GENDER AND DIVERSITY: India, Canada and Beyond

It is not very often that a book tries to break disciplinary boundaries with courage and acumen. This book Gender and Diversity: India, Canada and Beyond, confronts conventions, challenges definitions, offers new vocabulary and questions comforting platitudes. Comparing India and Canada, theessays suggest new ways of thinking about the issue of Gender and Diversity in multiple contexts. India and Canada provide a range of comparative paradigms even when they are distinct in many of their organizational structures.

The current anthology, gathering material from eminent writers in both the countries, and adopting the tools of interdisciplinary pedagogy, presents cutting edge scholarship in emerging areas. The four sections on ‘Cultural Pluralism’, ‘Gender Perspectives’, ‘Life-Story/Her Story’ and ‘Practical Applications’ neatly divide the primary concerns while admitting to creative overlaps. The discourse in several voices engages with history, rootedness, belonging, orality, identity formation, life writing, family reorientations, human rights, cross-cultural milieu, policy formation, memorializing, politics of the body, and nuances of power. The twenty articles contained in the book delve in experiential learning in rural areas, work places and school districts, as also with literary texts of a theoretical nature. In effect, the collection demonstrates that modern knowledge systems on gender are built upon contemporary understanding of the shifting parameters by which gender is defined.

The book will be useful to scholars in Comparative Literature, English and World Literature, Women and Gender Studies, International Relations, Canadian Studies, Political Science, Sociology, Social Work, Education, and many others.
Contents
I: Cultural Pluralism
1 Post-multiculturalism, Diaspora, Immanent Cosmopolitanism / Sneja Gunew
2 Negotiating Differences / Jasbir Jain
3 Shifting Paradigms of Alterity in the Indigenous Culture and Literature / Chandra Mohan
4 Culture, Diversity and Pluralism in India and Canada / Sushma Yadav
5 Gender, History and Historiography in India and Canada / Amrit Kaur Basra
II: Gender Perspectives
6 Narratology as a Tool in Gender Discourse / Devika Khanna Narula
7 LGBTQ Community: Canada and India / Garima Gupta
8 Woman’s Body: The Gender Question in Fiction and the Media / Vinita Gupta
9 Feminist Mythology and ‘Cultural Capital’ in Nabaneeta Dev Sen and Louky Bersianik / Mohar Daschaudhuri
10 Gender and Caste Politics in Shauna Singh Baldwin’s We Are So Different Now / Soham Pain
11 Mnemonic Body of the Female Subject / Shweta Kushal
III: Life-Story / Her Story
12 Translating Life Writing Across Cultures / Jameela Begum A.
13 Crossing the Boundaries: Feminist Archives and the Redemptive Power of Sisterhood / Sachidananda Mohanty
14 Narrating History/Herstory / Smita Banerjee
15 Body as Text and Context in the Works of Atwood and Goswami / Shraddha A. Singh
16 Gender and Identity: Indigenous Women as Symbols of Power / Santosh Bharti
IV: Practical Applications
17 Knowledge Keepers – Canadian Cinema About the Indigenous / Prem Kumari Srivastava
18 Diversity and Questions of Alliance / Hemjyoti Medhi
19 Women and Work in India and Canada / Nilima Srivastava
20 School Education and the Challenge of Diversity / Meenu Anand