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Constructs a history of an untouchable and heretical community, the Satnamis of Central India.
Scrupulously based in anthropology and history – and drawing on social theory and critical thought – this book revisits the disciplines, archives, and subjects of modernity. There are at least three interleaving emphases here. To begin with, the work rethinks institutionalized formations of anthropology and history – together with "archives" at large – as themselves intimating disciplines of modernity. Understood in the widest senses of the terms, these disciplines are constitutively contradictory. Moreover, the study interrupts familiar projections of modern subjects as molded a priori by a disenchanted calculus of interest and reason. It tracks instead the affective, embodied, and immanent attributes of our varied worlds as formative of subjects of modernity, sown into their substance and spirit. Finally, running through the book is a querying of entitlement and privilege that underlie social terrains and their scholarly apprehensions – articulating at once distinct elites, pervasive plutocracies, and modern "scholasticisms."
After Conversion imaginatively addresses issues of modernity and its margins, based upon an interplay between a variety of Western and non-Western perspectives. Saurabh Dube critically considers questions of conversion by examining colonial writings of a vernacular Christianity and by tracking the transformations of caste and sect in South Asia. He provides personal portraits of his anthropologist father as well as of an important visual artist in order to convey the dense sensuousness and moving contradictions of everyday worlds. Together, Dube incisively explores the mutual intersections between culture and power and the past and the present, while prudently unraveling the ways in which academic categories and social worlds come together yet fall apart.Saurabh Dube is Professor of History, Center for Asian and African Studies, El Colegio de México, Mexico.
"e;Dube ranges widely and globally - from histories of empires and genealogies of disciplines to recent Dalit artwork from India - to explore and carefully delineate a tension he regards as fundamental to the formation of the modern: the modern subject's inevitable entanglement with those subject to modernity. A tour de force, this book offers a critical, timely and powerful sequel to postcolonial and subaltern studies."e; - Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago
Contributed articles chiefly with reference to India.
Modern Makeovers examines the conditions, limitations, and possibilities of modernity in contemporary contexts of politics, culture, and the arts in the South Asian context.
Un becoming Modern: Colonialism, Modernity, Colonial Modernities explores the vital impact of the colonial pasts of India, Mexico, China, and even the United States on the processes through which these countries have become modern. The collection is unique as it brings together a range of disciplines and perspectives. The topics discussed include the Zapatista movement in southern Mexico, the image of the South in recent African-American literature, the theories of Andre Gunder Frank about the early modernization of Asian countries, and the contradictions of the colonial state in India.
Examining the notions, ideas, and concepts of crime and justice from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the volume covers laws, judiciary, policing, crime, criminals, Dalits, minorities, and violence.
Destined to become a key work of subaltern studies and a crucial intervention in postcolonial scholarship, Stitches on Time probes the relationships between empire and modernity, nation and history, the colonial and the postcolonial, and power and difference. Saurabh Dube combines history and anthropology to provide critical understandings of the theory and practice of historical ethnography and contemporary historiography. Drawing on extensive archival research and innovative fieldwork as well as political economy and social theory—including considerations of gender—he unpacks the implications of specific Indian pasts from the middle of the nineteenth century through the end of the twen...
This book thinks through modernity and its representations by drawing in critical considerations of time and space. It explores the oppositions and enchantments, the contradictions and contentions, and the identities and ambivalences spawned under modernity as constitutive of our worlds.Instead of assuming a straightforward, singular trajectory of the phenomena, the work discusses modernity as involving checkered, contingent, and contended processes of meaning and power over the past five centuries.Subjects of Modernity considers the overlaps yet distinctions between modernity, modernism, and modernization, further imaginatively exploring the relationship between history and anthropology. Critically engaging historical anthropology, subaltern studies, de-colonial understandings, andpost-colonial procedures, it at once offers an innovative understanding of cultural identities and imaginatively reassess critical perspectives, from South Asia to Latin America. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of anthropology, history, sociology, post-colonial studies,cultural geography, among other subjects, finding adoption in different courses/seminars across disciplines.