"The essays in this volume speak of diverse narratives–Indian, British, American, Latin American–with a broad emphasis on forms, ideologies, class relations. They crisscross and cohere around several themes: the politics of social location and the connections between local, metropolitan and colonial geographies as they bear on debates about epistemological uncertainty; the transnational and regional production of ideologies such as altruism under the aegis of colonialism; ways of theorizing women’s literacy’ labour and agency as well as consent to patriarchal arrangements and dominant ideologies. The essays provoke rethinking in a number of areas. The varied ensembles of ‘English in India and the relationships between ‘literature’ and the non-literary suggest retheorizing divisions between the metropolitan and the subcontinental. An egalitarian feminism that interrogates capitalism and colonialism also opens notions of cultural autonomy, hybridity, precapitalist essentialisms and some anticolonialisms to questioning. And the reformulation of patriarchal ideologies through the interdependent constitution of race, caste, class, religious difference, misogyny turns the multiple location of women into an object of critique. The essays can also be read as mapping a politics of ‘the possible’. This presents itself in several registers: as a more sensitive feminist historiography; as a reinflection of culture that keeps alternatives open for integrative political praxis; as social possibilities for the secular in a situation that seems to deny it; as historical possibilities created by contradictions that did not have inevitable outcomes; as resistant elements produced through contradictions between multiple structures of oppression."
There are no reviews yet.