Browse

Asha Nadkarni contends that whenever feminists lay claim to citizenship based on women’s biological ability to “reproduce the nation,” they are participating in a eugenic project—sanctioning reproduction by some and prohibiting it by others. Employing a wide range of sources from the United States and India, this book shows how the exclusionary impulse of eugenics is embedded within the terms of nationalist feminism. This book reveals connections between U.S. and Indian nationalist feminisms from the late nineteenth century through the 1970s, demonstrating that both call for feminist citizenship centered on the reproductive body as the origin of the nation. It juxtaposes U.S. and Indian feminists (and antifeminists) in provocative and productive ways: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s utopian novels regard eugenic reproduction as a vital form of national production; Sarojini Naidu’s political speeches and poetry posit liberated Indian women as active agents of a nationalist and feminist modernity predating that of the West; and Katherine Mayo’s Mother India from 1927 warns white U.S. women that Indian reproduction is a “world menace.” In addition, the book traces the refashioning of the icon Mother India, first in Mehboob Khan’s 1957 film Mother India and Kamala Markandaya’s 1954 novel Nectar in a Sieve, and later in Indira Gandhi’s self-fashioning as Mother India during the Emergency from 1975 to 1977.

This monograph examines the popular trend among diasporic Iranian women to produce auto/biographical narratives through a variety of genres: published memoirs, documentary films, comics, and social media. Contemporary diasporic Iranian memoirs, Naghibi claims, are particularly interesting in their mediation of the diasporic experience through the authors' memories of pre-revolutionary 1970s Iran, thus placing the concepts of memory and nostalgia, and questions of testimony and witness, at the heart of these narratives. This monograph explores the phenomenon of diasporic Iranian women’s life narratives in English in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, arguing that what ties these disparate narratives together is the experience of the 1979 revolution as a traumatic event, and the expression of a powerful nostalgia for an idealized past. The title of this book, Righting the Past, invokes a double entendre that draws attention to the important work of setting right historical injustices through the act of writing life narratives. This book posits the importance of writing as an articulation of memory, and as an assertion of human rights. By drawing on the empathy of the reader-spectator-witness, life narratives, argues Naghibi, offer the possibility of extending to their subjects a recognition of their humanity.