South Asian Governmentalities

South Asian Governmentalities
Author: Stephen Legg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2018-10-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108428517

This volume studies the reception of the works of the acclaimed post-colonial philosopher Michel Foucault by South Asian scholars.

South Asian Borderlands

South Asian Borderlands
Author: Farhana Ibrahim
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2021-10-31
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1108967574

This is an interdisciplinary volume exploring a range of historical, anthropological and literary ideas and issues in South Asian Borderlands. Going beyond the territorial and geo-political imaginaries of contemporary borderlands in South Asia, chapters in this book engage with the questions of sovereignty, control, policing as well as continuing affections across politically divided borderlands. Modern conceptions of nationhood have created categories of legality and illegality among historically, socially, economically and emotionally connected residents of South Asian borderlands. This volume provides unique insights into the interconnected lives and histories of these borderland spaces and communities.

South Asian Governmentalities

South Asian Governmentalities
Author: Stephen Legg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2018-10-18
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1108598870

This volume analyses the ways in which the works of one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, Michel Foucault, have been received and re-worked by scholars of South Asia. South Asian Governmentalities surveys the past, present, and future lives of the mutually constitutive disciplinary fields of governmentality - a concept introduced by Foucault himself - and South Asian studies. It aims to chart the intersection of post-structuralism and postcolonialism that has seen the latter Foucault being used to ask new questions in and of South Asia, and the experiences of post-colonies used to tease and test the utility of European philosophy beyond Europe. But it also seeks to contribute to the rich body of work on South Asian governmentalities through a critical engagement with the lecture series delivered by Foucault at the Collège de France from 1971 until his death in 1984, which have now become available in English.

In Search of Home

In Search of Home
Author: Kaveri Haritas
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2021-05-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1009003720

In Search of Home explores new, yet less explored space of urban poverty – rehabilitation housing that houses the displaced poor and increasingly dots the peripheries of Indian cities. It examines the politics of the poor focusing on law, citizenship and gender. Contesting the assumption that illegalities emerge due to lack of legal rights to property, this ethnography of the everyday narrates how the rehabilitated poor despite legal residence experience 'citizenship in limbo', suspended between an illegal past and an imagined future of full citizenship. The book details the flexible governance of such neighbourhoods, studying how the state produces illegalities, and how state institutions and actors stand to gain. By looking at how systemic corruption draws urban poor groups into webs of exchanges with the state, de-radicalising and co-opting the poor, it exposes the gendered underbelly of urban poor struggles, uncovering the role women play in eliciting the paternalism of the state.

Prostitution and the Ends of Empire

Prostitution and the Ends of Empire
Author: Stephen Legg
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 474
Release: 2014-09-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822376172

Officially confined to red-light districts, brothels in British India were tolerated until the 1920s. Yet, by this time, prostitution reform campaigns led by Indian, imperial, and international bodies were combining the social scientific insights of sexology and hygiene with the moral condemnations of sexual slavery and human trafficking. These reformers identified the brothel as exacerbating rather than containing "corrupting prostitutes" and the threat of venereal diseases, and therefore encouraged the suppression of brothels rather than their urban segregation. In this book, Stephen Legg tracks the complex spatial politics surrounding brothels in the interwar period at multiple scales, including the local, regional, national, imperial, and global. Campaigns and state policies against brothels did not just operate at different scales but made scales themselves, forging new urban, provincial, colonial, and international formations. In so doing, they also remade the boundary between the state and the social, through which the prostitute was, Legg concludes, "civilly abandoned."

Bureaucratic Archaeology

Bureaucratic Archaeology
Author: Ashish Avikunthak
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2021-10-31
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1009082000

Bureaucratic Archaeology is a multi-faceted ethnography of quotidian practices of archaeology, bureaucracy and science in postcolonial India, concentrating on the workings of Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). This book uncovers an endemic link between micro-practice of archaeology in the trenches of the ASI to the manufacture of archaeological knowledge, wielded in the making of political and religious identity and summoned as indelible evidence in the juridical adjudication in the highest courts of India. This book is a rare ethnography of the daily practice of a postcolonial bureaucracy from within rather than from the outside. It meticulously uncovers the social, cultural, political and epistemological ecology of ASI archaeologists to show how postcolonial state assembles and produces knowledge. This is the first book length monograph on the workings of archaeology in a non-western world, which meticulously shows how theory of archaeological practice deviates, transforms and generates knowledge outside the Euro-American epistemological tradition.

Fleeting Agencies

Fleeting Agencies
Author: Arunima Datta
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2021-09-30
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1108837387

Critically examines the agency and history of long-silenced coolie women and their role in colonial economy and transnational movements.

Purifying Empire

Purifying Empire
Author: Deana Heath
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2010-06-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 113948818X

Purifying Empire explores the material, cultural and moral fragmentation of the boundaries of imperial and colonial rule in the British Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It charts how a particular bio-political project, namely the drive to regulate the obscene in late nineteenth-century Britain, was transformed from a national into a global and imperial venture and then re-localized in two different colonial contexts, India and Australia, to serve decidedly different ends. While a considerable body of work has demonstrated both the role of empire in shaping moral regulatory projects in Britain and their adaptation, transformation and, at times, rejection in colonial contexts, this book illustrates that it is in fact only through a comparative and transnational framework that it is possible to elucidate both the temporalist nature of colonialism and the political, racial and moral contradictions that sustained imperial and colonial regimes.

The Female Voice of Myanmar

The Female Voice of Myanmar
Author: Nilanjana Sengupta
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 413
Release: 2015-12-09
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1316570274

The Female Voice of Myanmar seeks to offer a female perspective on the history and political evolution of Myanmar. It delves into the lives and works of four of Myanmar's remarkable women who set aside their lives to answer the call of their country: Khin Myo Chit, who spoke about latent sexual politics in pre-Independent Burma; Ludu Daw Amar, who as the editor of the leftist Ludu Daily, was deemed anti-establishment and was witness to the socialist government's abortive efforts at ethnic reconciliation; Ma Thida, whose writing bears testimony to the impact the authoritative military rule had on the individual psyche; and Aung San Suu Kyi, who has re-articulated Burmese nationalism. This book breaks new ground in exploring their writing, both published and hitherto unexamined, some in English and much in Burmese, while the intimate biographical sketches offer a glimpse into the Burmese home and the shifting feminine image.