Devika Sharma - Böcker

Is privilege a problem? Scandinavians ask, Is this okay?—and wrestle with the answerA twenty-first century paradox has emerged in contemporary Scandinavian societies: the region’s deeply ingrained egalitarian ideals exist uneasily alongside its undeniable global privilege. In The Predicament of Privilege, Devika Sharma examines this tension, exploring how a well-intentioned desire to “do good” collides with an unsettling realization: the very structures that enable ethical consumption, charitable donations, and humanitarian action are themselves embedded in a system of exploitation.Through an incisive analysis of contemporary Scandinavian cultural texts, The Predicament of Privilege introduces the concept of skeptimentality—a pervasive moral ambivalence about virtuous emotions like compassion and generosity. As Sharma demonstrates, this sentiment does not necessarily lead to action but creates a vacuum, leaving privilege-sensitive publics with a crisis of conscience but no clear path forward. Sharma’s book challenges both the self-image of Nordic societies and the broader assumptions of humanitarian ethics. A necessary read for scholars, cultural critics, and anyone engaging with the politics of privilege, this book offers a bold new perspective on the unfinished business of equality.

Is privilege a problem? Scandinavians ask, Is this okay?—and wrestle with the answerA twenty-first century paradox has emerged in contemporary Scandinavian societies: the region’s deeply ingrained egalitarian ideals exist uneasily alongside its undeniable global privilege. In The Predicament of Privilege, Devika Sharma examines this tension, exploring how a well-intentioned desire to “do good” collides with an unsettling realization: the very structures that enable ethical consumption, charitable donations, and humanitarian action are themselves embedded in a system of exploitation.Through an incisive analysis of contemporary Scandinavian cultural texts, The Predicament of Privilege introduces the concept of skeptimentality—a pervasive moral ambivalence about virtuous emotions like compassion and generosity. As Sharma demonstrates, this sentiment does not necessarily lead to action but creates a vacuum, leaving privilege-sensitive publics with a crisis of conscience but no clear path forward. Sharma’s book challenges both the self-image of Nordic societies and the broader assumptions of humanitarian ethics. A necessary read for scholars, cultural critics, and anyone engaging with the politics of privilege, this book offers a bold new perspective on the unfinished business of equality.

This comprehensive volume offers a framework to understand the descriptive and prescriptive functions of oral narratives. Drawing upon narratological theory and linguistic analysis, it traces the evolution of folktales across generations, showcasing how they adapt to changing societal contexts while maintaining their core functions.The book investigates the intersections of language, culture, and narrative, offering a rich, cross-disciplinary perspective that highlights the enduring relevance of oral traditions in constructing and preserving ethnic identity. It examines how narrative forms contribute to the continuity of cultural memory, linguistic diversity, and social cohesion. Exploring the narratological and linguistic structures of Dogri folktales, this study illuminates a crucial facet of the cultural heritage of the Dogra community in Jammu and Kashmir. Folktales are presented not merely as entertainment but as powerful tools of cultural transmission, embodying deeply rooted moral, social, and philosophical values.This book will be of great interest to students, researchers, and educators in the fields of linguistics, folklore studies, cultural anthropology, literature, and South Asian studies. It will also serve as a valuable resource for policy makers, cultural preservationists, and general readers.

Raymond Williams coined the notion "structure of feeling" in the 1970s to facilitate a historical understanding of "affective elements of consciousness and relationships." Since then, the need to understand emotions, moods and atmospheres as historical and social phenomena has only become more acute in an era of social networking, ubiquitous media and a public sphere permeated by commodities and advertisement culture. Concomitantly, affect studies have become one of the most thriving branches of contemporary humanities and social sciences. This volume explores the significance of the study of affectivity for already thriving fields of cultural analysis such as media studies, memory studies, gender studies and cultural studies at large. The volume is divided into four sections. The first part, Producing Affect, brings together contributions which explore some of the ways in which new media works to produce and intensify affectivity. The essays making up the second part, Affective Pasts, explore the significance of affect to the ways we remember, commemorate and in other ways get hold of things in our recent and not so recent past – or fail to do so. The essays engage the affective production of presence in contexts such as 9/11, the emotional culture of the eighteenth century, and literary auto-fiction. The third part, Affective Thinking, examines various concepts, theories, and forms of thinking not so much to show how the thinking in question may inform the field of affect studies but rather in order to draw attention to the way in which these modes of thinking are themselves already attuned to matters of affect. New social relations and ways of being in a networked world are the common themes of the essays in the final part of the volume, Circulating Affect.