Caste, Colonialism and Counter-Modernity

Caste, Colonialism and Counter-Modernity PDF Author: Debjani Ganguly
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134291388
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
This book discusses the enigmatic persistence of caste in the lives of South Asians as they step into the twenty-first century.

Caste, Colonialism and Counter-Modernity

Caste, Colonialism and Counter-Modernity PDF Author: Debjani Ganguly
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134291388
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book discusses the enigmatic persistence of caste in the lives of South Asians as they step into the twenty-first century.

Caste, Colonialism and Counter-Modernity

Caste, Colonialism and Counter-Modernity PDF Author: Debjani Ganguly
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113429137X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
One prevalent socio-cultural structure that is peculiar to South Asia is caste, which is broadly understood in socio-anthropological terms as an institution of ranked, hereditary and occupational groups. This book discusses the enigmatic persistence of caste in the lives of South Asians as they step into the twenty-first century. It investigates the limits of sociological and secular historical analysis of the caste system in South Asia and argues for ways of describing life-forms generated by caste on the subcontinent that supplement the accounts of caste in the social sciences. By focusing on the literary, oral, visual and spiritual practices of one particular group of ex-untouchables in western India called ‘Mahars’, the author suggests that one can understand caste not as an essence that is responsible for South Asia’s backwardness, but as a constellation of variegated practices that are in a constant state of flux and cannot be completely encapsulated within a narrative of nation-building, modernization and development.

Castes of Mind

Castes of Mind PDF Author: Nicholas B. Dirks
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400840945
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
When thinking of India, it is hard not to think of caste. In academic and common parlance alike, caste has become a central symbol for India, marking it as fundamentally different from other places while expressing its essence. Nicholas Dirks argues that caste is, in fact, neither an unchanged survival of ancient India nor a single system that reflects a core cultural value. Rather than a basic expression of Indian tradition, caste is a modern phenomenon--the product of a concrete historical encounter between India and British colonial rule. Dirks does not contend that caste was invented by the British. But under British domination caste did become a single term capable of naming and above all subsuming India's diverse forms of social identity and organization. Dirks traces the career of caste from the medieval kingdoms of southern India to the textual traces of early colonial archives; from the commentaries of an eighteenth-century Jesuit to the enumerative obsessions of the late-nineteenth-century census; from the ethnographic writings of colonial administrators to those of twentieth-century Indian scholars seeking to rescue ethnography from its colonial legacy. The book also surveys the rise of caste politics in the twentieth century, focusing in particular on the emergence of caste-based movements that have threatened nationalist consensus. Castes of Mind is an ambitious book, written by an accomplished scholar with a rare mastery of centuries of Indian history and anthropology. It uses the idea of caste as the basis for a magisterial history of modern India. And in making a powerful case that the colonial past continues to haunt the Indian present, it makes an important contribution to current postcolonial theory and scholarship on contemporary Indian politics.

Democracy against Development

Democracy against Development PDF Author: Jeffrey Witsoe
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022606350X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Hidden behind the much-touted success story of India’s emergence as an economic superpower is another, far more complex narrative of the nation’s recent history, one in which economic development is frequently countered by profoundly unsettling, and often violent, political movements. In Democracy against Development, Jeffrey Witsoe investigates this counter-narrative, uncovering an antagonistic relationship between recent democratic mobilization and development-oriented governance in India. Witsoe looks at the history of colonialism in India and its role in both shaping modern caste identities and linking locally powerful caste groups to state institutions, which has effectively created a postcolonial patronage state. He then looks at the rise of lower-caste politics in one of India’s poorest and most populous states, Bihar, showing how this increase in democratic participation has radically threatened the patronage state by systematically weakening its institutions and disrupting its development projects. By depicting democracy and development as they truly are in India—in tension—Witsoe reveals crucial new empirical and theoretical insights about the long-term trajectory of democratization in the larger postcolonial world.

Modernity of Slavery

Modernity of Slavery PDF Author: P. Sanal Mohan
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780198099765
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This text pushes further the debates on colonial modernity by bringing to the fore Dalit experience in Kerala. The question of social identity is addressed in this study by analysing the problems of Dalit identity in Kerala. The book is a product of interdisciplinary research based on new archival and ethnographic materials which contributes to debates on colonial modernity.

The Cambridge History of World Literature

The Cambridge History of World Literature PDF Author: Debjani Ganguly
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009064452
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1147

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Book Description
World Literature is a vital part of twentieth-first century critical and comparative literary studies. As a field that engages seriously with function of literary studies in our global era, the study of World literature requires new approaches. The Cambridge History of World Literature is founded on the assumption that World Literature is not all literatures of the world nor a canonical set of globally successful literary works. It highlights scholarship on literary works that focus on the logics of circulation drawn from multiple literary cultures and technologies of the textual. While not rejecting the nation as a site of analysis, these volumes will offer insights into new cartographies – the hemispheric, the oceanic, the transregional, the archipelagic, the multilingual local – that better reflect the multi-scalar and spatially dispersed nature of literary production. It will interrogate existing historical, methodological and cartographic boundaries, and showcase humanistic and literary endeavors in the face of world scale environmental and humanitarian catastrophes.

Caste and Capitalism in Colonial India

Caste and Capitalism in Colonial India PDF Author: David West Rudner
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520376536
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
David Rudner's richly detailed ethnographic and historical analysis of a South Indian merchant-banking caste provides the first comprehensive analysis of the interdependence among Indian business practice, social organization, and religion. Exploring noncapitalist economic formations and the impact of colonial rule on indigenous commercial systems, Rudner argues that caste and commerce are inextricably linked through formal and informal institutions. The practices crucial to the formation and distribution of capital are also a part of this linkage. Rudner challenges the widely held assumptions that all castes are organized either by marriage alliance or status hierarchy and that caste structures are incompatible with the "rational" conduct of business. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.

Untouchable Fictions: Literary Realism and the Crisis of Caste

Untouchable Fictions: Literary Realism and the Crisis of Caste PDF Author: Toral Jatin Gajarawala
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823245241
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Untouchable Fictions considers the crisis of literary realism--progressive, rural, regionalist, experimental--in order to derive a literary genealogy for the recent explosion of Dalit ("untouchable caste") fiction. Drawing on a wide array of writings from Premchand and Renu in Hindi to Mulk Raj Anand and V. S. Naipaul in English, Gajarawala illuminates the dark side of realist complicity: a hidden aesthetics and politics of caste. How does caste color the novel? What are its formal tendencies? What generic constraints does it produce?

Saraswativijayam

Saraswativijayam PDF Author: Potheri Kunhambu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Malayalam fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
Series statement from cover.

Narrating Race

Narrating Race PDF Author: Robbie B.H. Goh
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9401207089
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
Preliminary Material -- INTRODUCTION: WRITING RACE AND ASIA-PACIFIC MOBILITIES - CONSTRUCTIONS AND CONTESTATIONS /Robbie B.H. Goh -- VIVAN SUNDARAM'S “AMRITA”: TOWARDS A STYLE OF THE BODY /Tania Roy -- THE RETURN OF THE SCIENTIST: ESSENTIAL KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL TRIBALISM IN AMITAV GHOSH'S THE HUNGRY TIDE AND THE CALCUTTA CHROMOSOME /Robbie B.H. Goh -- ETHNICITY AND THE SOUTHEAST ASIAN DIASPORA IN LI-YOUNG LEE'S THE WINGED SEED /Walter S.H. Lim -- NARRATING RACE, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY IN R.K. NARAYAN'S THE PAINTER OF SIGNS /Chitra Sankaran -- CHINESE ETHNICITY IN POST-REFORMATION INDONESIAN WOMEN'S FICTION: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF TWO NOVELS BY AYU UTAMI AND DEWI LESTARI /Harry Aveling -- RESI(G)NIFYING THE CHINESE AND FILIPINO IN CINEMATIC NARRATIVES /Caroline S. Hau -- PERFORMING ETHNICITY, ETHNICIZING HISTORY: THE EURASIANS OF SINGAPORE IN REX SHELLEY'S THE SHRIMP PEOPLE /Lily Rose Tope -- PERFORMING THE SELF: RACE AND IDENTITY IN TWO HONG KONG ENGLISH-LANGUAGE PLAYS /Kwok-Kan Tam -- BORDER CROSSING: PLACE, IDENTITY AND DIS/LOCATION OF THE SELF IN XU XI'S THE UNWALLED CITY /Terry Siu-Han Yip -- HYBRID BROWN GAIJIN IS A “DISTINGUISHED ALIEN” IN SAKOKU JAPAN /Julie Mehta -- UGLY AMERICANS AND LITTLE BROWN BROTHERS: SPECTACLES OF IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY PHILIPPINE DRAMA /Judy Celine Ick -- DISAPPEARING RACE: NORMATIVE WHITENESS AND CULTURAL APPROPRIATION IN AUSTRALIAN REFUGEE NARRATIVES /Wenche Ommundsen -- RACE IN ASIAN POETRY IN ENGLISH: ETHNIC, NATIONAL AND COSMOPOLITAN REPRESENTATIONS /Agnes S.L. Lam -- NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS -- INDEX.