This book incorporates literary works, testimonies, autobiographies, women’s resistance movements, and films that add to the conversation on the resilience of women in the global south. The essays question historical accuracy and politics of representation that usually undermine women’s role during conflict, and they reevaluate how women participated, challenged, sacrificed, and vehemently opposed war discourses that work on obliterating women’s role in shaping resistance movements.
 

LAVA ASAAD is a postdoctoral teaching fellow at Auburn University in Alabama. She is the author of Literature with a White Helmet: The Textual-Corporeality of Being, Becoming and Representing Refugees.

FAYEZA HASANAT completed her MA and PhD in English from the University of Florida. She is the author of Nawab Faizunnesa’s Rupjalal: Translation and Commentary and The Voices of War Heroines: Sexual Violence, Testimony, and the Bangladesh Liberation War. Her debut short story collection, The Bird Catcher and Other Stories, was simultaneously published in the United States and Bangladesh. Hasanat teaches at the English Department of the University of Central Florida, Orlando.

 

Introduction: Portraits of Resistances

Part I: Representation of Resistance in Art and Media
Chapter 1: Syrian Women’s Prison Art: Toward a Poetics of Creative Insurgency
Stefanie Sevcik
Chapter 2: Moving beyond Victimhood: Female Agency in Bangladeshi War Movies
Farzana Akhter
Chapter 3: Structuring Jinelogy within Global Feminism: Representations of Kurdish Women Fighters in Western Media
Lava Asaad

Part II: Literature and Resistance
Chapter 4: All the Female Bodies: Female Resistance and Political Consciousness in Testimonies of the Dirty War in Argentina
Lucía García-Santana
Chapter 5: The Woman from Tantoura: An Autotheoretical Reading in the Art of Resistance
Doaa Omran
Chapter 6: South Asian Women and Hybrid Identities: Narratives of Abduction and Displacement in Partition Literature
Margaret Hageman
Chapter 7: Writing Solidarity: Women in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India
Carolyn Ownbey
Chapter 8: Sri Lankan Postcolonial Inversion and a “Thousand Mirrors” of Resistance
Moumin Quazi

Part III: Advocacy / Activism
Chapter 9: Kashmiri Women Activists in the Aftermath of the Partition of India
Nyla Ali Khan
Chapter 10: Teaching Narratives of Rape Survivors of the Bangladesh War in a Classroom: A Study on University Students
Shafinur Nahar
Chapter 11: They Fear Us Because We are Fearless: Women-Led Global Environmental Advocacy and its Adversaries
Matthew Spencer

Conclusion: Detangling Resistance
Notes on Contributors
Index