Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature
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Autobiography as Objectification: Re-presenting the Subaltern in Gandhi’s The Story of My Experiments with Truth
Full text linkThis paper examines the rhetorical strategies employed in Gandhi’s autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1927). Specifically, the paper focuses on how Gandhi constructs his narrative of identity by purporting to represent the interests of subaltern Indians in British India and South Africa. Its central argument is that in the process of framing the narrative of self, Gandhi’s autobiography objectifies the Indian masses by employing negative tropes to describe their attitudes towards cleanliness and sanitation. The paper demonstrates that by projecting them as dirty and unamenable to change, Gandhi indirectly creates a binary opposition between himself and the subalterns. It concludes that, in spite of his claims of solidarity with the oppressed, Gandhi ends up objectifying them as “others.â
Grammatical Change in the Verb Phrase in Contemporary Philippine English
Full text linkThis paper presents the findings of a diachronic corpus-based study of selected categories of the verb phrase – the progressive aspect, the passive voice, the present perfect aspect, the modals and quasi-modals – in contemporary Philippine English and its colonial parent variety, American English. Frequencies were determined for the verb phrase categories in the Philippine and American components of the early 2010s Corpus of Global Web-based English. These are compared with the findings of earlier studies by Collins and associates of Philippine English, and by Leech and associates of American English, in the 1960s and 1990s. The trajectories of the grammatical variables over the half-century from the early 1960s to the early 2010s are traced, and the implications of the findings for the contentious issue of the evolutionary status of PhilE are explored
“Fantasy Ladiesâ€: Female Performers and Actresses in Qurratulain Hyder’s “The Missing Photographâ€
No full textThis essay examines Qurratulain Hyder’s short story “The Missing Photograph,†as a site that interrupts what Priti Ramamurthy identifies as the relative silence of feminist and film historiography on the role and contribution of actresses in early Hindi cinema, a silence that is attributed to the fact that they did not fit the dominant paradigm of social reform, nationalism, or radical movements. By providing an acute awareness of multiple and intersecting social forces that impacted the lives of actresses, “The Missing Photograph,†I suggest, is an important imaginative fragment that highlights how actresses, while remaining invisible, were central to the early film industry
