Deutsch
English
FrançaisSub menu: Home
Home / Index of Authors
Gopal, Priyamvada
Priyamvada Gopal teaches in the English faculty at Cambridge University and is the author of Literary Radicalism in India
4 articles of this author have been cited in the European Press Review so far.
Priyamvada Gopal on gender equality
Cambridge university lecturer of English Priyamvada Gopal contests the common claim that womens' equality is an inherently western concept. "Women from non-western cultures have long mounted their own challenges to subjection ... . In India, women learned self-assertion from medieval female Hindu poets like Tarabai Shinde, who in 1882 wrote a stinging denunciation of male double standards. Early 20th century Muslim women writers attacked a range of injustices including seclusion, lack of reproductive choice, and illiteracy. ... Invocation of women's equality as the key difference between 'us' and 'them' is worrying. Apart from the simple hypocrisy of people whose own societies have yet to fully address gender, race and class inequalities, there is a long, dismal history of using the subjection of women to justify cultural condescension and colonial occupation."
» full article (external link, English)
More from the press review on the subject » Minorities, » Global
London exhibtion on India's and Pakistan's independence
Priyamvada Gopal, professor of English at Cambridge University, welcomes an exhibition that she considers "should be required viewing for a generation of indifferent Britons and Indians. ... A new exhibition at the British Library offers a more thoughtful commemoration of the 60th anniversary of independence for India and Pakistan. 'Countdown to Freedom' chronicles the turbulent centuries from the arrival in 1608 of the East India Company to the fabled midnight of independence. Though small, the display succeeds in evoking the historical ties that bind Britain to the subcontinent. ... While the end of British rule was a crucial historical moment for four subcontinental nations, current celebrations focus largely on contemporary India. This is less a tribute to history than canny courtship of that nation as a lucrative trading partner."
» full article (external link, English)
More from the press review on the subject » Exhibitions / Museums, » History, » United Kingdom, » Asia
Salman Rushdie at the heart of a new controversy
The Spanish daily republishes a column from The Guardian in which Priyamvada Gopal, a professor of postcolonial studies at Cambridge, takes issue with Salman Rushdie's political views. "Sir Salman is partly the creation of the fatwa that played its role in strengthening the self-fulfilling 'clash of civilisations' that both Bush and Osama bin Laden find so handy. Driven underground and into despair by zealotry, Rushdie finally emerged blinking into New York sunshine shortly before the towers came tumbling down. Those formidable literary powers would now be deployed not against, but in the service of, an American regime that had declared its own fundamentalist monopoly on the meanings of "freedom" and "liberation". The Sir Salman recognised for his services to literature is certainly no neocon but is iconic of a more pernicous trend: liberal literati who have assented to the notion that humane values, tolerance and freedom are fundamentally western ideas that have to be defended as such."
» more information (external link, Spanish)
More from the press review on the subject » International Relations, » Literature, » United Kingdom, » Europe
BBC historian 'whitewashes' colonialism
Priyamvada Gopal, who teaches postcolonial studies at Cambridge University, says "a resurrection is haunting the British media, the bizarre apparition of 'benevolent empire'. It takes the form of documentaries and discussions steered towards the conclusion that colonialism was not such a bad thing after all and that something of a celebration is in order. ... Only the desire to recover some imaginary good from the tragedy that was empire can explain the elevation of the neoconservative ideologue Niall Ferguson to chief imperial historian on the BBC and now Channel 4. His aggressive rewriting of history, driven by the messianic fantasies of the American right, is being presented as a new revelation. In fact, Ferguson's 'history' is a fairytale for our times which puts the white man and his burden back at the centre of heroic action."
» full article (external link, English)
More from the press review on the subject » History, » United Kingdom
© 2005-2012