You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Constructs a history of an untouchable and heretical community, the Satnamis of Central India.
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.
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."
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This book thinks through modernity and its representations by exploring critical considerations of time and space. Drawing on anthropology, history and social theory, it investigates the oppositions and enchantments, the contradictions and contentions, and the identities and ambivalences spawned under modernity. Crucially, it understands these antinomies not as errors, but as constitutive elements of modern worlds. The book questions routine portrayals of homogeneous time and antinomian blueprints of cultural space, while acknowledging the production of time and space by social subjects. ...
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.
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...
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.
Over the last four decades, Dipesh Chakrabarty's astonishingly wide-ranging scholarship has elaborated a range of important issues, especially those of modernity, identity, and politics - in dialogue with postcolonial theory and critical historiography - on global and planetary scales. All of this makes Chakrabarty among the most significant (and most cited) scholars working in the humanities and social sciences today. The present text comprises substantive yet short, academic yet accessible essays that are crafted in conversation with the critical questions raised by Chakrabarty's writings. Now, Chakrabarty holds the singular distinction of making key contributions to some of the most salie...