Nation and Its Modes of Oppressions in South Asia
Nation and Its Modes of Oppressions in South Asia

Author: Sajal Nag

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-12-30

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1000810445

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This volume examines nationhood as a concept and how it became the basis of political discourse in South Asia. It studies the emergence of nationalism in modern states as a powerful, omnipotent, and omnipresent form of political identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This book examines the idea of a nation, as it originated in medieval Europe, as an unending process of 'othering' individuals, groups, and communities to establish its hegemony, exclusivity, and absolute power within a political discourse. It sheds light on how these new political frameworks in the name of nationalism resulted in conflicts and bloodshed. It unleashed politics of retribution and facilitated majoritarianism, minority persecution, and collective authoritarianism which devastated individuals and collectivities. Further, the author also discusses various prominent ideas and contemporary theories on nationalism alongside pivotal socio-cultural factors which have significantly shaped the formation of modern nation states and their politics. Topical and nuanced, this book will be indispensable to researchers, scholars, and readers interested in nationalism, political science, modern history, political theory, political philosophy, political sociology, political history, post-colonial studies, and South Asia studies.

Gender in Modern India
Gender in Modern India

Author: Lata Singh

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-02-29

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 0198900805

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Gender in Modern India brings together pioneering research on a range of themes including social reforms, caste, and contestations; Adivasis, patriarchy, and colonialism; capitalism, political economy, and labour; masculinity and sexuality; health, medical care, and institution building; culture and identity; and migration and its new dynamics. Commissioned in remembrance of the prolific social historian Biswamoy Pati, this volume examines the gender question through a multilayered and multi-dimensional frame in which interdisciplinarity and intersectionality play an important role. Using case studies on gender from diverse geographies?east, west, north, south, and northeast; community locations?Hindu, Muslim, and Christian; and marginalized socio-economic or ethnic habitations such as those of Dalits and Adivasis, the contributors highlight the complexities and diversities of women's negotiations of patriarchies in varied social, ethnic, and community contexts. Collectively, the chapters in this volume focus on three related and overlapping settings?colonial, colonial and postcolonial continuum, and postcolonial. They delineate the multiple lives of gender by focusing on its intersections with other markers of difference including race, class, caste, sexuality, culture, ethnicity, region, and occupation, thereby questioning stereotypes, challenging dated notions and interpretations of gender, and demonstrating the ubiquity of patriarchy.

Nation and National Identity in South Asia
Nation and National Identity in South Asia

Author: S. L. Sharma

Publisher: Orient Blackswan

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 9788125019244

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This Book Brings Together Papers By Leading Sociologists On The Problem Of Nation And National Identity In South Asia. The Book Makes Important Conceptual Distinctions Between Nation , State , Territory And Region . It Also Attempts To Understand The Rise Of The State And Civil Society Over Time. It Includes Papers On Gender And Caste In The Nation-State And Also Includes Papers On National Identity In Sri Lanka And Pakistan.

New South Asian Feminisms
New South Asian Feminisms

Author: Srila Roy

Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.

Published: 2012-12-13

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 1780321929

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South Asian feminism is in crisis. Under constant attack from right-wing nationalism and religious fundamentalism and co-opted by 'NGO-ization' and neoliberal state agendas, once autonomous and radical forms of feminist mobilization have been ideologically fragmented and replaced. It is time to rethink the feminist political agenda for the predicaments of the present. This timely volume provides an original and unprecedented exploration of the current state of South Asian feminist politics. It will map the new sites and expressions of feminism in the region today, addressing issues like disability, Internet technologies, queer subjectivities and violence as everyday life across national boundaries, including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Written by young scholars from the region, this book addresses the generational divide of feminism in the region, effectively introducing a new 'wave' of South Asian feminists that resonates with feminist debates everywhere around the globe.

Analyzing Oppression
Analyzing Oppression

Author: Ann E. Cudd

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 0195187431

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Analyzing Oppression presents a new, integrated theory of social oppression, which tackles the fundamental question that no theory of oppression has satisfactorily answered: if there is no natural hierarchy among humans, why are some cases of oppression so persistent? Cudd argues that the explanation lies in the coercive co-opting of the oppressed to join in their own oppression. This answer sets the stage for analysis throughout the book, as it explores the questions of how and why the oppressed join in their oppression. Cudd argues that oppression is an institutionally structured harm perpetrated on social groups by other groups using direct and indirect material, economic, and psychological force. Among the most important and insidious of the indirect forces is an economic force that operates through oppressed persons' own rational choices. This force constitutes the central feature of analysis, and the book argues that this force is especially insidious because it conceals the fact of oppression from the oppressed and from others who would be sympathetic to their plight. The oppressed come to believe that they suffer personal failings and this belief appears to absolve society from responsibility. While on Cudd's view oppression is grounded in material exploitation and physical deprivation, it cannot be long sustained without corresponding psychological forces. Cudd examines the direct and indirect psychological forces that generate and sustain oppression. She discusses strategies that groups have used to resist oppression and argues that all persons have a moral responsibility to resist in some way. In the concluding chapter Cudd proposes a concept of freedom that would be possible for humans in a world that is actively opposing oppression, arguing that freedom for each individual is only possible when we achieve freedom for all others.

Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia
Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia

Author: Sasanka Perera

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-02-23

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 3030058522

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Taking South Asia as its focus, this wide-ranging collection probes the general reluctance of the cultural anthropology to engage with contemporary visual art and artists, including painting, sculpture, performance art and installation. Through case studies engaged equally in anthropology and visual studies, contributors examine art and artistic production in India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal to bring the social and political complexities of artistic practice to the fore. Demonstrating the potential of the visual as a means to understand a society, its values, and its politics, this volume ranges across discourses of anthropology, sociology, biography, memory, art history, and contemporary practices of visual art. Ultimately, Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia simultaneously expands and challenges the disciplinary foci of two fields: it demonstrates to art criticism and art history the necessity of anthropological and sociological methodologies and theories, while at the same time challenging the “iconophobia” of social sciences.

Karma Of Brown Folk
Karma Of Brown Folk

Author: Vijay Prashad

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2001-03-12

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 1452942560

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Village Voice Favorite Books of 2000 The popular book challenging the idea of a model minority, now in paperback! “How does it feel to be a problem?” asked W. E. B. Du Bois of black Americans in his classic The Souls of Black Folk. A hundred years later, Vijay Prashad asks South Asians “How does it feel to be a solution?” In this kaleidoscopic critique, Prashad looks into the complexities faced by the members of a “model minority”-one, he claims, that is consistently deployed as "a weapon in the war against black America." On a vast canvas, The Karma of Brown Folk attacks the two pillars of the “model minority” image, that South Asians are both inherently successful and pliant, and analyzes the ways in which U.S. immigration policy and American Orientalism have perpetuated these stereotypes. Prashad uses irony, humor, razor-sharp criticism, personal reflections, and historical research to challenge the arguments made by Dinesh D’Souza, who heralds South Asian success in the U.S., and to question the quiet accommodation to racism made by many South Asians. A look at Deepak Chopra and others whom Prashad terms “Godmen” shows us how some South Asians exploit the stereotype of inherent spirituality, much to the chagrin of other South Asians. Following the long engagement of American culture with South Asia, Prashad traces India’s effect on thinkers like Cotton Mather and Henry David Thoreau, Ravi Shankar’s influence on John Coltrane, and such essential issues as race versus caste and the connection between antiracism activism and anticolonial resistance. The Karma of Brown Folk locates the birth of the “model minority” myth, placing it firmly in the context of reaction to the struggle for Black Liberation. Prashad reclaims the long history of black and South Asian solidarity, discussing joint struggles in the U.S., the Caribbean, South Africa, and elsewhere, and exposes how these powerful moments of alliance faded from historical memory and were replaced by Indian support for antiblack racism. Ultimately, Prashad writes not just about South Asians in America but about America itself, in the tradition of Tocqueville, Du Bois, Richard Wright, and others. He explores the place of collective struggle and multiracial alliances in the transformation of self and community-in short, how Americans define themselves.

Embodied Violence
Embodied Violence

Author: Kumari Jayawardena

Publisher: Zed Books

Published: 1996-11

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 9781856494489

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Embodied Violence is a major investigation into the myriad of ways in which societies play out the struggle for cultural identity on women's bodies. Focusing on communal violence, it explores how such violence reconfigures women's experiences, facilitates the formation of particular identities and the dissemination of specific ideologies and how it positions women vis-a-vis their communities as well as the State. A distinguished cast of contributors explores the relationship between ideals of motherhood, tradition, community and racial purity, and uncovers the ways in which women's bodies become the recording surface of repressive cultural practices and symbolic humiliations.

Resistance and its discontents in South Asian women's fiction
Resistance and its discontents in South Asian women's fiction

Author: Maryam Mirza

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2023-08-22

Total Pages: 149

ISBN-13: 1526150603

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‘Mirza’s theorization of resistance is a substantive addition to feminist and postcolonial scholarship, and her rich readings of different literary texts make a valuable contribution to feminist literary studies.’ Nalini Iyer, Professor of English, Seattle University 'Resistance and its discontents in South Asian women’s fiction is a rigorous and impassioned exploration of the concept of resistance in postcolonial literature. It is an essential contribution to the field of postcolonial studies and a compelling excavation of resistance in South Asian women’s writing.' Claire Chambers, Professor of Global Literature, University of York 'Mirza’s comprehensive take on what counts as “resistance” in Anglophone fiction by women writers from South Asia and its diaspora—not just its heroic manifestations but also its limits, its contradictions, its marginality and even its absence in the reality of women’s lives—makes this a provocative theoretical inquiry into female agency. Resistance and its Discontents in South Asian Women’s Fiction makes a major contribution to postcolonial criticism as well as feminist theory.' Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Formerly Global Distinguished Professor, New York University ‘Maryam Mirza’s new book is sure to become a major work of reference in the field of South Asian literary studies and of literature by (and on) women. Its breadth, depth, and level of detail are astonishing, and it offers a thoroughly new reboot of the genre of “resistance literature”, by enlarging and complexifying the semantic reach of the term “resistance” beyond its current remit within contemporary fictional narratives.’ Neelam Srivastava, Professor of Postcolonial and World Literature, Newcastle University This book is an examination of how English-language fiction by women writers from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka has grappled with the idea and practice of resistance. A valuable, original and timely contribution to the field of South Asian literary and cultural studies, this book extends and complicates existing debates about the meanings of resistance. It brings to the fore not only the emancipatory potential of resistance, but also the contradictions that it can encompass as well as the anxieties that it can generate, particularly for women. Focusing on novels and short fiction, the book explores fiction by Arundhati Roy, Kamila Shamsie, Tahmima Anam, Jhumpa Lahiri, Manju Kapur and Ru Freeman, amongst others.

Teaching Anglophone South Asian Women Writers
Teaching Anglophone South Asian Women Writers

Author: Deepika Bahri

Publisher: Modern Language Association

Published: 2021-06-15

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 1603294910

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Global and cosmopolitan since the late nineteenth century, anglophone South Asian women's writing has flourished in many genres and locations, encompassing diverse works linked by issues of language, geography, history, culture, gender, and literary tradition. Whether writing in the homeland or in the diaspora, authors offer representations of social struggle and inequality while articulating possibilities for resistance. In this volume experienced instructors attend to the style and aesthetics of the texts as well as provide necessary background for students. Essays address historical and political contexts, including colonialism, partition, migration, ecological concerns, and evolving gender roles, and consider both traditional and contemporary genres such as graphic novels, chick lit, and Instapoetry. Presenting ideas for courses in Asian studies, women's studies, postcolonial literature, and world literature, this book asks broadly what it means to study anglophone South Asian women's writing in the United States, in Asia, and around the world.