The Politics Of Belonging In Contemporary India

This volume looks at the emerging forms of intimacies in contemporary India. Drawing on rigorous academic research and pop culture phenomena, the volume: Brings together themes of nationhood, motherhood, disability, masculinity, ethnicity, kinship, and sexuality, and attempts to understand them within a more complex web of issues related to space, social justice, marginality, and communication; Focuses on the struggles for intimacy by the disabled, queer, Dalit, and other subalterns, as well as people with non-human intimacies, to propose an alternative theory of the politics of belonging; Explores the role of social and new media in understanding and negotiating intimacies and anxieties. Comprehensive and thought-provoking, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of political studies, sociology, sexuality and gender studies, women’s studies, cultural studies, and minority studies.

Since the 1990s, the Indigenous movement worldwide has become increasingly relevant to research in India, re-shaping the terms of engagement with Adivasi (Indigenous/tribal) peoples and their pasts. This book responds to the growing need for an inter-disciplinary re-assessment of Tribal studies in postcolonial India and defines a new agenda for Adivasi studies. It considers the existing conceptual and historical parameters of Tribal studies, as a means of addressing new approaches to histories of de-colonization and patterns of identity-formation that have become visible since national independence. Contributors address a number of important concerns, including the meaning of Indigenous studies in the context of globalised academic and political imaginaries, and the possibilities and pitfalls of constructions of indigeneity as both a foundational and a relational concept. A series of short editorial essays provide theoretical clarity to issues of representation, resistance, agency, recognition and marginality. The book is an essential read for students and scholars of Indian Sociology, Anthropology, History, Cultural Studies and Indigenous studies.

This collection of essays examines the racialized and gendered effects of contemporary politics of belonging, issues which lie at the heart of contemporary political and social lives. It encompasses critical questions of identity and citizenship, inclusion and exclusion, emotional attachments, violent conflicts and local/global relationships. The range - geographically, thematically and theoretically - covered by the chapters reflects current concerns in the world today. A timely contribution to the ongoing debates in the field, it will be a valuable companion to scholars working in the areas of multiculturalism, globalisation and culture, race and ethnic studies, gender studies and studies of post-partition societies.

Sexuality in India offers an expression of nationalist anxieties and is a significant marker of modernity through which subjectivities are formed among the middle class. This book investigates the everyday experience of queer Indian men on digital spaces. It explores how queer identities are formed in virtual spaces and how the existence of such spaces challenge and critique ‘Indian’-ness. It also looks at the role of class and intimacy within the discourse. This work argues that new media, social networking sites (SNSs), both web and mobile, and related technologies do not exist in isolation; rather they are critically embedded within other social spaces. Similarly, online queer spaces exist parallel to and in conjunction with the larger queer movement in the country. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of gender studies, especially men's and masculinity studies, queer and LGBT studies, media and cultural studies, particularly new media and digital culture, sexuality and identity, politics, sociology and social anthropology, and South Asian studies.

In this groundbreaking book, Nira Yuval-Davis provides a cutting-edge investigation of the challenging debates around belonging and the politics of belonging. Alongside the hegemonic forms of citizenship and nationalism which have tended to dominate our recent political and social history, the author examines alternative contemporary political projects of belonging constructed around the notions of religion, cosmopolitanism, and the feminist ‘ethics of care’. The book also explores the effects of globalization, mass migration, the rise of both fundamentalist and human rights movements on such politics of belonging, as well as some of its racialized and gendered dimensions. A special space is given to the various feminist political movements that have been engaged as part of or in resistance to the political projects of belonging.

“[R]ecommended to anyone interested in multiculturalism and migration....[and] food for thought also for scholars studying migration in less privileged contexts.”—Social Anthropology In this compelling study of the children of serial migrants, Danau Tanu argues that the international schools they attend promote an ideology of being “international” that is Eurocentric. Despite the cosmopolitan rhetoric, hierarchies of race, culture and class shape popularity, friendships, and romance on campus. By going back to high school for a year, Tanu befriended transnational youth, often called “Third Culture Kids”, to present their struggles with identity, belonging and internalized racism in their own words. The result is the first engaging, anthropological critique of the way Western-style cosmopolitanism is institutionalized as cultural capital to reproduce global socio-cultural inequalities. From the introduction: When I first went back to high school at thirty-something, I wanted to write a book about people who live in multiple countries as children and grow up into adults addicted to migrating. I wanted to write about people like Anne-Sophie Bolon who are popularly referred to as “Third Culture Kids” or “global nomads.” ... I wanted to probe the contradiction between the celebrated image of “global citizens” and the economic privilege that makes their mobile lifestyle possible. From a personal angle, I was interested in exploring the voices among this population that had yet to be heard (particularly the voices of those of Asian descent) by documenting the persistence of culture, race, and language in defining social relations even among self-proclaimed cosmopolitan youth.

The contributions gathered in this volume bear witness to the fact that belonging is a multi-faceted concept that necessitates different and shifting idioms of expression. It continually requires reconsideration and redefinition of our affiliations in response to the rapid social, cultural, and political changes of our world. The literary paradigms, linguistic practices, and cultural formations of belonging testify to the impossibility of confining it to conventional and established structures of knowledge. The different reflections on belonging introduced in this book are instrumental in reassessing and remodelling the general assumptions that have informed its definition and representation. The current global reality and the self-other encounter make inevitable the continuous search for new forms of belonging that are in tune with one’s evolving and changing sense of self. Theoretically informed by and substantially grounded in lively and heated debates on cultural identity and belonging, this book proposes new critical directions in understanding national and transnational belonging.

Explains the Hindi novel’s role in anticipating and creating the story of middle-class modernity and modernization in North India. Vasudha Dalmia offers a panoramic view of the intellectual and cultural life of North India over a century, from the aftermath of the 1857 uprising to the end of the Nehruvian era. The North’s historical cities, rooted in an Indo-Persianate culture, began changing more slowly than the Presidency towns founded by the British. Dalmia takes up eight canonical Hindi novels set in six of these cities—Agra, Allahabad, Banaras, Delhi, Lahore, and Lucknow—to trace a literary history of domestic and political cataclysms. Her exploration of the emerging Hindu middle classes, changing personal and professional ambitions, and new notions of married life provides a vivid sense of urban modernity. She argues that the radical social transformations associated with post-1857 urban restructuring, and the political flux resulting from social reform, Gandhian nationalism, communalism, Partition, and the Cold War shaped the realm of the intimate as much as the public sphere. Love and friendship, notions of privacy, attitudes to women’s work, and relationships within households are among the book’s major themes.