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>Murderous Ritual versus Devotional Custom: The Rhetoric and Ritual of Sati and Women’s Subjectivity in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies
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Murderous Ritual versus Devotional Custom: The Rhetoric and Ritual of Sati and Women’s Subjectivity in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies
The representation of the practice of sati, the immolation of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyre, has garnered interest for long from postcolonial and feminist discourses among others. While advocates of Western modernity perceive sati as a murderous ritual, the proponents of orthodox Hinduism, on the contrary, claim sati to be a courageous cult of “wifely devotion”. In both bigoted beliefs, as poststructuralists observe, women largely appear as “mute objects”. Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008) brilliantly sidelines the conundrum of polarizing representation of sati along the East-West axis and reflects instead the subjective experience of women as sati. The article examines how the rhetoric and ritual of sati in the novel enable marginalized women to acquire consciousness of their subjectivity in a colonized society. To this end, the paper analyzes deconstructive readings of sati, such as by Gayatri Spivak, and explores the way the novel uses religion as a ploy, which, instead of perpetrating violence, confers a subjective entity on the sati that can even subvert the constrictive norms of a colonized society.
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机译：讽刺行为的代表，即寡妇对丈夫葬礼柴柱的献祭，在后殖民主义和女权主义言论中引起了长期的关注。西方现代主义的倡导者认为萨蒂是一种杀人的仪式，而正统印度教的拥护者则相反认为萨蒂是一种勇敢的“虔诚奉献”邪教。正如后结构主义者所观察到的，在两种既定的信念中，女性在很大程度上表现为“静音的对象”。阿米塔夫·戈什（Amitav Ghosh）的《罂粟花之海》（Ace of Poppies）（2008年）巧妙地掩盖了萨蒂人沿东西轴两极分化的难题，反而反映了女性作为萨蒂人的主观经历。本文探讨了小说中讽刺的修辞和仪式如何使处于边缘地位的女性在殖民社会中获得其主体性的意识。为此，论文分析了诸如加耶特里·斯皮瓦克（Gayatri Spivak）等对萨蒂的解构主义解读，并探讨了小说以宗教为手段的方式，而不是施加暴力，而是赋予萨蒂一种主观实体，甚至可以颠覆传统殖民社会的规范。
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