythification? These are important questions to consider in light of a project such as Namjoshi’s. For building culture requires this possibility of displacement and fluidity – what I refer to in this essay as reinscription – while simultaneously seeking a resting place.

Within the field of postcolonial theory, other scholars have identified this renegotiation of the terms of production as catachrestic reinscription – with a focus on the question of whether Eurocentrism is escapable within postcolonial theory. Gyan Prakash, using Gayatri Spivak’s terms, defines catachrestic reinscription as the process whereby the apparatus of value-coding used by the European centres are seized, reversed and displaced (491). I would argue that this definition could be extended beyond just the colonial/postcolonial debate into a more general discussion of seizure, reversal, and displacement of the apparatus of value-coding. Since I argue that this process is similar to the process of subjectivation suggested by Butler, and illustrated by Namjoshi’s text, I think it is imperative to offer a discussion of how this works within postcolonial theory, or at least as presented by Leela Gandhi. This is especially important since Namjoshi uses a western religious myth to deal with a universal theme of meaning-(re)making and myth-(re)making, as well as approaching her project from the vantage point of a pantheistic Hindu (Namjoshi ix-xv). That is to say, both approaches seem set on their own signification systems, but Namjoshi tries to engage them in dialogue without essentializing or co-opting either, and this is what is demonstrated by postcolonial theory on a larger scale.

The question whether postcolonial and post-patriarchal worlds can be envisioned without being caught in the traps of Eurocentrism, is somewhat different from the question that asks whether postcolonial and post-patriarchal worlds can be envisioned without reference to Europe. Whereas it is possible for the postcolonial subjects to refrain from Eurocentrism, and the feminist subjects to refrain from Western androcentric rationality, it is not possible for them to refrain from referring to Europe in their discourses. For theorists such as Homi Bhabha, Gyan Prakash, Gayatri Spivak, and Robert Young, the postcolonial subjects cannot write without referring to Europe’s role in forming the very colonial histories that they seek to challenge. Similarly, for feminists such as Musa Dube, Julia Kristeva, and Chandra Mohanty, because of feminism’s Western origins it too cannot escape referring to its homeland, even if it is in the negative. For all these theorists, the reference to Europe’s centrality and patriarchal rationality is not to give either of these its self-assumed superior status, but rather to challenge and reinscribe these self-assigned roles. This is what Prakash, using Gayatri Spivak’s terms, defines as catachrestic reinscription, as I have argued above.

Leela Gandhi’s catachrestic reinscription is illustrated by her insistence that postcolonial theory is a negotiated discourse between Marxism and poststructuralism, whereby both theoretical models are challenged and changed to suit the specificity of the discourse called postcolonial. As Gandhi puts it herself:


In the main, the intellectual history of postcolonial theory is
marked by a dialectic between Marxism, on the one hand,
and poststructuralism/postmodernism, on the other…. Neither
the assertions of Marxism nor those of poststructuralism, how-
ever, can exhaustively account for the meanings and consequences
of the colonial encounter. (viii-ix)


Gandhi’s final observation is that postcolonial theory needs both the poststructuralist critique of Western epistemology and the materialist politics of Marxism in order to make formidable sense.

On account of Gandhi’s insistence that postcolonial theory is a negotiation between two Western systems of analysis, and her insistence that the current mood of postcolonial theory addresses largely the needs of the Western academy (ix), it could be argued that her text demonstrates very starkly how Eurocentrism cannot be escaped. Alternatively though, it could also be argued that this negotiated terrain is no longer purely European. That is to say, catachrestic reinscription has taken place, and the emergent discourse, called postcolonial, has traces of its origins, but is not defined by them ultimately. As I argued earlier, the focus on Europe in postcolonial theory is not to ascribe it its formerly self-assigned role as superior, but rather to challenge this self-ascription. This argument can, therefore, be extended to Gandhi’s argument, and made to read that, even though postcolonial theory uses Marxism and poststructuralism, it is not because these theories are in-and-of-themselves postcolonial, but rather because they are useful tools, and tools are to some extent adaptable even though not so much changeable.

I think that it can be argued that this is exactly the kind of discursive reinscription that Namjoshi seems to be concerned with in Building Babel. Of particular interest is the question of men in Babel. How are men to be treated in Babel? The only way that men earn any status is through toil and dedication to the ideals of Babylon (Vijayasree 149). As Vijaysree aptly notes, this “is an inversion of what goes on in the male dominated world, only the gender roles are reversed” (149). Defamiliarization is Namjoshi’s choice of reinscription. Since women’s bodies are usually construed, patriarchally, as objects of desire, and this objectified desire is fulfilled through either the economy of prostitution or that of the institution of marriage, it is only through a rejection of both of these constructions that liberation is possible. It is through a rejection of the dream of the androcentric family and the androcentric woman (whore) that the women can emerge as subjects who exercise their agency. Namjoshi achieves this through a deliberate objectification of men in Babel, as well as giving choice to the women who choose to have men in their lives. That is, in the lives of those women where men are present, viz., Cinders and Rap Rap, men play a very minor role in the everyday life of Babel. At the same time though Namjoshi is not willing to jettison them completely. Queen Alice raises the question of men a number of times throughout her reign, and Lady Shy admits to the Cat at one point that men are useful for the production and propagation of genes, for the building of Babel perhaps even necessary (118). Be it so, they still occupy a reinscribed role, and an inferior one at that. For the sake of transformation this reinscribed role is necessary if Babel is going to be built. Therefore, in order for a different subjectivity to be conferred, the patriarchally constituted body has to be rejected. This is not the rejection of body qua body, but body as perverted body, just as remythification is not rejection of myth but a reworking of it so that it has relevance for the one who is engaging with it. For Namjoshi displacement is not dismissal and reinscription is not jettisoning.

Conceptualising a New Identity/Myth


If one takes remythification prima facie as a positive process, what implications does this have for both the prior myth and the resultant reworked myth? What kinds of subjects emerge as a result of the transformation? Were these subjects already there, i.e., merely waiting to be recovered, or are the transformed subjects a discovery in the strictest sense of the word as something new? The answers to these questions have serious implications about the role that the recipients of myth play in response to the myths themselves. Namjoshi’s project, I would argue, has to do with letting readers take responsibility for the meaning-making process that arises out of reading a text. This is more than just the appeal to readers to make up their own endings. As Vijayasree puts it: “Implied in such a position is the assumption that the reader is no passive recipient of meaning, but an active participant in the making of meanings” (143) – in the Derridean deconstructionist sense. As subjects who both receive and consume myths, how do readers place themselves vis-à-vis the myths once they are reworked? Regardless of whether the different subject that arises via the remythification process is being recovered or being found as new, what is important in both notions is the emergence of something different. In both cases there is a different subject, thus indicating explicitly and implicitly a sense of displacement of sorts. What I am arguing is that this reinscription or remythification can take either of two forms, that of recovery or that of discovery.

If the emergence of the different subjectivity were to be conceived teleologically (discovery) as something new, that is, having not existed before, by what means do readers, as consumers (subjects) of myths, come to know that the new subjectivity is not just another subjected subjectivity? What guarantees are there to ensure that the new subject will not fall prey to similar, if not the same, conditions of subjection as before? It seems that conceiving of subjectivity in this teleological manner offers false hopes about some change in the future. The characters of Namjoshi’s Babel reject this way of thinking very sternly. By rejecting the ideal dream of a trouble-free Babel, and holding on instead to part of their past identities (however troubled) and the possibilities offered by the new identities, they are able to deal with the tension of transformation as recovery versus transformation as discovery. Rather than remain essentialist, they opt, instead, for a rather complex resignification process (recovery). The kind of resignification that affirms both possibilities of subjectivation - subjecting and subjected - a resignification that affirms the subject as both creator and recipient.

That is to say, out of the deadened spheres of myth consumption emerge radicalized forms of resistance that utilize their objects of oppression as tools of liberation. The masters’ tools are reinscribed with a new utility, thus able to destroy the masters’ houses. Affirming, therefore, that tools do not just build, they also destroy. In the context of Building Babel, Namjoshi wants to affirm that the myths that precede the remythified ones are not desirable and need to be changed, but this change is not to be located outside these myths, but within them. Her logic is Adornian in its insistence that the process of change is guided by its own constitutive cognition, which at the same time cannot be totally removed from the context from which it arises. Namjoshi offers a process of subjectivation that mimics as it transforms. For, the limited and limiting myth has to be affirmed at the same time as it is displaced, and through its displacement a resignified myth and subject emerge. This rather complex reconstitution of a myth can be compared to what Pamela-Sue Anderson elsewhere refers to as mimetic re-figuration.

Mimetic Refiguration


Mimicry, in its most basic understanding, can be referred to as mimesis, that is, the act of imitating. Mimicry, though, does not just imitate to merely reproduce the exact same replica of what is being imitated. Instead mimicry mocks or ridicules what is being imitated, with the aim of showing how the original is much more than (or less than) what it is perceived to be. In this sense mimicry is subversive and never passive. Anderson is concerned with this subversiveness of mimicry, and how it has been and can be used to disrupt so-called authentic identities and configured myths. As Anderson notes, quoting Irigaray, “to play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it” (144). Obviously I am suggesting that the remythification that Namjoshi’s characters engage with, can and should be understood as a form of mockery of so-called authentic identities. The aim of course is to demonstrate how mythic identity is inconsistently shifting, thus continuously forcing the forging of different senses of myths and identities.
Arguing on a different front, but with a similar spirit, Anderson notes the following about mimetic refiguration:


My contention is that mythical configuration of human
and divine reality should be accompanied by their
mimetic refigurations, and that the mimetic refigurations
can enable us to recognize what content has been
excluded from the formally rational constructions of
religious beliefs…. Disruptive miming is necessary
for the successful transformation of patriarchal myths
and theistic beliefs. In particular, this miming offer
the possibility of disrupting the hierarchy which continues
to be dominant in western philosophy of religion. (153-154)


Anderson sees in mimetic refiguration both the continued valuing of some patriarchal myths as well as their reinscription through being challenged and changed. She realises that there is a problem that the initial imitation might just mime the symptoms of oppression, hence she insists that this initial stage of miming be supplanted by the second stage. This second stage is one that “takes on the role of miming in order to subvert the economy of the same which has relied upon the feminine for its power to master and control,” as Anderson explains later (154). In Building Babel, before sisterhood can be proclaimed victorious and Babel built, the variety of and differences in perspectives have to be acknowledged. The patriarchal myth of Babel as a myth about confusion has to be acknowledged, and subsequently challenged. The privileged status of sisterhood has to be examined for its own oppressive and exclusionary tendencies. For even within sisterhood there exists hierarchies, as we are aptly reminded that “The cat is a cat// Cats eat mice,// sneer at girls….// Queens kill people.// Maids scrub floors” (Namjoshi 168).

For Anderson, mimesis allows for the possibility of subject-role reversal, whereby one has to think from the position of the other thus imitating this position, but also moving on to the next step, which is subverting such hierarchical subject positions. Mimetic refiguration dislodges the configured identities of the economy of the same, and stresses how the construction of these identities is not as solid as it might have always imagined itself to be. In this sense, the different other is shown to be the self-same, but not with the intention of assimilating this different other into the economy of the same. Rather the aim is to embrace this different other as equal.

Arguing the same point, but locating the issue within the debate on sameness and difference in feminist discourse between “Western” and “Third World” feminists, Susan Arndt notes that:


as far as their gender-specific experiences are concerned
– all women face similar forms of discrimination and
oppression…. the parallels in the situations, problems
and concerns of women across the globe make an inter-
cultural, international solidarization among women who
want to attack the patriarchal status quo of society and
claim more social spaces and freedom for women not
only possible in theory, but in a way almost inevitable.
(176)


This does not mean that Arndt, and consequesntly Namjoshi, are therefore not aware of the implications and weaknesses of such a stance. Quite the contrary is true. Babel has to be built still, and this is why it is crucial for her as the author to leave the conclusion to a variety of perspectives and possibilities. Difference is very crucial, but not definitive. The possibility for mimetic refiguration lies in the seeming impossibility of the reinscription of the original myth. The subjects that emerge out of the reconfigured myth constitute the prior subjects, but in a refigured and reinscribed form. In this sense, the act of building Babel is not just name transposition, but it is a working out of the terms of meaning that this act conveys, thus granting the women the kind of power previously not afforded them by their precedent identities – the ability to build and self-define. As I have argued, this is the power offered by Namjoshi to her readers to exercise as well – for this ability is inherently contained in the very act of creating an artwork ala Adorno.

Conclusion


In answer to the questions posed at the beginning of this essay, I have argued that through catachrestic reinscription and mimetic refiguration it is possible to escape the strictures of a prior myth whilst trying to forge a new one without being totally overwhelmed and achieving nothing in the end. I have also argued that the subjects that emerge are different from the prior ones because even though they contain elements of former subjects, these are catachrestically reinscribed and mimetically refigured in the emergent subjects. What remains to be conceded is that subjectivity is not an easy process, but a painful ambivalence of both subjection and subjecting, where both loss and again are of equal value. In losing the pervertedly embodied selves of patriarchal discourse, Namjoshi’s characters find agents that are subjects embodied in other selves that are reinscribed differently, even as animals. To get there they have to pursue paths (or processes) that lie outside the dominant discourse that had painted them otherwise as incapable muses. Thus, as Butler attests, subject is indeed neither ground nor a product, but the permanent possibility of a certain resignifying process (639). And, it is through this re-signification process that the possibilities for new configurations, re-figurations, and reinscriptions emerge – a new Woman emerges (a new Babel). A remythification without universal bondage becomes possible, resulting in a myth that will not always remain rooted in limitation, but takes limitation into itself, thereby reforming the limited myth as a renewed and renamed one.

Works Cited
Anderson, Pamela-Sue. A Feminist Philosophy of Religion. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998

Arndt, Susan. The Dynamics of African Feminism: Defining and Classifying African
-Feminist Literatures. Translated by Isabel Cole. Trenton, NJ, Africa World
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Butler, Judith. “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of
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Darlene Juschka. New York, Continuum, 2001. 629-647

______ “Subjection, Resistance, Resignification: Between Freud and Foucault.” The
Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1997

Gandih, Leela. Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1998

Namjoshi, Suniti. Building Babel. N. Melbourne: Spinifex, 1996

Nnaemeka, Obioma. “Imag(in)ing Knowledge, Power, and Subversion in the Margins.”
The Politics of (M)Othering: Womanhood, Identity, and Resistance in African
Literature. Edited by Obioma Nnaemeka. New York: Routledge, 1997: 1-25

Prakash, Gyan. “Postcolonial Criticism and Indian Historiography.” Dangerous
Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives. Eds. Anne McClintock,
Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997:
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The Holy Bible, New Revised Standard Version. New York, Oxford: Oxford University
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Vijayasree, C. Suniti Namjoshi: The Artful Transgressor. Jaipur: Rawat, 2001

 


 

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