South Asia -- Fictions of Feminist Ethnography by Kamala Visweswaran / Women as Subjects: South Asian Histories edited by Nita Kumar

Fictions of Feminist Ethnography. By KAMALA VISWESWARAN. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. xii, 205 pp. $44.95 (cloth); $17.95 (paper).

Women as Subjects: South Asian Histories. Edited by NITA KUMAR. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994. 239 pp. $14.95 (paper).

Fictions of Feminist Ethnography and the essays in Women as Subjects: South Asian Histories attempt to render what Kamala Visweswaran calls "women's subjectivity" (p. 10), especially a dissident, resistant subjectivity, both as it is situated within dominant (male) cultural, political, and social structures, and as it elaborates alternative models of speaking and writing. In both method and content, Fictions and Women see this as an attempt, as Nita Kumar notes, at "unveiling the covered, listening to the mute, looking for hidden meanings," deciphering "a separate, parallel discourse for women within the larger context of normative ... male-centered discourse" (p. 203). But whereas Fictions offers an internal critique of dominant ethnography by retrieving ignored or suppressed feminist ethnographic practices, the essays in Women employ the procedures of ethnographic and historical analyses to reveal often neglected instances of subversion and resistance evident in women's utterances regarding normatively ascribed gender roles.

Interested in disclosing fundamental continuities between ethnography and fiction (especially in the autobiographical mode), Fictions opens and closes with a fable and a story, both instances of fictional genres. In seeing ethnography as fiction, and vice versa, Fictions both contests ethnography's initial efforts to separate itself from the fictional and conforms with the self-reflexiveness of a...