You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Increasingly, over the last 20 years, women in poor developing countries have had to cope with growing ecological stress. Food, fodder, wood and water, previously in adequate supply have become scarce, and women have also been deprived of traditional access to cultivable land. Those who left the countryside for the cities now face terrible pollution, miserable housing and poor sanitation and water supplies. This reader tells the rarely told story of women living and coping in these dreadful conditions. It is a book of hope because it shows them to be not passive victims but courageous fighters and organizers in the fact of natural disaster, uncaring bureaucracy, agencies and governments whose priorities lie elsewhere, and traditional structures inimical to their needs. The women and their oganizations described here have produced demonstrably effective approaches for more sustainable uses of their resources and environments, challenging conventional accounts of their roles.
Critically examines the agency and history of long-silenced coolie women and their role in colonial economy and transnational movements.
From pre-Columbian times to the environmental justice movements of the present, women and men frequently responded to the environment and environmental issues in profoundly different ways. Although both environmental history and women's history are flourishing fields, explorations of the synergy produced by the interplay between environment and sex, sexuality, and gender are just beginning. Offering more than biographies of great women in environmental history, Beyond Nature's Housekeepers examines the intersections that shaped women's unique environmental concerns and activism and that framed the way the larger culture responded. Women featured include Native Americans, colonists, enslaved field workers, pioneers, homemakers, municipal housekeepers, immigrants, hunters, nature writers, soil conservationists, scientists, migrant laborers, nuclear protestors, and environmental justice activists. As women, they fared, thought, and acted in ways complicated by social, political, and economic norms, as well as issues of sexuality and childbearing. Nancy C. Unger reveals how women have played a unique role, for better and sometimes for worse, in the shaping of the American environment.
This collection of 21 papers, selected from presentations internationally, reflect the depth and focus of Professor Shepherd's work over the past ten years, in the areas of conquest and colonialization, slavery and anti-slavery, post-slavery society, the project of decolonialization and the role of gender.
Challenging the more conventional approaches to dislocation and resettlement that are the usual focus of discussion on the topic, this book offers a unique theory of dislocation in the form of primitive accumulation. Interrogating the ‘reformist-managerial’ and ‘radical-movementist’ approaches, it historicizes and politicizes the event of dislocation as a moment to usher in capitalism through the medium of development. Such a framework offers alternative avenues to rethinking dislocation and resettlement, and indeed the very idea of development. Arguing that dislocation should not be seen as a necessary step towards achieving progress - as it is claimed in the development discourse - the authors show that dislocation emerges as a socio-political constituent of constructing capitalism. This book will be of interest to academics working on Development Studies, especially on issues relating to the political economy of development and globalization.
The essays in Transitions, Environments, Translations explore the varied meanings of feminism in different political, cultural, and historical contexts. They respond to the claim that feminism is Western in origin and universalist in theory, and to the assumption that feminist goals are self-evident and the same in all contexts. Rather than assume that there is a blueprint by which to measure the strength or success of feminism in different parts of the world, these essays consider feminism to be a site of local, national and international conflict. They ask: What is at stake in various political efforts by women in different parts of the world? What meanings have women given to their efforts? What has been their relationship to feminism--as a concept and as an international movement? What happens when feminist ideas are translated from one language, one political context, to another?
This book is an interdisciplinary comparative investigation of activist, artistic, literary, and academic discourse—expressive work promoting ecological justice, ending racism, and representing self and community through virtual realism—a cultural poetics of environmental justice. Research fixed on women’s work intervenes in patriarchal assumptions. Focus on marginalized areas in India and a U.S. movement led by people of color, defies racisms, and promotes vigilance against structural violence that permeates across political spectrums. Striving for environmental justice is not just community work, merely academic, or trendy art, performance, or literature. Environmental justice work demands interdisciplinary, transnational, transcommunity sharing, many border crossings and solid alliance-building. Chicanas and women in India engaged in such activities generate a rich cultural poetics—a transformative vision of environmental equity, ecological and civic wellbeing, and calming climate.
Edited by two well-known scholars of development-induced involuntary displacement in India, this book brings together fourteen well researched and relevant essays by academics, researchers and practitioners with extensive first-hand knowledge and experience of the resettlement and rehabilitation (R&R) process in India.
"In this book, historian Jonathan Connolly traces the normalization of indenture from its controversial beginnings to its widespread adoption across the British Empire in the 1860s. Initially, indenture caused scandal and was viewed as a covert revival of slavery. But soon enough, a changing economic landscape in the colonies altered how it was perceived, and it was increasingly viewed as a legitimate form of free labor and a means of preserving the promise of abolition. Connolly explains how, over time, the large-scale, state-sponsored migration of Indian subjects to work in sugar plantations across Mauritius, British Guiana, and Trinidad was justified as a supposed force for progress. Excavating legal and public debates and tracing practical applications of the law, Connolly carefully reconstructs how the categories of free and unfree labor were made and remade to suit the interests of capital and empire, showing that emancipation was not simply a triumphal event but, rather, a deeply contested process. In so doing, he advances an original interpretation of how indenture changed the meaning of "freedom" in a post-abolition world"--
This pioneering collection of essays brings together a description and analysis of women workers and the socio-economic systems of plantations world-wide. The plantation remains a formidable force in many areas of the world and new trends towards tree farming call for further examination of its agriculture. Women have, in the past, constituted a considerable precentage of the work force in this milieu, and continue to do so.Using specific case studies of historical and contemporary plantations, an account is given of the history of female labour, focusing on the colonial and post-colonial eras. The essays examine reasons for women's degraded status and emphasize, in particular, issues relati...