Care, Memory, and Autonomy: Feminist and Postfeminist Intersections in Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar

Care, Memory, and Autonomy: Feminist and Postfeminist Intersections in Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar
S. Farhad

Abstract

Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar (2020) is nominated for the Booker Prize and stands as one of the most disturbing and incisive revelations of the mother daughter relationship. Chronicled by Antara, the novel shifts between testimony and vengeance as she remembers her mother, Tara’s, neglect and she assumes reluctant responsibility for her care. This article explores Burnt
Sugar as a narrative that portrays the dialectic between feminist critique and postfeminist sensibility. Drawing on feminist theorists (Beauvoir, Butler, Menon, Tharu & Sangari), postfeminist critics (Gill, McRobbie), and trauma theorists (Caruth), the novel offers no stable resolution between rage, care, and autonomy. Instead, it focuses on a protagonist who is shaped by the contradictions of feminist resistance and postfeminist selfhood in neoliberal India. It involves postfeminist themes of selffashioning, emotional trauma, and the commodification of autonomy through Tara.