This series is concerned with three kinds of intersections or conversations: first, across cultures and regions, an interaction that postcolonial studies have emphasized in their foregrounding of the multiple sites and multi-directional traffic involved in the making of the modern; second, across time, the conversation between a mutually constitutive past and present that occurs in different times and places; and third, between colonial and postcolonial histories, which as theoretical positions have very different perspectives on the first two ‘intersections’ and the questions of intellectual enquiry and expression implied in them. These three kinds of conversations are critical to the making of any present and any history. Thus the new series provides a forum for extending our understanding of core issues of Human society and its self-representation over the centuries.
While focusing on Asia, the series is open to studies of other parts of the world that are sensitive to cross-cultural, cross-chronological and cross-colonial perspectives. The series invites submissions for single-authored and edited books by young as well as established scholars that challenge the limits of inherited disciplinary, chronological and geographical boundaries, even when they focus on a single, well-recognized territory or period.
By M.T. Ansari
January 22, 2018
Islam in India, as elsewhere, continues to be seen as a remainder in its refusal to "conform" to national and international secular-modern norms. Such a general perception has also had a tremendous impact on the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent, who as individuals and communities have been shaped...
Edited
By Gyanendra Pandey
October 26, 2017
For some time now, scholars have recognized the archive less as a neutral repository of documents of the past, and rather more as a politically interested representation of it, and recognized that the very act of archiving is accompanied by a process of un-archiving. Michel Foucault pointed to "...
By Anuradha Needham
October 12, 2017
Shyam Benegal is an Indian director and screenwriter whose work is considered central to New Indian cinema. By closely analysing several of Benegal’s films, this book provides an understanding of India’s post-independence history. The book examines the filmmaker’s focus on women by highlighting his...
Edited
By Supriya Chaudhuri, Josephine McDonagh, Brian Murray, Rajeswari Rajan
August 30, 2017
Commodity, culture and colonialism are intimately related and mutually constitutive. The desire for commodities drove colonial expansion at the same time that colonial expansion fuelled technological invention, created new markets for goods, displaced populations and transformed local and ...
By John Solomon
March 31, 2016
Untouchable migrants made up a substantial proportion of Indian labour migration into Singapore in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During this period, they were subject to forms of caste prejudice and discrimination that powerfully reinforced their identities as untouchables overseas. Today...
By Jason Mohaghegh
August 14, 2015
Presenting an engaging reflection on the work of prominent modern Iranian literary artists in exchange with contemporary Continental literary criticism and philosophy, this book tracks the idea of silence – through the prism of poetics, dreaming, movement, and the body – across the textual ...
By Nandini Bhattacharya
August 04, 2015
Hindi Cinema is full of instances of repetition of themes, narratives, plots and characters. By looking at 60 years of Hindi cinema, this book focuses on the phenomenon as a crucial thematic and formal code that is problematic when representing the national and cinematic subject. It reflects on the...
Edited
By David Hardiman, Projit Mukharji
July 18, 2015
Examining the world of popular healing in South Asia, this book looks at the way that it is marginalised by the state and medical establishment while at the same time being very important in the everyday lives of the poor. It describes and analyses a world of ‘subaltern therapeutics’ that both ...
By Adrian Carton
July 18, 2015
Focusing on Portuguese, British and French colonial spaces, this book traces changing concepts of mixed-race identity in early colonial India. Starting in the sixteenth century, it discusses how the emergence of race was always shaped by affiliations based on religion, class, national identity, ...
Edited
By Deana Heath, Chandana Mathur
April 12, 2013
Taking as its premise the belief that communalism is not a resurgence of tradition but is instead an inherently modern phenomenon, as well as a product of the fundamental agencies and ideas of modernity, and that globalization is neither a unique nor unprecedented process, this book addresses the ...
Edited
By Gyanendra Pandey
January 15, 2012
Focusing on the idea of difference as a marker of subalternity, this book looks at the ways in which ordinary citizens have sought to present and identify themselves in ways that defy the conventional categorisations of governments and historical experience. Inspired particularly by questions ...
By Milind Wakankar
October 07, 2011
This book explores the relationship between mainstream and marginal or subaltern religious practice in the Indian subcontinent, and its entanglement with ideas of nationhood, democracy and equality. With detailed readings of texts from Marathi and Hindi literature and criticism, the book brings ...
