Resilient women: transnational homes and identities in Tahmima Anam's A Golden Age

ABSTRACT

Foregrounding theoretical expositions of the home and identity, this paper examines historical novel by Bangladeshi author Tahmima Anam entitled A Golden Age (2007), which explores gendered roles within familial separation during political unrest. Using a transnational lens, it addresses shifting meanings of home and identity amidst nation-fragmentation during the politically fractious period of Bangladesh liberation war. Deploying a historico-literary imagination, the novel's emphasis on women's intimate struggles to keep family intact offer insights into meanings of home in terms of mother–child ties and geopolitical tensions that shape new borders within domestic and national spaces. As a point of departure, Kuah-Pearce's concept of transnational identities is applied to make sense of private and communal selves of female characters whose articulations of (un)homely affiliations in times of transnational crises are a means to redefine their resilience, and critique the practices of discrimination and segregation that disrupt the space of the home.

KEYWORDS:

• Postcolonial history
• Bangladeshi fiction
• diasporic women
• transnational home
• identity crisis
• South Asian contemporary experiences
• women's writings

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Notes on contributors

Hannah Ming Yit Ho

Hannah M. Y. Ho is an Assistant Professor in the English Studies Programme at Universiti Brunei Darussalam. She is also a research fellow at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore. She holds a PhD from the University of York, United Kingdom. Her research interests include postcolonial literature, diasporic fiction, and contemporary women’s writings. She has published in journals such as Global Society, Asiatic, Southeast Asian Review of English, and The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture. She co-edited the volume entitled Engaging Modern Brunei: Research on Language, Literature and Culture (2021).