Author: Sumathi Ramaswamy
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520918797
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 339
Book Description
Why would love for their language lead several men in southern India to burn themselves alive in its name? Passions of the Tongue analyzes the discourses of love, labor, and life that transformed Tamil into an object of such passionate attachment, producing in the process one of modern India's most intense movements for linguistic revival and separatism. Sumathi Ramaswamy suggests that these discourses cannot be contained within a singular metanarrative of linguistic nationalism and instead proposes a new analytic, "language devotion." She uses this concept to track the many ways in which Tamil was imagined by its speakers and connects these multiple imaginings to their experience of colonial and post-colonial modernity. Focusing in particular on the transformation of the language into a goddess, mother, and maiden, Ramaswamy explores the pious, filial, and erotic aspects of Tamil devotion. She considers why, as its speakers sought political and social empowerment, metaphors of motherhood eventually came to dominate representations of the language.
Passions of the Tongue
Author: Sumathi Ramaswamy
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520918797
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 339
Book Description
Why would love for their language lead several men in southern India to burn themselves alive in its name? Passions of the Tongue analyzes the discourses of love, labor, and life that transformed Tamil into an object of such passionate attachment, producing in the process one of modern India's most intense movements for linguistic revival and separatism. Sumathi Ramaswamy suggests that these discourses cannot be contained within a singular metanarrative of linguistic nationalism and instead proposes a new analytic, "language devotion." She uses this concept to track the many ways in which Tamil was imagined by its speakers and connects these multiple imaginings to their experience of colonial and post-colonial modernity. Focusing in particular on the transformation of the language into a goddess, mother, and maiden, Ramaswamy explores the pious, filial, and erotic aspects of Tamil devotion. She considers why, as its speakers sought political and social empowerment, metaphors of motherhood eventually came to dominate representations of the language.
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520918797
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 339
Book Description
Why would love for their language lead several men in southern India to burn themselves alive in its name? Passions of the Tongue analyzes the discourses of love, labor, and life that transformed Tamil into an object of such passionate attachment, producing in the process one of modern India's most intense movements for linguistic revival and separatism. Sumathi Ramaswamy suggests that these discourses cannot be contained within a singular metanarrative of linguistic nationalism and instead proposes a new analytic, "language devotion." She uses this concept to track the many ways in which Tamil was imagined by its speakers and connects these multiple imaginings to their experience of colonial and post-colonial modernity. Focusing in particular on the transformation of the language into a goddess, mother, and maiden, Ramaswamy explores the pious, filial, and erotic aspects of Tamil devotion. She considers why, as its speakers sought political and social empowerment, metaphors of motherhood eventually came to dominate representations of the language.
Passions of the Tongue
Author: Sumathi Ramaswamy
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520918795
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 348
Book Description
Why would love for their language lead several men in southern India to burn themselves alive in its name? Passions of the Tongue analyzes the discourses of love, labor, and life that transformed Tamil into an object of such passionate attachment, producing in the process one of modern India's most intense movements for linguistic revival and separatism. Sumathi Ramaswamy suggests that these discourses cannot be contained within a singular metanarrative of linguistic nationalism and instead proposes a new analytic, "language devotion." She uses this concept to track the many ways in which Tamil was imagined by its speakers and connects these multiple imaginings to their experience of colonial and post-colonial modernity. Focusing in particular on the transformation of the language into a goddess, mother, and maiden, Ramaswamy explores the pious, filial, and erotic aspects of Tamil devotion. She considers why, as its speakers sought political and social empowerment, metaphors of motherhood eventually came to dominate representations of the language.
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520918795
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 348
Book Description
Why would love for their language lead several men in southern India to burn themselves alive in its name? Passions of the Tongue analyzes the discourses of love, labor, and life that transformed Tamil into an object of such passionate attachment, producing in the process one of modern India's most intense movements for linguistic revival and separatism. Sumathi Ramaswamy suggests that these discourses cannot be contained within a singular metanarrative of linguistic nationalism and instead proposes a new analytic, "language devotion." She uses this concept to track the many ways in which Tamil was imagined by its speakers and connects these multiple imaginings to their experience of colonial and post-colonial modernity. Focusing in particular on the transformation of the language into a goddess, mother, and maiden, Ramaswamy explores the pious, filial, and erotic aspects of Tamil devotion. She considers why, as its speakers sought political and social empowerment, metaphors of motherhood eventually came to dominate representations of the language.
“I have always loved the Holy Tongue”
Author: Anthony Grafton
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674058496
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 393
Book Description
“[An] extraordinary book.” —New Republic Fusing high scholarship with high drama, Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg uncover a secret and extraordinary aspect of a legendary Renaissance scholar’s already celebrated achievement. The French Protestant Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614) is known to us through his pedantic namesake in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. But in this book, the real Casaubon emerges as a genuine literary hero, an intrepid explorer in the world of books. With a flair for storytelling reminiscent of Umberto Eco, Grafton and Weinberg follow Casaubon as he unearths the lost continent of Hebrew learning—and adds this ancient lore to the well-known Renaissance revival of Latin and Greek. The mystery begins with Mark Pattison’s nineteenth-century biography of Casaubon. Here we encounter the Protestant Casaubon embroiled in intellectual quarrels with the Italian and Catholic orator Cesare Baronio. Setting out to understand the nature of this imbroglio, Grafton and Weinberg discover Casaubon’s knowledge of Hebrew. Close reading and sedulous inquiry were Casaubon’s tools in recapturing the lost learning of the ancients—and these are the tools that serve Grafton and Weinberg as they pore through pre-1600 books in Hebrew, and through Casaubon’s own manuscript notebooks. Their search takes them from Oxford to Cambridge, from Dublin to Cambridge, Massachusetts, as they reveal how the scholar discovered the learning of the Hebrews—and at what cost.
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674058496
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 393
Book Description
“[An] extraordinary book.” —New Republic Fusing high scholarship with high drama, Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg uncover a secret and extraordinary aspect of a legendary Renaissance scholar’s already celebrated achievement. The French Protestant Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614) is known to us through his pedantic namesake in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. But in this book, the real Casaubon emerges as a genuine literary hero, an intrepid explorer in the world of books. With a flair for storytelling reminiscent of Umberto Eco, Grafton and Weinberg follow Casaubon as he unearths the lost continent of Hebrew learning—and adds this ancient lore to the well-known Renaissance revival of Latin and Greek. The mystery begins with Mark Pattison’s nineteenth-century biography of Casaubon. Here we encounter the Protestant Casaubon embroiled in intellectual quarrels with the Italian and Catholic orator Cesare Baronio. Setting out to understand the nature of this imbroglio, Grafton and Weinberg discover Casaubon’s knowledge of Hebrew. Close reading and sedulous inquiry were Casaubon’s tools in recapturing the lost learning of the ancients—and these are the tools that serve Grafton and Weinberg as they pore through pre-1600 books in Hebrew, and through Casaubon’s own manuscript notebooks. Their search takes them from Oxford to Cambridge, from Dublin to Cambridge, Massachusetts, as they reveal how the scholar discovered the learning of the Hebrews—and at what cost.
Silent Anatomies
Author: Monica Ong
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781888553697
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Poetry. Art. Asian & Asian American Studies. 2014 Kore Press First Book Winner, selected by Joy Harjo. SILENT ANATOMIES is a poetic-visual hybrid that traverses the body's terrain, examining the phenomena of cultural silences. Whether it is shame obscuring the female body, the social stigma shrouding certain illnesses, or the cryptic stories of her ancestors, Monica Ong interrogates the agency of the daughter, who must decide whether or not to speak out. What happens to stories that go underreported, un-translated, or are completely erased?
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781888553697
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Poetry. Art. Asian & Asian American Studies. 2014 Kore Press First Book Winner, selected by Joy Harjo. SILENT ANATOMIES is a poetic-visual hybrid that traverses the body's terrain, examining the phenomena of cultural silences. Whether it is shame obscuring the female body, the social stigma shrouding certain illnesses, or the cryptic stories of her ancestors, Monica Ong interrogates the agency of the daughter, who must decide whether or not to speak out. What happens to stories that go underreported, un-translated, or are completely erased?
Still Life
Author: Henrietta L. Moore
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745637930
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 175
Book Description
How adequate are our theories of globalisation for analysing the worlds we share with others? In this provocative new book, Henrietta Moore asks us to step back and re-examine in a fresh way the interconnections normally labeled 'globalisation'. Rather than beginning with abstract processes and flows, Moore starts by analyzing the hopes, desires and satisfactions of individuals in their day-to-day lives. Drawing on a wide range of examples, from African initiation rituals to Japanese anime, from sex in virtual worlds to Schubert songs, Moore develops a theory of the ethical imagination, exploring how ideas about the human subject, and its capacities for self-making and social transformation, form a basis for reconceptualizing the role and significance of culture in a global age. She shows how the ideas of social analysts and ordinary people intertwine and diverge, and argues for an ethics of engagement based on an understanding of the human need to engage with cultural problems and seek social change. This innovative and challenging book is essential reading for anyone interested in the key debates about culture and globalization in the contemporary world.
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745637930
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 175
Book Description
How adequate are our theories of globalisation for analysing the worlds we share with others? In this provocative new book, Henrietta Moore asks us to step back and re-examine in a fresh way the interconnections normally labeled 'globalisation'. Rather than beginning with abstract processes and flows, Moore starts by analyzing the hopes, desires and satisfactions of individuals in their day-to-day lives. Drawing on a wide range of examples, from African initiation rituals to Japanese anime, from sex in virtual worlds to Schubert songs, Moore develops a theory of the ethical imagination, exploring how ideas about the human subject, and its capacities for self-making and social transformation, form a basis for reconceptualizing the role and significance of culture in a global age. She shows how the ideas of social analysts and ordinary people intertwine and diverge, and argues for an ethics of engagement based on an understanding of the human need to engage with cultural problems and seek social change. This innovative and challenging book is essential reading for anyone interested in the key debates about culture and globalization in the contemporary world.
The Goddess and the Nation
Author: Sumathi Ramaswamy
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822391538
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 402
Book Description
Making the case for a new kind of visual history, The Goddess and the Nation charts the pictorial life and career of Bharat Mata, “Mother India,” the Indian nation imagined as mother/goddess, embodiment of national territory, and unifying symbol for the country’s diverse communities. Soon after Mother India’s emergence in the late nineteenth century, artists, both famous and amateur, began to picture her in various media, incorporating the map of India into her visual persona. The images they produced enabled patriotic men and women in a heterogeneous population to collectively visualize India, affectively identify with it, and even become willing to surrender their lives for it. Filled with illustrations, including 100 in color, The Goddess and the Nation draws on visual studies, gender studies, and the history of cartography to offer a rigorous analysis of Mother India’s appearance in painting, print, poster art, and pictures from the late nineteenth century to the present. By exploring the mutual entanglement of the scientifically mapped image of India and a (Hindu) mother/goddess, Sumathi Ramaswamy reveals Mother India as a figure who relies on the British colonial mapped image of her dominion to distinguish her from the other goddesses of India, and to guarantee her novel status as embodiment, sign, and symbol of national territory. Providing an exemplary critique of ideologies of gender and the science of cartography, Ramaswamy demonstrates that images do not merely reflect history; they actively make it. In The Goddess and the Nation, she teaches us about pictorial ways of learning the form of the nation, of how to live with it—and ultimately to die for it.
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822391538
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 402
Book Description
Making the case for a new kind of visual history, The Goddess and the Nation charts the pictorial life and career of Bharat Mata, “Mother India,” the Indian nation imagined as mother/goddess, embodiment of national territory, and unifying symbol for the country’s diverse communities. Soon after Mother India’s emergence in the late nineteenth century, artists, both famous and amateur, began to picture her in various media, incorporating the map of India into her visual persona. The images they produced enabled patriotic men and women in a heterogeneous population to collectively visualize India, affectively identify with it, and even become willing to surrender their lives for it. Filled with illustrations, including 100 in color, The Goddess and the Nation draws on visual studies, gender studies, and the history of cartography to offer a rigorous analysis of Mother India’s appearance in painting, print, poster art, and pictures from the late nineteenth century to the present. By exploring the mutual entanglement of the scientifically mapped image of India and a (Hindu) mother/goddess, Sumathi Ramaswamy reveals Mother India as a figure who relies on the British colonial mapped image of her dominion to distinguish her from the other goddesses of India, and to guarantee her novel status as embodiment, sign, and symbol of national territory. Providing an exemplary critique of ideologies of gender and the science of cartography, Ramaswamy demonstrates that images do not merely reflect history; they actively make it. In The Goddess and the Nation, she teaches us about pictorial ways of learning the form of the nation, of how to live with it—and ultimately to die for it.
Notes on the International S.S. Lessons [...]
Author: Robert Rhoden Meredith
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 136
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 136
Book Description
Passion
Author: June Jordan
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
ISBN: 1619322420
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 116
Book Description
After decades out of print, Passion—one of June Jordan’s most important collections—has returned to readers. Originally entitled, passion: new poems, 1977-1980, this volume holds key works including “Poem About My Rights,” “Poem About Police Violence,” “Free Flight,” and an essay by the poet, “For the Sake of the People’s Poetry: Walt Whitman and the Rest of Us.” June Jordan was a fierce advocate for the safety and humanity of women and Black people, and for the freedom of all people—and Barack Obama made a line from this book famous: “We are the ones we have been waiting for.” With love and humor, via lyrics and rants, she calls for nothing less than radical compassion. This new edition includes a foreword by Nicole Sealey.
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
ISBN: 1619322420
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 116
Book Description
After decades out of print, Passion—one of June Jordan’s most important collections—has returned to readers. Originally entitled, passion: new poems, 1977-1980, this volume holds key works including “Poem About My Rights,” “Poem About Police Violence,” “Free Flight,” and an essay by the poet, “For the Sake of the People’s Poetry: Walt Whitman and the Rest of Us.” June Jordan was a fierce advocate for the safety and humanity of women and Black people, and for the freedom of all people—and Barack Obama made a line from this book famous: “We are the ones we have been waiting for.” With love and humor, via lyrics and rants, she calls for nothing less than radical compassion. This new edition includes a foreword by Nicole Sealey.
Riddles of Belonging
Author: Christi A. Merrill
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823229572
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 668
Book Description
Can the subaltern joke? Christi A. Merrill answers by invoking riddling, oral-based fictions from Hindi, Rajasthani, Sanskrit, and Urdu that dare to laugh at what traditions often keep hidden-whether spouse abuse, ethnic violence, or the uncertain legacies of a divinely wrought sex change. Herself a skilled translator, Merrill uses these examples to investigate the expectation that translated work should allow the non-English-speaking subaltern to speak directly to the English-speaking reader. She plays with the trope of speaking to argue against treating a translated text as property, as a singular material object to be "carried across" (as trans-latus implies.) She refigures translation as a performative "telling in turn," from the Hindi word anuvad, to explain how a text might be multiply possessed. She thereby challenges the distinction between "original" and "derivative," fundamental to nationalist and literary discourse, humoring our melancholic fixation on what is lost. Instead, she offers strategies for playing along with the subversive wit found in translated texts. Sly jokes and spirited double entendres, she suggests, require equally spirited double hearings. The playful lessons offered by these narratives provide insight into the networks of transnational relations connecting us across a sea of differences. Generations of multilingual audiences in India have been navigating this "Ocean of the Stream of Stories" since before the 11th century, arriving at a fluid sense of commonality across languages. Salman Rushdie is not the first to pose crucial questions of belonging by telling a version of this narrative: the work of non-English-language writers like Vijay Dan Detha, whose tales are at the core of this book, asks what responsibilities we have to make the rights and wrongs of these fictions come alive "age after age."
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823229572
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 668
Book Description
Can the subaltern joke? Christi A. Merrill answers by invoking riddling, oral-based fictions from Hindi, Rajasthani, Sanskrit, and Urdu that dare to laugh at what traditions often keep hidden-whether spouse abuse, ethnic violence, or the uncertain legacies of a divinely wrought sex change. Herself a skilled translator, Merrill uses these examples to investigate the expectation that translated work should allow the non-English-speaking subaltern to speak directly to the English-speaking reader. She plays with the trope of speaking to argue against treating a translated text as property, as a singular material object to be "carried across" (as trans-latus implies.) She refigures translation as a performative "telling in turn," from the Hindi word anuvad, to explain how a text might be multiply possessed. She thereby challenges the distinction between "original" and "derivative," fundamental to nationalist and literary discourse, humoring our melancholic fixation on what is lost. Instead, she offers strategies for playing along with the subversive wit found in translated texts. Sly jokes and spirited double entendres, she suggests, require equally spirited double hearings. The playful lessons offered by these narratives provide insight into the networks of transnational relations connecting us across a sea of differences. Generations of multilingual audiences in India have been navigating this "Ocean of the Stream of Stories" since before the 11th century, arriving at a fluid sense of commonality across languages. Salman Rushdie is not the first to pose crucial questions of belonging by telling a version of this narrative: the work of non-English-language writers like Vijay Dan Detha, whose tales are at the core of this book, asks what responsibilities we have to make the rights and wrongs of these fictions come alive "age after age."
Thaipusam in Malaysia
Author: Carl Vadivella Belle
Publisher: Flipside Digital Content Company Inc.
ISBN: 9814786667
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 432
Book Description
This book explores the festival of Thaipusam in terms of its own inner dynamics - the traditions and belief structures which ensure the festival's continuing relevance to Malaysian Hindus. It argues that Thaipusam reflects a growing sense of Hindu identity in Malaysia and an as yet inchoate unity. It contends that while the kavadi ritual provides profound meaning at the individual and group level, Thaipusam furnishes a public arena for and gives expression to a powerful Hindu resurgence, largely, though not exclusively, fuelled by Dravidian assertiveness. In situating the festival within the context of a Malaysia dominated by Malay and Islamic power brokers, a society in which both the Indian community and Hinduism are relegated to the margins, the book explores the festival of Thaipusam as a vehicle for mobilization of religious symbols and values which not only simultaneously articulate ethnicity and thus resist the forces which threaten cultural and religious integrity, but which also ultimately signal wider allegiances to the broader politico-cultural world of an imagined, immeasurably rich, and enduring Indo-Hindu civilization.
Publisher: Flipside Digital Content Company Inc.
ISBN: 9814786667
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 432
Book Description
This book explores the festival of Thaipusam in terms of its own inner dynamics - the traditions and belief structures which ensure the festival's continuing relevance to Malaysian Hindus. It argues that Thaipusam reflects a growing sense of Hindu identity in Malaysia and an as yet inchoate unity. It contends that while the kavadi ritual provides profound meaning at the individual and group level, Thaipusam furnishes a public arena for and gives expression to a powerful Hindu resurgence, largely, though not exclusively, fuelled by Dravidian assertiveness. In situating the festival within the context of a Malaysia dominated by Malay and Islamic power brokers, a society in which both the Indian community and Hinduism are relegated to the margins, the book explores the festival of Thaipusam as a vehicle for mobilization of religious symbols and values which not only simultaneously articulate ethnicity and thus resist the forces which threaten cultural and religious integrity, but which also ultimately signal wider allegiances to the broader politico-cultural world of an imagined, immeasurably rich, and enduring Indo-Hindu civilization.