Redefining Boundaries in Global Literary Studies

Today, literary, critical and feminist territorial boundaries are not as clear cut as they were imagined to be even a decade ago when modes of communication between scholars and between audience in the First and Third Worlds were much slower. Speed has not created equality among all critical voices, but nevertheless, we are at a new site, one that approaches what we might call “globall literary studies in English”- a situation that requires a radical rethinking of the claims we have become accustomed to making when we produce literary scholarship. We can no longer claim knowledge of how literary text function as cultural artifacts and as political tools without thinking hard about how such text might play out in other locations ; we cannot

Introduction:

Kamala Das has the distinction of being one of the best known Indian women writers in the twentieth century writing in two Indian languages, English and Malayalam. Mrs. Das is the author of many autobiographical works and novels in both languages, several highly regarded collections of poetry in English, numerous collections of short stories, as well as essays on a wide range of topics. Her work in English has been widely anthologized in the Indian subcontinent, Australia, and the West; and she has won numerous awards for her writing, including the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1985 and the nomination for the Nobel Prize in literature in 1984. From the 1970s when her career was at its peak, to late 1990s, India –based, English -language literary critics have written extensively on Kamala Das. Yet, in this criticism all the non hetero normative protests and pleasures in My Story were straightened out. This state of affairs emerges in part because, as elsewhere, many India – based, English

Spivak writes: “The figure of the implied reader is constructed within a consolidated system of cultural representation. The appropriate culture in this context is the one supposedly indigenous to the literature under consideration.” However, this concern for the context that is supposedly indigenous to Kamala Das leads scholars to pay little attention either to same sex desire in Das’s work or to heterosexuality from the vantage point of the non hetero normative. Given this situation, a queer reading of Das’s work, originating as it does from the South Asian diaspora, has no option but to accept the implications of going against the interpretive direction set by local feminist readings of Das’s work. This encounter of one local feminisim with another local feminism under the sign of diaspora is a scenario that is worth examining, not just for the purposes of this rereading of Kamala Das but also beacuse diaspora studies provide a productive albeit tight discursive space that has been carved out in a rapidly changing world. As the anthology Same - sex love in India: Readings from Literature and History makes clear, there has been a long history of India -based writing on same -sex desire. This Anthology, edited by Rutu Vanita and Saleem Kidwai, showcases