Date of Award

8-7-2024

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

English

First Advisor

Renee Schatteman

Second Advisor

Jay Rajiva

Third Advisor

Ghulam A. Nadri

Abstract

This dissertation examines the dynamics of Global South feminism, scrutinizing its limitations and highlighting the western gaze on women inhabiting this “deterritorialized geography” that remains in the margin of the first-world countries (Mahler 2017). South-Asian scholars like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak analyze women’s subalternity and subjectivity in Global South to make the border an agentive space emphasizing women’s endurance of subjugation because of their “sexual difference” that is “doubly affected” by western as well as Global-South patriarchy (Spivak 2010: 28). On the other hand, Sunaina Arya and Aakash Singh Rathore agree with Dalit writers that Global South and western discourses create a theoretical and ideological flaw by homogenizing Indian women and abandoning Dalit women’s experiences of caste and gender discriminations. Belonging to the margin of the marginal Global South, Dalit women possess a powerful voice; however, they remain inaudible in the prominent feminist debates. The unrecognition of female Dalit voices in global, Indian, and even Dalit literary-cultural-social spheres compels them to linger in the “fourth world,” a liminal, traumatic, “negative space” (Fricker viii). By interrogating the binaries—patriarchy/ feminism, first-world/ third world, center/ margin—through a priori feminist discourse, I argue that failing to acknowledge the active existence of the fourth world eliminates the empirical observation of Dalit women’s voices—a significant area of discussion in postcolonial studies. To subvert the conventional feminist perception of Dalit women as a colonial, partial, and dependent “other,” and to accentuate Dalit women’s reimagination of life, I turn to a similar supposed “negative space” that the Black women in Africa inhabit. My comparative study of two geo-political spaces—global African resistance literature alongside regional Dalit literature—provides a platform to identify the reasons of Dalit women’s space being “negative” and its assumed muteness. In doing so, I aim for a more productive way of reading Dalit literature, which in turn, destabilizes the west-centric perception of marginalized women’s “frozen” subalternity.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.57709/37400591

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