Object as subject
Material agency in Ismat Chughtai's 'The Quilt' and 'Chhoti Apa
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2179541 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sheelalipi Sahana (0009-0007-5853-8427) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 58 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 336-348 |
| Publication date | 2022-05-04 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Postcolonial Writing (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1744-9855 • E-ISSN: 1744-9863 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/17449855.2021.2014348 |
| OpenAlex | W4205726388 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 12 |
Ismat Chughtai was an Urdu-language writer in India whose affiliation with the Progressive Writers Movement sparked a lifelong tryst with socialism. This article examines the “material agency” found in household objects that help to co-create a society for women within their private gendered domains in which they hold power. The quilt and the diary – objects in Chughtai’s short stories “The Quilt” and “Chhoti Apa” respectively – serve as biographical insight into the women’s lives because they create a subjectivity that was previously denied to Muslim women by oriental ethnographic studies. The agency of the objects lies in their ability to morph their meaning according to contexts, revealing the socially constructed nature of identity of humans and objects, forged by wrestling with variables such as gender and sexuality. Chughtai’s stories “unveil” Muslim women’s daily performative acts of resistance in a decolonial discourse on material culture and postcolonial feminism
Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy · Art · Epistemology · Feminism · Human sexuality · Identity (music · Linguistics · Male gaze · Meaning (existential · Object (grammar · Performative utterance · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Quilt · Social science · Sociology · Subject (documents · Subjectivity · Subversion · Visual arts · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Socioeconomic Development in Asia · South Asian Cinema and Culture · Gender Studies · Law · Philosophy
| Citations per year | 0.25 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2022 - 2022 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |