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.
- ISBN10 0252026101
- ISBN13 9780252026102
- Publish Date 30 November 2000
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 10 July 2009
- Publish Country US
- Imprint University of Illinois Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 312
- Language English