South Asian Governmentalities

South Asian Governmentalities

Author: Stephen Legg

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-10-18

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 1108428517

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This volume studies the reception of the works of the acclaimed post-colonial philosopher Michel Foucault by South Asian scholars.


South Asian Governmentalities

South Asian Governmentalities

Author: Stephen Legg

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-10-18

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1108598870

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This volume analyses the ways in which the works of one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, Michel Foucault, have been received and re-worked by scholars of South Asia. South Asian Governmentalities surveys the past, present, and future lives of the mutually constitutive disciplinary fields of governmentality - a concept introduced by Foucault himself - and South Asian studies. It aims to chart the intersection of post-structuralism and postcolonialism that has seen the latter Foucault being used to ask new questions in and of South Asia, and the experiences of post-colonies used to tease and test the utility of European philosophy beyond Europe. But it also seeks to contribute to the rich body of work on South Asian governmentalities through a critical engagement with the lecture series delivered by Foucault at the Collège de France from 1971 until his death in 1984, which have now become available in English.


South Asian Borderlands

South Asian Borderlands

Author: Farhana Ibrahim

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-10-31

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1108967574

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This is an interdisciplinary volume exploring a range of historical, anthropological and literary ideas and issues in South Asian Borderlands. Going beyond the territorial and geo-political imaginaries of contemporary borderlands in South Asia, chapters in this book engage with the questions of sovereignty, control, policing as well as continuing affections across politically divided borderlands. Modern conceptions of nationhood have created categories of legality and illegality among historically, socially, economically and emotionally connected residents of South Asian borderlands. This volume provides unique insights into the interconnected lives and histories of these borderland spaces and communities.


In Search of Home

In Search of Home

Author: Kaveri Haritas

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-05-31

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 1009003720

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In Search of Home explores new, yet less explored space of urban poverty – rehabilitation housing that houses the displaced poor and increasingly dots the peripheries of Indian cities. It examines the politics of the poor focusing on law, citizenship and gender. Contesting the assumption that illegalities emerge due to lack of legal rights to property, this ethnography of the everyday narrates how the rehabilitated poor despite legal residence experience 'citizenship in limbo', suspended between an illegal past and an imagined future of full citizenship. The book details the flexible governance of such neighbourhoods, studying how the state produces illegalities, and how state institutions and actors stand to gain. By looking at how systemic corruption draws urban poor groups into webs of exchanges with the state, de-radicalising and co-opting the poor, it exposes the gendered underbelly of urban poor struggles, uncovering the role women play in eliciting the paternalism of the state.


Bureaucratic Archaeology

Bureaucratic Archaeology

Author: Ashish Avikunthak

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-10-31

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1009082000

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Bureaucratic Archaeology is a multi-faceted ethnography of quotidian practices of archaeology, bureaucracy and science in postcolonial India, concentrating on the workings of Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). This book uncovers an endemic link between micro-practice of archaeology in the trenches of the ASI to the manufacture of archaeological knowledge, wielded in the making of political and religious identity and summoned as indelible evidence in the juridical adjudication in the highest courts of India. This book is a rare ethnography of the daily practice of a postcolonial bureaucracy from within rather than from the outside. It meticulously uncovers the social, cultural, political and epistemological ecology of ASI archaeologists to show how postcolonial state assembles and produces knowledge. This is the first book length monograph on the workings of archaeology in a non-western world, which meticulously shows how theory of archaeological practice deviates, transforms and generates knowledge outside the Euro-American epistemological tradition.


Prostitution and the Ends of Empire

Prostitution and the Ends of Empire

Author: Stephen Legg

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2014-09-19

Total Pages: 474

ISBN-13: 0822376172

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Officially confined to red-light districts, brothels in British India were tolerated until the 1920s. Yet, by this time, prostitution reform campaigns led by Indian, imperial, and international bodies were combining the social scientific insights of sexology and hygiene with the moral condemnations of sexual slavery and human trafficking. These reformers identified the brothel as exacerbating rather than containing "corrupting prostitutes" and the threat of venereal diseases, and therefore encouraged the suppression of brothels rather than their urban segregation. In this book, Stephen Legg tracks the complex spatial politics surrounding brothels in the interwar period at multiple scales, including the local, regional, national, imperial, and global. Campaigns and state policies against brothels did not just operate at different scales but made scales themselves, forging new urban, provincial, colonial, and international formations. In so doing, they also remade the boundary between the state and the social, through which the prostitute was, Legg concludes, "civilly abandoned."


Fleeting Agencies

Fleeting Agencies

Author: Arunima Datta

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-09-30

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 1108837387

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Critically examines the agency and history of long-silenced coolie women and their role in colonial economy and transnational movements.


Purifying Empire

Purifying Empire

Author: Deana Heath

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-06-03

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 113948818X

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Purifying Empire explores the material, cultural and moral fragmentation of the boundaries of imperial and colonial rule in the British Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It charts how a particular bio-political project, namely the drive to regulate the obscene in late nineteenth-century Britain, was transformed from a national into a global and imperial venture and then re-localized in two different colonial contexts, India and Australia, to serve decidedly different ends. While a considerable body of work has demonstrated both the role of empire in shaping moral regulatory projects in Britain and their adaptation, transformation and, at times, rejection in colonial contexts, this book illustrates that it is in fact only through a comparative and transnational framework that it is possible to elucidate both the temporalist nature of colonialism and the political, racial and moral contradictions that sustained imperial and colonial regimes.


Changing the Subject

Changing the Subject

Author: Srila Roy

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2022-08-29

Total Pages: 183

ISBN-13: 1478023511

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In Changing the Subject Srila Roy maps the rapidly transforming terrain of gender and sexual politics in India under the conditions of global neoliberalism. The consequences of India’s liberalization were paradoxical: the influx of global funds for social development and NGOs signaled the co-optation and depoliticization of struggles for women’s rights, even as they amplified the visibility and vitalization of queer activism. Roy reveals the specificity of activist and NGO work around issues of gender and sexuality through a decade-long ethnography of two West Bengal organizations, one working on lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues and the other on rural women’s empowerment. Tracing changes in feminist governmentality that were entangled in transnational neoliberalism, Roy shows how historical and highly local feminist currents shaped contemporary queer and nonqueer neoliberal feminisms. The interplay between historic techniques of activist governance and queer feminist governmentality’s focus on changing the self offers a new way of knowing feminism—both as always already co-opted and as a transformative force in the world.


Dynamics of Caste and Law

Dynamics of Caste and Law

Author: Dag-Erik Berg

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-02-27

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 1108855601

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Dynamics of Caste and Law breaks new ground in understanding how caste and law relate in India's democratic order. Caste has become a visible phenomenon often associated with discrimination, inequality and politics in India and globally. India's constitutional democracy has had a remarkable goal of creating equality in a context of caste. Despite constitutional promises with equal opportunities for the lower castes and outlawing of untouchability at the time of independence, recurring atrocities and inadequate implementation of law have called for rethinking and legal change. This book sheds new light on why caste oppression persists by using new theoretical perspectives as well as Bhimrao Ambedkar's concepts of the caste system. Focusing on struggles among India's Dalits, the castes formerly known as untouchables, the book draws on a rich material and explains, among other things, mechanisms of oppression and how powerful actors may gain influence in institutions of law and state.