Author: Saurabh Dube
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2004
Language: English
Pages: 259
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0195668375
Description
Destined to become a key work of subaltern studies and a crucial intervention in postcolonial scholarship, Stitches on Time probes the relationships between empire and modernity, nation and history, the colonial and the postcolonial, and power and difference.
Saurabh Dube combines history and anthropology to provide critical understandings of the theory and practice of historical ethnography and contemporary historiography. Drawing on extensive archival research and innovative fieldwork as well as political economy and social theory-including considerations of gender-he unpacks the implications of specific Indian pasts from the middle of the nineteenth century through the end of the twentieth century.
Dube provides incisive accounts of the interactions between North American evangelical missionaries and Christian converts of central India, and between colonial legal systems and the Indian popular laws. He reflects on the difficulties of history writing by considering the production and reception of recent Hindu nationalist histories. Assessing the work of the South Asian Subaltern Studies Collection, he offers substantial critical readings of major writings by Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee, and others. Dube develops the concept and practice of a history without warranty as a means of rigorously rethinking categories such as modernity, colonialism, the West, the postcolonial, and the nation.
REVIEWS
Modernity has defined itself against enchantment, yet continually produced new enchantments. Saurabh Dube helpfully establishes this pattern, and especially sheds light on the ways in which colonial and postcolonial power relationships are interwoven with spiritual meanings. He rightly and persuasively brings such apparently marginal actors as evangelical missionaries and native Indian Christians onto center stage, and he does so with grace, lucidity, and insight.
-Craig Calhoun, President, Social Science Research Council
Saurabh Dube’s book will make a signal contribution to the political and theoretical legacy of South Asian subaltern studies. Based at the Colegio de Mexico and in conversation with scholars and intellectuals based in Latin America, Dube’s book will enhance the dialogue between Latin American critical social thought and subaltern studies already underway. Historically grounded and theoretically sophisticated, Stitches on time conveys the felling of a new gaze in the tradition of subaltern studies, an awareness of a daily life out of place in relation to the subject of scholarly pursuit.
-Walter d Mignolo, Duke University
Contents
ABBREVIATIONS
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
COLONIAL TEXTURES
Traveling Light
Evangelical Entanglements
Telling Tales
Entitlements and Enmities
POSTCOLONIAL TANGLES
Subaltern Subjects
Pilgrims’ Progress
The Enchanted and the Modern
Afterword
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index