On speech and literature’s silent female subjects
When Gayatri Spivak ends her groundbreaking essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988) with a definitive statement “the subaltern cannot speak”, a section of literary criticism took that dictum literally—accepting the “cannot” to represent mutism or an inability to speak.
1m ago
What we represent and who we are
As we close the curtains on the first month of the new year and step into the second, here at Star Books and Literature, we are thinking back on the year we had.
3m ago
The violence that separates us
No amount of activism is enough to bring an end to gender-based violence when women’s and girls’ lives are considered less than that of their male counterparts.
5m ago
Dancing on the pages
This week, then, we're thinking: music and books, music and literature. In print and online, we're dreaming in tunes, dancing with words, daring to merge the two.
6m ago
A noble profession and the system that fails it
Teachers are no longer the valued, moral arbiters of society that we once deemed them to be.
6m ago
No country for women and girls
What codes of safety and protection can ensure women’s right to, well, exist?
7m ago
The alterities of hunger
In two of the more prominent fictional works that are part of the diasporic South Asian literary production, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, food is presented as a conceptual apparatus that makes palatable the tensions of ‘multiculturalism’ and offers a critique of class barriers—if not always at the level of economics, but at the level of consciousness.
7m ago
On moving
Reading moves you. The movement is emotional—you feel moved as you read, you feel moved by what you read. To read is to be moved—by the sheer joy and ecstasy on the pages, by the pain and heartache in the letters,
8m ago
March 9, 2024
On speech and literature’s silent female subjects
When Gayatri Spivak ends her groundbreaking essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988) with a definitive statement “the subaltern cannot speak”, a section of literary criticism took that dictum literally—accepting the “cannot” to represent mutism or an inability to speak.
February 1, 2024
What we represent and who we are
As we close the curtains on the first month of the new year and step into the second, here at Star Books and Literature, we are thinking back on the year we had.
November 25, 2023
The violence that separates us
No amount of activism is enough to bring an end to gender-based violence when women’s and girls’ lives are considered less than that of their male counterparts.
October 8, 2023
Dancing on the pages
This week, then, we're thinking: music and books, music and literature. In print and online, we're dreaming in tunes, dancing with words, daring to merge the two.
October 5, 2023
A noble profession and the system that fails it
Teachers are no longer the valued, moral arbiters of society that we once deemed them to be.
September 15, 2023
No country for women and girls
What codes of safety and protection can ensure women’s right to, well, exist?
September 9, 2023
The alterities of hunger
In two of the more prominent fictional works that are part of the diasporic South Asian literary production, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, food is presented as a conceptual apparatus that makes palatable the tensions of ‘multiculturalism’ and offers a critique of class barriers—if not always at the level of economics, but at the level of consciousness.
August 17, 2023
On moving
Reading moves you. The movement is emotional—you feel moved as you read, you feel moved by what you read. To read is to be moved—by the sheer joy and ecstasy on the pages, by the pain and heartache in the letters,
August 5, 2023
On remembering Rabindranath
One can find Rabindranath anywhere—he’s there in the words we whisper, in the tunes we hum, in the ethos we believe in, in the ideal of the human we wish we were.
June 3, 2023
Climate fiction and the fictions we tell ourselves
There is an element of the unexpected in the twinning of fiction and ecology. A sense of unease of sorts exists in the pairing together of fiction, a form of narrative that is untrue, with the imminent ecological disaster, an environmental inevitability that is true.
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