Domestic servitude blurs the divide between family and work, affection and duty, the home and the world. In Cultures of Servitude, Raka Ray and Seemin Qayum offer an ethnographic account of domestic life and servitude in contemporary Kolkata, India, with a concluding comparison with New York City. Focused on employers as well as servants, men as well as women, across multiple generations, they examine the practices and meaning of servitude around the home and in the public sphere....

Straddling disciplines and continents, Feminist Futures interweaves scholarship and social activism to explore the evolving position of women in the South.Working at the intersection of cultural studies, critical development studies and feminist theory, the book's contributors articulate a radical and innovative framework for understanding the linkages between women, culture and development, applying it to issues ranging from sexuality and the gendered body to the environm...

Domestic servitude blurs the divide between family and work, affection and duty, the home and the world. In Cultures of Servitude, Raka Ray and Seemin Qayum offer an ethnographic account of domestic life and servitude in contemporary Kolkata, India, with a concluding comparison with New York City. Focused on employers as well as servants, men as well as women, across multiple generations, they examine the practices and meaning of servitude around the home and in the public sphere....

Social movements have played a vital role in Indian politics since well before the inception of India as a new nation in 1947. During the Nehruvian era, from Independence to Nehru's death in 1964, poverty alleviation was a foundational standard against which policy proposals and political claims were measured; at this time, movement activism was directly accountable to this state discourse. However, the role of social movements in India has shifted during the last several decades to accomp...

This book examines the middle classes — who they are and what they do — and their influence in shaping contemporary cultural politics in India. Describing the historical emergence of these classes, from the colonial period to contemporary times, it shows how the middle classes have changed, with older groups shifting out and new entrants taking place, thereby transforming the character and meanings of the category. The essays in this volume observe multiple sites of social action (workplac...

The Social Life of Gender provides a comprehensive approach to gender as an organizing principle of institutions, history, and unequal interpersonal relations. This new title will develop students’ capacity to use gender analysis to question social life more broadly, presenting a critical sociology based on the unique insights gleaned from the study of gender. Through bold, concise, and intellectually generative writing, the authors explore culture, geopolitics, and the ec...

In this special issue, we address what we refer to as 'perversity of the political' or 'perverse politics': namely, the assumptions political theory and movements, and in our specific case feminism, often make on behalf of their subjects, and how their subjects, in return, perform individual and collective contrariness, unruliness and resistance to what is expected or desired from their 'subjectivity'. Specifically focusing on the themes of 'false consciousness', multiplicity, and uneasy a...

For an open-access edition and online resources, including video and additional images, visit the CoronAsur page on Manifold. https://manifold.uhpress.hawaii.edu/projects/coronasurBy the summer of 2020, when the coronavirus had fully entered our everyday vocabulary and our lives, religious communities and places of worship around the world were already undergoing profound changes. In Asian and Asian diaspora communities, diverse cultural tropes, beliefs, and artifa...