Decolonizing the mind, writing outside the identity box : Vandana Singh's complex speculative fiction
Martín Alegre, Sara (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)

Date:	2020
Description:	22 pàg.
Abstract:	Taking as a case study Vandana Singh and her speculative fiction collection Ambiguity Machines (2019), I deal here with the difficulties experienced by women writers whose work is strongly influenced by factors outside the habitual definition of identity. Singh, a professional scientist with a long career, migrated from her native India to the United States to further her education in physics. Her writing, celebrated for its high literary quality, is closely connected to her scientific practice, as she herself has often stressed in interviews. Yet, academic analysis of Singh's work highlights, above all, her ethnic identity and background, thus exaggerating its influence on her writing. This means that, unlike white women authors, Singh must struggle simultaneously to decolonize her mind, a concept she has often invoked, and resist academic readings of her stories as, primarily, examples of diasporic, post-colonial, or transnational writing, while she tries to offer clues about how her writing should be assessed.
Note:	Working paper based on the conference presentation 'The case of Vandana Singh: reading Indian science fiction, with a warning about wrongs' (2017)
Rights:	Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús Creative Commons. Es permet la reproducció total o parcial, la distribució, i la comunicació pública de l'obra, sempre que no sigui amb finalitats comercials, i sempre que es reconegui l'autoria de l'obra original. No es permet la creació d'obres derivades.
Language:	Anglès
Document:	Working paper
Subject:	Vandana Singh ; Ruminations in an Alien Tongue ; Science fiction ; Women's writing ; Race ; Ethnicity

Conference presentation: https://ddd.uab.cat/record/182669

22 p, 295.9 KB

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Research literature > Working papers