HuSS: International Journal of Research in Humanities and Social Sciences

A. Vanitha ¹

Affiliations
1 PG and Research Department of English, Vellalar College for Women (Autonomous), Erode, Tamil Nadu, IN

Abstract

Storytelling in postcolonial fiction is all about reliving the forgotten or erased past thereby preserving and repossessing it. The novel Eva Luna narrates the story of Eva Luna, who is endowed with an intuitive potential of entertaining and nourishing people by her stories each of which she generates in no time piecing together shards of her past with slivers of her imagination. Like most of the woman protagonists of Isabel Allende's fiction, Eva Luna is a storyteller who has a flair for animating the past through her stories and in so doing nurtures the present. Through her stories, she not only records history but also fortifies the inseparable ancestral bonds which thwart the oppressed and the marginalized from extinction in a country - perceivably Latin America - torn asunder by political upheavals. Subjected to the manifold hegemony of the church, the state and the military, which are the mainstays of patriarchy, Eva Luna's stories work towards a rememory of the past and reclamation of her lost world which had been snatched away from her and her mother from whom she has inherited the legacy of storytelling.

Keywords

Logocentric, Masochism, Meta-Narrative, Monocracy, Pastiche, Phonocentric, Raconteur, Scheherazade.

Full Text

   

S. Lekha Subasini ¹, A. Vanitha ²

Affiliations
1 Research Scholar, PG & Research Department of English, Vellalar College for Women, Erode, Tamil Nadu, IN
2 Assistant Professor, PG & Research Department of English, Vellalar College for Women, Erode, Tamil Nadu, IN

Abstract

This paper attempts a folkloric study on the South Indian cultural creeds and rituals practiced by the transgender and transvestite people during their annual carnivals in the temple of Koothanadavar which lies in the Koovagam region of Tamil Nadu and, the Kottankulangara Bhagavathi Devi temple in Kerala region. It unravels the unification and identification of gender-benders in spreading the folkloric performances through these ritualistic carnivals nationwide towards social acceptability of their gender and practices through the trope of Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnivalesque. Though the members of the community have been spurned for their biological abnormality by their own family and society, they form their own group to share and follow their self-established socio-cultural norms and practices for their consecutive generations. The members never give up their own cultural practices, folk songs, dances and other performances during the Koovagam and Kottankulangara carnivals at any cost. Thus, this paper scrutinizes how the members of transgender and transvestites of Tamil Nadu and Kerala worship these deities during these carnivals in order to receive acceptance and validation in society by following their own rituals and credos which is considered to be unique across the globe and also interprets the hybrid forms of Hindu Gods and Goddesses for understanding the inherent and inevitable biological aberrations in the creation of species.

Keywords

Carnival and Carnivalesque, Cross-dressers, Culture and Rituals, Folk, Hayavadana Myth, Transgender

Full Text