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Lines of the Nation radically recasts the history of the Indian railways, which have long been regarded as vectors of modernity and economic prosperity. From the design of carriages to the architecture of stations, employment hierarchies, and the construction of employee housing, Laura Bear explores the new public spaces and social relationships created by the railway bureaucracy. She then traces their influence on the formation of contemporary Indian nationalism, personal sentiments, and popular memory. Her probing study challenges entrenched beliefs concerning the institutions of modernity and capitalism by showing that these rework older idioms of social distinction and are legitimized by...
This work examines in detail the world of travelogues of a highly interesting culture-universe: the Bengali bhadralok. A travelogue is usually a crucial political/aesthetic text. Its very fabric is structured in space and power - it creates, relates, compares and contrasts spaces and powers. Bengalis travelling to Europe in the colonial period felt compelled to produce such texts. An analysis of these works from a historian's angle provides crucial windows to the colonised mind striving for self-definition. Trailokyanath Mukherjee, Romesh Chandra Dutt, Krishnabhabini Das, Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore and other travellers aimed to demystify the myth of Europe by establishing physica...
Words of Her Own situates the experiences and articulations of emergent women writers in nineteenth-century Bengal through an exploration of works authored by them. Based on a spectrum of genres—such as autobiographies, novels, and travelogues—this book examines the sociocultural incentives that enabled the dawn of middle-class Hindu and Brahmo women authors at that time. Murmu explores the intersections of class, caste, gender, language, and religion in these works. Reading these texts within a specific milieu, Murmu sets out to rectify the essentialist conception of women’s writings being a monolithic body of works that displays a firmly gendered form and content, by offering rich in...
Dislocating Globality: Deterritorialization, Difference and Resistance offers a broad panorama of critical approaches to globalization, its effects, the critique of neoliberalism, and discusses various forms of resistance to its monocultural raison d’être. The authors in this volume address these issues from a variety of perspectives – theoretical, as well as geographically diverse case-based analyses ranging from South Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, Europe, and Australia in attempt to show the diverse effects of globalization, and varied forms of negotiating globalization on a local level. Contributors are: Allie Biswas, Katherine Burrows, Jacob P. Chamberlain, Vytis Čiubrinskas, Maria Halouva, Jeanne Kay, Mara Matta, Gintautas Mažeikis, Dennis Mehmet, Beatriz Miranda-Galarza, Mustafa Mustafa, Abhijeet Paul, Šarūnas Paunksnis, and Némésis Srour.
The “biennale culture” now determines much of the art world. Literature on the worldwide dissemination of art assumes nationalism and ethnic identity, but rarely analyzes it. At the same time there is extensive theorizing about globalization in political theory, cultural studies, postcolonial theory, political economy, sociology, and anthropology. Art and Globalization brings political and cultural theorists together with writers and historians concerned specifically with the visual arts in order to test the limits of the conceptualization of the global in art. Among the major writers on contemporary international art represented in this book are Rasheed Araeen, Joaquín Barriendos, Susa...
Religion in decline in an age of progress -- Untidy realms -- A Swadeshi Chaitanya -- Recovering Bishnupriya's loss -- Utopia and a birthplace.
Kathak, the classical dance of North India, combines virtuosic footwork and dazzling spins with subtle pantomime and soft gestures. As a global practice and one of India's cultural markers, kathak dance is often presented as heir to an ancient Hindu devotional tradition in which men called Kathakas danced and told stories in temples. The dance's repertoire and movement vocabulary, however, tell a different story of syncretic origins and hybrid history - it is a dance that is both Muslim and Hindu, both devotional and entertaining, and both male and female. Kathak's multiple roots can be found in rural theatre, embodied rhythmic repertoire, and courtesan performance practice, and its history ...
‘This work goes where other books fear to tread. It reaches the parts other scholars might imagine in their dreams but would neither have the international reach nor the critical acumen and forensic flourish to deliver.’ Alan Read, King's College London ‘This book is not only timely. It is overdue – and it is a masterpiece unrivalled by any book I know of.’ Erika Fischer-Lichte, Freie Universität Berlin ‘The first and only book that focuses on the intersections of performance, terror and terrorism as played out beyond a Euro-American context post-9/11. It is an important work, both substantively and methodologically.’ Jenny Hughes, University of Manchester ‘A profound and ti...
Paper by Bruce Kercher traces the legal origins of the doctrine of terra nullius in early court cases in New South Wales.
This volume provides rich insights into workings of the Indian mind arguing that Indian merchants in the medieval and the early modern period were in no way inferior to other traders and Europeans in terms of their commercial operations and business acumen drawing on a wide range of sources. This book throws a new light on growth and development of Asian Trade on Sea and Land unearthing new evidence from Danish and Russian sources.