India

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April 24, 2009

Within Their Own Seams: 19th Century Fashion and the Management of the Body in Women’s Literature and Letters

Posted by folkpub under Dress, Europe, Identity, India, Modernity
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Within Their Own Seams: 19th Century Fashion and the Management of the Body in Women’s Literature and Letters

Kristiana Willsey
Indiana University

Abstract:

Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1855 novel, North and South, demonstrates the significant position women’s fashion played in the construction and maintenance of identity and self-expression.  Drawing on Gaskell’s novel as well as excerpts from other 19th century women’s letters, travelogues, and memoirs, we see how through imported fashions, English women participated in Empire making and confronted the problems of establishing English identity abroad. Women simultaneously occupied particular local identities and transcended them, articulating the tensions of maintaining both national and international identities through the feminine medium of fashion. At the same time, the tightly managed, corseted body represented a complex response to the advent of modernism. (more…)

 

November 5, 2008

Keila Diehl. Echoes from Dharamsala: Music in the Life of a Tibetan Refugee Community

Posted by folkpub under Book Review, India, Music
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Keila Diehl. Echoes from Dharamsala: Music in the Life of a Tibetan Refugee Community. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002. Pp. xi+312, illustrations, glossary, index. $25.00 paper.

Lori Goshert
Indiana University

In Echoes from Dharamsala, anthropologist Keila Diehl presents an engaging and complex picture of Tibetan refugee life in Dharamsala, India, the site of Tibet’s government-in-exile, through the music the community listens to and produces. Diehl begins the book with a colorful description of the first few days of her fieldwork, allowing readers to share her experiences and visualize themselves in India with her. The rest of the book is just as vivid in the way she describes her interactions with the Tibetan refugee community and her role as a participant-observer in Dharamsala’s music culture while playing keyboards for the Yak Band, a Tibetan rock group. (more…)