Haunting Violations

by Hesford, Wendy S.; Kozol, Wendy

• ISBN13: 9780252069116
• ISBN10: 0252069110
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-02-01
• Publisher: Univ of Illinois Pr

Summary

"Feminist critics place a premium on the ""real"" stories told by the victimized and the oppressed. Haunting Violations offers a corrective to such uncritical acceptance of the ""real"" in confessional, testimonial, and ethnographic narratives. Through close readings of a wide variety of texts, contributors argue that depictions of the ""real"" are inherently performative, crafted within the limits and in the interests of specific personal, political, or social projects.Haunting Violations explores the inseparability of discourse and politics in quasi-autobiographical works such as I, Rigoberta Mench and When Heaven and Earth Changed Places. Contributors consider how the Sri Lankan Mother's Front movement exploits the sanctity of the maternal and how multiple political purposes on both sides bleed through government ""documentary"" photographs of Japanese-American concentration camp internees. This volume also investigates how South Asian feminists use the authority of their personal experience to critique the film Mississippi Masala and how realist narratives, such as Janet Campbell Hale's autobiographical Bloodlines, Margie Strosser's documentary film Rape Stories, and Shekur Kapur's film Bandit Queen, reexamine how assumptions about power and trauma are embedded in the promise of the real. "

Table of Contents

Defining Moments	ix
Wendy S. Hesford
Acknowledgments	xiii
Introduction: Is There a ``Real'' Crisis?	1	(12)
Wendy S. Hesford
Wendy Kozol
Rape Stories: Material Rhetoric and the Trauma of Representation	13	(34)
Wendy S. Hesford
Reading ``India's Bandit Queen'': A Trans/National Feminist Perspective on the Discrepancies of Representation	47	(29)
Leela Fernandes
I Am [Not] Like You: Ideologies of Selfhood in I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala	76	(35)
Susan Sanchez-Casal
Writing in Blood: Autobiography and Technologies of the Real in Janet Cambell Hale's Bloodlines	111	(26)
Julia Watson
Mississippi Masala, South Asian Activism, and Agency	137	(32)
Purnima Bose
Linta Varghese
Third-World Testimony in the Era of Globalization: Vietnam, Sexual Trauma, and Le Ly Hayslip's Art of Neutrality	169	(26)
Leslie Bow
The ``Language of the Organs'': The Political Purchase of Tears in Contemporary Sri Lanka	195	(22)
Malathi de Alwis
Relocating Citizenship in Photographs of Japanese Americans during World War II	217	(34)
Wendy Kozol
The Smiles and Tears of Representation: A Cross-Talk Essay	251	(11)
Patrick Brantlinger
Reading Crises of the ``Real'': A Cross-Talk Essay	262	(15)
Dion Farquhar
Contributors	277	(4)
Index	281