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Gandhi and Architecture: A Time for Low-Cost Housing chronicles the emergence of a low-cost, low-rise housing architecture that conforms to M.K. Gandhi’s religious need to establish finite boundaries for everyday actions; finitude in turn defines Gandhi’s conservative and exclusionary conception of religion. Drawing from rich archival and field materials, the book begins with an exploration of Gandhi’s religiosity of relinquishment and the British Spiritualist, Madeline Slade’s creation of his low-cost hut, Adi Niwas, in the village of Segaon in the 1930s. Adi Niwas inaugurates a low-cost housing architecture of finitude founded on the near-simultaneous but heterogeneous, conservativ...
Gandhi and Architecture: A Time for Low-Cost Housing chronicles the emergence of a low-cost, low-rise housing architecture that conforms to M.K. Gandhi's religio-philosophical emphasis on the necessity of establishing limits in everyday actions. This book approaches the making of a 'Gandhian low-cost housing architecture of finitude' as an enduring present. Drawing from rich archival and field materials, the book explores Gandhi's religiosity and the British Spiritualist, Madeline Slade's creation of his low-cost hut, Adi Niwas, in the village of Segaon in the 1930s. Adi Niwas inaugurates a low-cost housing architecture of finitude founded on the Gandhian ideal of self-sacrifice and the need...
This book surveys the intersections between water systems and the phenomenology of visual cultures in early modern, colonial and contemporary South Asia. Bringing together contributions by eminent artists, architects, curators and scholars who explore the connections between the environmental and the cultural, the volume situates water in an expansive relational domain. It covers disciplines as diverse as literary studies, environmental humanities, sustainable design, urban planning and media studies. The chapters explore the ways in which material cultures of water generate technological and aesthetic acts of envisioning geographies, and make an intervention within political, social and cul...
10 Useful but dangerous: photography and the Madras School of Art, 1850-73 -- 11 Temporal transformations: terracotta and trash -- Index
This highly original book reconsiders canonical long eighteenth-century narratives through the conjoined lenses of queer studies and the environmental humanities. Moving from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels to Gothic novels including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Jeremy Chow investigates the role that bodies of water play in reading these central texts. Chow navigates various representations and phases of water to magnify the element’s furtive yet pronounced effects on narrative, theory, and identity. Water, Chow reveals, is both a participant and a stage upon which bodily violation manifests. The sea, rivers, pools, streams, and glaciers all participate in a violent decolonialism that fractures, revises, and reshapes notions of colonial masculinity emerging throughout the long eighteenth century. Through an innovative series of intermezzi, The Queerness of Water also traces the afterlives of eighteenth-century literature in late twentienth- and twenty-first-century film, television, and other popular media, opening up conversations regarding canon, literary criticism, pedagogy, and climate change.
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Discourse about water and power in the modern era have largely focused on human power over water: who gets to own and control a limited resource that has incredible economic potential. As a result, discussion of water, even in the humanities, has traditionally focused on fresh water for human use. Today, climate extremes from drought to flooding are forcing humanities scholars to reimagine water discourse. This volume exemplifies how interdisciplinary cultural approaches can transform water conversations. The manuscript is organized into three emergent themes in water studies: agency of water, fluid iden...
The book responds to the challenge of the global turn in the humanities from the perspective of art history. A global art history, it argues, need not follow the logic of economic globalization nor seek to bring the entire world into its fold. Instead, it draws on a theory of transculturation to explore key moments of an art history that can no longer be approached through a facile globalism. How can art historical analysis theorize relationships of connectivity that have characterized cultures and regions across distances? How can it meaningfully handle issues of commensurability or its absence among cultures? By shifting the focus of enquiry to South Asia, the five meditations that make up this book seek to translate intellectual insights of experiences beyond Euro–America into globally intelligible analyses.
In this second book of her trailblazing trilogy, Marsha Meskimmon proposes that decolonial, ecocritical, feminist art’s histories can unravel the anthropocentric legacies of Eurocentric universalism, to create transformative conversations between and across many and more-than-human worlds. Engaging with the ecologies and genealogies – worlds and stories – that constitute the plural knowledge projects of transnational feminisms and art’s transhemispheric histories, the book is written through two critical figurations: transcanons and trans-scalar ecologies. Materializing art’s histories as radical practices of disciplinary disobedience, the volume demonstrates how planetary feminism...
This book is an extensive critical study of the mystical poetry of Nund Rishi (1378-1440), the founder of the Kashmiri Sufi order called the Rishi Order, who is revered and remembered by most Kashmiris as 'Alamdār-e Kashmir or the flag-bearer of Kashmir. The author breaks with dominant perceptions of Nund Rishi as a quietistic Sufi and argues that the themes of Islam, Death, the Nothing and the Apocalyptic in his poetry are a form of negative theology. Nund Rishi's negative theology is presented as a discourse on the transcendent which relies on negations rather than affirmations that disclose an existential politics. It explores Nund Rishi's mystical poetry not only within its historical context but also in relation to religious and political controversies in medieval Kashmir. The book locates the negative theology of Nund Rishi as one form, among others, of the 'negative path' across regions in the medieval Indo-Persian world.
Extreme poverty, which intensified in India during colonial rule, peaked in the 1920s—after decades of imperialist exploitation, famine, and disease—a time when architects, engineers, and city authorities proposed a new type of housing for India’s urban poor and industrial workers. As Farhan Karim argues, economic scarcity became a central inspiration for architectural modernism in the subcontinent. As India moved from colonial rule to independence, the Indian government, business entities, international NGOs, and intergovernmental agencies took major initiatives to modernize housing conditions and the domestic environment of the state’s low-income population. Of Greater Dignity than...