Space, Time and Female Empowerment in Diaspora

Abstract

This chapter discusses how the recipes and song lyrics exist in an alternative temporality and enter a liminal space. I use Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia, reflecting the polyphonous nature of the oral texts with an analysis of the multi-voiced aspects of each recipe and song, which allow me to locate the voices in a particular space and time paradigm. This framework, which is euro-centric, has been modified in order for the female voice in diaspora to be located and heard. I also use theories of a gendered space and time when focusing on these wedding songs and particularly those theories that emerge from Julia Kristeva’s work. Aspects of women’s power which originate in the spaces they forge are also explored.

The whole notion of ‘women’s work’ within the separate spheres ideology coalesced around a distinction of space and activity.

Jane Haggis Good Wives and Mothers’ or ‘Dedicated Workers’? Contradictions of Domesticity in the Mission of Sisterhood’, Travancore, South India in K. Ram, and M.t A. Jolly (ed) Maternities and Modernities: Colonial and Postcolonial experiences in Asia and the Pacific (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998), p. 104.

The lived experiences and spatial imaginaries of transnational migrants revolve around home in a range of ways: through, for example, relationships between home and the homeland, the existence of multiple homes, diverse home-making practices and the intersections of home, memory, identity and belonging.

Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling, Home (Routledge, London, 2006), p. 199.