Orientalism, Deconstruction, and Relationality: Sara Suleri's<i>Meatless Days</i>

Rahman, Shazia

doi:10.1080/10436920490534415

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 3 publications

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“…This dichotomy of lineages complicates Sara's position in the Pakistani nation: her view is colored by these two lenses, and like her mother, she could never leave Pakistan though she leaves for America for good and for Goodyear. Shazia Rahman (2004) refers to this complexity of Suleri's narrative when she suggests that it "make[s] incursions against orientalist ideology by deconstructing terms such as women, native, and a third world without completely dismissing them" (p. 347). "Suleri's memoir," Rahman continues, "fights orientalism by critiquing categories as diverse as women and nation while simultaneously creating a relational subjectivity at the intersections of the categories it deconstructs" (p. 348).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Women, History And Faith: Suleri's Critique Of Pakistan's National Culture In Meatless Days And Boys Will Be Boys

Murtaza

Hayat

Hashmi

2020

GSSR

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Sara Suleri is divided between her fascination for her father's strong character and her repulsion for the consequent effect on woman's space in family life, connoting a critique of Pakistani patriarchal society in which women, irrespective of their social status, suffer from marginalization. Although Suleri's Boys Will Be Boys is an elegy for her father, as she announces in the sub-title of the work, she manages her tilt toward her father despite her advocacy of the woman's space miserably shrunk to domestic life in Pakistani society. Besides women's position, she questions the dominant version of history and the state's political manipulation of religion for ulterior motives. She is close to Boehmer's theorization of the elitist continuities and intimacies with a view that develops from geographically and historically multiple contexts and histories. Her role as a native intellectual is two-pronged: her view is colored by western discourse, but her status as a 'representative' Pakistani voice is also significant. This article analyzes how far Suleri's representation of women, religion and history of Pakistani society is colored by western context.

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Women, History And Faith: Suleri's Critique Of Pakistan's National Culture In Meatless Days And Boys Will Be Boys

Murtaza

Hayat

Hashmi

2020

GSSR

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Milk-Fed Discourse and Female Identity in Sara Suleri's Meatless Days

Fagan

2008

South Asian Review

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The rhetoric of Sara Suleri: Life writing and postcolonial theory

Ghosh

2019

Journal of Postcolonial Writing

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This article reads Sara Suleri's memoirs Meatless Days (1989) and Boys Will Be Boys (2003) in dialogue with The Rhetoric of English India (1992), her influential work of postcolonial theory. It argues that Suleri's life writing and scholarship respond to the same fundamental questions about writing and description, and foreground visual metaphors to show how the memoirist distorts or imaginatively invents her absent subjects as a critic distorts or invents the text they read. Like memoir, Suleri understands criticism to be an act of creative, and distorting, remembrance. Reading Suleri's work in this way prompts us to re-read the postcolonial theory of the 1980s and 1990s as a body of literature, a register of and a meditation on a history of 20th-century migration and cultural encounter.Through the 1980s and 1990s, Sara Suleri Goodyear (b.1953) was an "academic postcolonial star" (Seyhan 2013, 197). Her father was a scion of Pakistani journalism, and a supporter of Jinnah and Pakistani nationalism. Her mother, born in Wales, was a professor of English literature in Lahore. Suleri is a Professor Emeritus at Yale, where she was teaching when her memoir Meatless Days was published.in 1989. She subsequently wrote The Rhetoric of English India, a book of criticism, in 1992, and Boys Will Be Boys, a second memoir, in 2003. Azade Seyhan (2013) remembers how Meatless Days was a popular text "on the syllabi of exile literature courses" in American universities in the 1990s, "because of its elegant and accessible theoretical musings and its focus on the questions that these courses emphasize". But it "disappeared relatively fast from college syllabi", perhaps due to "a certain fatigue with the plenitude of postcolonial discourses"

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Orientalism, Deconstruction, and Relationality: Sara Suleri'sMeatless Days

Cited by 4 publications

References 3 publications

Women, History And Faith: Suleri's Critique Of Pakistan's National Culture In Meatless Days And Boys Will Be Boys

Women, History And Faith: Suleri's Critique Of Pakistan's National Culture In Meatless Days And Boys Will Be Boys

Milk-Fed Discourse and Female Identity in Sara Suleri's Meatless Days

The rhetoric of Sara Suleri: Life writing and postcolonial theory

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