You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This collection provides a lucid introduction for those unfamiliar with Tagore's work, while simultaneously presenting importnat new scholarship and novel interpretation. Rabindranath Tagore is considered the greatest modern writer of India. He is also one of the great social and political figures in modern Indian history. After he received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913, Tagore's reputation in the West has been based primarily on his mystical poetry. But beyond poetry, Tagore wrote novels of social realism, treating nationalism, religious intolerance, and violence. He wrote analytic works on social reform, education, and science- even engaging in a brief dialogue with Albert Einstein. Without ignoring religion and mysticism, the essays in this collection concentrate on this other Tagore. They explicate Tagore's writings in relation to its historical and literary context and, at the same time, draw out those aspects of Tagore's work that continue to bear on contemporary society.
In the continuing debates on the topic of racial and ethnic identity in the United States, there are some that argue that ethnicity is an ascribed reality. To the contrary, others claim that individuals are becoming increasingly active in choosing and constructing their ethnic identities.Focusing on second-generation South Asian Americans, Bandana Purkayastha offers fresh insights into the subjective experience of race, ethnicity, and social class in an increasingly diverse America. The young people of Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Nepalese origin that are the subjects of the study grew up in mostly white middle class suburbs, and their linguistic skills, education, and occupation prof...
Global Feminist Autoethnographies bears witness to our displacements, disruptions, and distress as tenured faculty, faculty on temporary contracts, graduate students, and people connected to academia during COVID-19. The authors document their experiences arising within academia and beyond it, gathering narratives from across the globe—Australia, Canada, Ghana, Finland, India, Norway, South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States along with transnational engagements with Bolivia, Iran, Nepal, and Taiwan. In an era where the older rules about work and family related to our survival, wellbeing, and dignity are rapidly being transformed, this book shows that distress and traumas are eme...
Most Americans assume that the United States provides a gold standard for human rights—a 2007 survey found that 80 percent of U.S. adults believed that "the U.S. does a better job than most countries when it comes to protecting human rights." As well, discussions among scholars and public officials in the United States frame human rights issues as concerning people, policies, or practices "over there." By contrast, the contributors to this volume argue that many of the greatest immediate and structural threats to human rights, and some of the most significant efforts to realize human rights in practice, can be found in our own backyard. Human Rights in Our Own Backyard examines the state o...
This collection of essays focuses on the post-1980s period of the Indian feminist movement, a moment rich in new and different modes of resistance, of widespread political engagements with issues of rights, of justice, of identity and much more. The writers here, all well-known activists and founders of some of the most important of feminist institutions, describe their individual and collective journeys, bringing attention to the movement, to their struggles, their campaigns, their victories and the challenges they have faced. In using the tools of feminist analysis – a focus on life stories, on oral accounts, on group formation and more – they also make a case for advocacy through lega...
The population of the South Asian Diaspora in the US is over 2.5 million people. Yet in a post 9/11 climate of opinion, little is known about this group beyond images of Muslim and Hindu fundamentalists and terrorists. This is particularly true of women where simplistic assumptions about veils and subordination obscure the voices of the women themselves. Rarely are Hindu and Muslim American women—many of whom are social workers, physicians, lawyers, academics, students, homemakers—asked about their everyday lives and religious beliefs. Living our Religions brings out these hidden stories from South Asian American women of Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Indian and Nepali origin. Their accounts s...
Critical intersectional scholarship enhances researchers’ and scholar-activists’ ability to open novel research frontiers. This forward-thinking Research Handbook demonstrates how to pursue fluid and innovative research approaches, identify differences from traditional methodologies, and overcome the common challenges faced when carrying out intersectional research.
Why do powerful states like the U.S., U.K., China, and Russia repeatedly fail to meet their international legal obligations as defined by human rights instruments? How does global capitalism affect states’ ability to implement human rights, particularly in the context of global recession, state austerity, perpetual war, and environmental crisis? How are political and civil rights undermined as part of moves to impose security and surveillance regimes? This book presents a framework for understanding human rights as a terrain of struggle over power between states, private interests, and organized, “bottom-up” social movements. The authors develop a critical sociology of human rights foc...
In Envisioning Religion, Race, and Asian Americans, David K. Yoo and Khyati Y. Joshi assemble a wide-ranging and important collection of essays documenting the intersections of race and religion and Asian American communities—a combination so often missing both in the scholarly literature and in public discourse. Issues of religion and race/ethnicity undergird current national debates around immigration, racial profiling, and democratic freedoms, but these issues, as the contributors document, are longstanding ones in the United States. The essays feature dimensions of traditions such as Islam, Hinduism, and Sikhism, as well as how religion engages with topics that include religious affili...
"Sport has the power to change the world," South African president Nelson Mandela told the Sporting Club in Monte Carlo in 2000. Today, we are inundated with similar claims—from politicians, diplomats, intellectuals, journalists, athletes, and fans—about the many ways that international sports competitions make the world a better place. Promoters of the Olympic Games and similar global sports events have spent more than a century telling us that these festivals offer a multitude of "goods": that they foster friendship and mutual understanding among peoples and nations, promote peace, combat racism, and spread democracy. In recent years boosters have suggested that sports mega-events can ...