Author: Saurabh Dube
Editor(s): Saurabh Dube
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2005
Language: English
Pages: 275
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0195665082
Description
This book addresses anew contentious questions of historical representation and cultural understanding by bringing into mutual dialogue landmark writings on empire and modernity, state and nation, and colonial questions and postcolonial problem. In the book, postcolonial does not imply a settled stage of history or an exclusive form or knowledge. Rather, it suggests a critical perspective, one that probes the contradictions and connections between the colonial state and the Indian nation, explores the conditions and prospects of modernity, and questions the projection of the West as history and destiny.
The contributors, widely known for their critical engagements with dominant representation of the Indian subcontinent, not only explore in inherently plural ways colonial and postcolonial cultures and pasts, society and politics, but equally think through pervasive global and national divisions of knowledge and power at the beginning of the new millennium.
Cutting across disciplinary boundaries, this collection scrutinizes vital issues - such as the linkages and tensions between modernity and its margins, empire and nation, colonialism and community and nationalist transformations and sectarian violence - as representations and experience. The editor's critical introduction brings together the concerns of the eminent contributors by placing them in broad theoretical and historiographical contexts, and expresses the ambiguities and possibilities of the postcolonial as a category.
This volume will be invaluable to the reader interested in fresh perspectives on the Indian subcontinent and its multi-faceted history. In the classroom, especially in post graduate courses, this widely-ranging reader shall provide a serious framework for understanding salient questions in the study of the past and the present.
REVIEWS:
This collection is not merely an important academic source book for students and researchers interested in the current status of postcolonial studies. Postcolonial Passages is also a scholarly introduction to the diverse, contending strands of history, anthropology, historical anthropology in the field.
- Ashis Nandy, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
The articles chosen by Dube for inclusion in this volume are incisive; the reader gets a sampling of the writings of stalwarts in the field. The book is a significant contribution.
- Rila Mukherjee, The Statesman
The Editor has provided a valuable theoretical introduction. By bringing together such a diverse range of important articles on postcolonial studies, this book will service as a useful sourcebook for students and researchers in a wide range of Humanities and Social Science disciplines.
- Shekhar Bandopadhyay, The Book Review
Contents
INTRODUCTION
Terms that Bind: Colony, Nation, Modernity
COLONY AND EMPIRE
Not at Home in Empire
Representing Authority in Victorian India
The Ethnographic Sate
Problems of Violence, States of Terror: Torture in Colonial India
Tragedy, Irony, and Modernity
NATION AND COMMUNITY
Communities and the Nation
They Also Followed Gandhi
Disciplining Difference
Belonging
MARGINS OF MODERNITY
Entangled Endeavors
Reproducing inequality: Spirit Cults and Labour
Relations in Colonial Eastern India
Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts
Blood
AFTERWORD
Presence of Europe: A Cyber conversation with Dipesh Chakrabarty
Notes on Contributors
Index