Gyanendra Pandey - Böcker

Deploying the provocative idea of the ‘subaltern citizen’, this book raises fundamental questions about subalternity and difference, dominance and subordination, in India and the United States. In contrast to other writings on subordinated and marginalized people, the essays presented here devote deliberate attention to diverse locations of subalternity: in the conditions and histories of slaves, dalits, peasants, illegal immigrants, homosexuals, schoolteachers, women of noble lineage; in the Third World and the First; in pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial times.With contributions from a diverse group of distinguished scholars, the anthology explores issues of gender and sexuality, migration, race, caste and class, education and law, culture and politics. The very juxtaposition of different bodies of scholarship serves to challenge common perceptions of inherited histories – claims to American and Indian ‘exceptionalism’ – and promotes a new awareness, not only of shared histories and shared struggles in the making of the modern world, but of particularities and facets of our different histories and societal conditions that are assumed as being well understood, and hence often taken for granted.Subaltern Citizens and Their Histories will be essential reading for scholars of colonial, postcolonial and subaltern studies, American studies, US and South Asian social science and history.

Focusing on concepts that have been central to investigation of the history and politics of marginalized and disenfranchised populations, this book asks how discourses of ‘subalternity’ and ‘difference’ simultaneously constitute and interrupt each other. The authors explore the historical production of conditions of marginality and minority, and challenge simplistic notions of difference as emanating from culture rather than politics. They return, thereby, to a question that feminist and other oppositional movements have raised, of how modern societies and states take account of, and manage, social, economic and cultural difference. The different contributions investigate this question in a variety of historical and political contexts, from India and Ecuador, to Britain and the USA.The resulting study is of invaluable interest to students and scholars in a wide range of disciplines, including History, Anthropology, Gender and Queer and Colonial and Postcolonial Studies.

Focusing on the idea of difference as a marker of subalternity, this book looks at the ways in which ordinary citizens have sought to present and identify themselves in ways that defy the conventional categorisations of governments and historical experience. Inspired particularly by questions arising within the feminist movement, chapters examine the ways in which liberal democracies are able to accommodate and live with difference. The reader is encouraged to question normative ontological conventions of society and politics, as well as question some of the revolutionary ideologies which have sought to achieve radical change in the societies concerned by encouraging people to identify with particular class interests. The book goes on to analyse the concept of the Subaltern and the meaning of Subalternity, insisting that it should be understood though action and self-identification in relationship to repression, rather than as an abstract academic tool of analysis. The book marks a new approach to the study of disenfranchised and minoritized populations, challenges simplistic pronouncements of ‘difference’ based on culture rather than politics. It is an essential read for students and scholars of History, Anthropology, and Colonial and Postcolonial studies.

For some time now, scholars have recognized the archive less as a neutral repository of documents of the past, and rather more as a politically interested representation of it, and recognized that the very act of archiving is accompanied by a process of un-archiving. Michel Foucault pointed to "madness" as describing one limit of reason, history and the archive. This book draws attention to another boundary, marked not by exile, but by the ordinary and everyday, yet trivialized or "trifling." It is the status of being exiled within – by prejudices, procedures, activities and interactions so fundamental as to not even be noticed – that marks the unarchived histories investigated in this volume.Bringing together contributions covering South Asia, North and South America, and North Africa, this innovative analysis presents novel interpretations of unfamiliar sources and insightful reconsiderations of well-known materials that lie at the centre of many current debates on history and the archive.

Deploying the provocative idea of the ‘subaltern citizen’, this book raises fundamental questions about subalternity and difference, dominance and subordination, in India and the United States. In contrast to other writings on subordinated and marginalized people, the essays presented here devote deliberate attention to diverse locations of subalternity: in the conditions and histories of slaves, dalits, peasants, illegal immigrants, homosexuals, schoolteachers, women of noble lineage; in the Third World and the First; in pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial times.With contributions from a diverse group of distinguished scholars, the anthology explores issues of gender and sexuality, migration, race, caste and class, education and law, culture and politics. The very juxtaposition of different bodies of scholarship serves to challenge common perceptions of inherited histories – claims to American and Indian ‘exceptionalism’ – and promotes a new awareness, not only of shared histories and shared struggles in the making of the modern world, but of particularities and facets of our different histories and societal conditions that are assumed as being well understood, and hence often taken for granted.Subaltern Citizens and Their Histories will be essential reading for scholars of colonial, postcolonial and subaltern studies, American studies, US and South Asian social science and history.

Through an investigation of the violence that marked the partition of British India in 1947, this book analyses questions of history and memory, the nationalisation of populations and their pasts, and the ways in which violent events are remembered (or forgotten) in order to ensure the unity of the collective subject - community or nation. Stressing the continuous entanglement of 'event' and 'interpretation', the author emphasises both the enormity of the violence of 1947 and its shifting meanings and contours. The book provides a sustained critique of the procedures of history-writing and nationalist myth-making on the question of violence, and examines how local forms of sociality are constituted and reconstituted, by the experience and representation of violent events. It concludes with a comment on the different kinds of political community that may still be imagined even in the wake of Partition and events like it.

Through an investigation of the violence that marked the partition of British India in 1947, this book analyses questions of history and memory, the nationalisation of populations and their pasts, and the ways in which violent events are remembered (or forgotten) in order to ensure the unity of the collective subject - community or nation. Stressing the continuous entanglement of 'event' and 'interpretation', the author emphasises both the enormity of the violence of 1947 and its shifting meanings and contours. The book provides a sustained critique of the procedures of history-writing and nationalist myth-making on the question of violence, and examines how local forms of sociality are constituted and reconstituted, by the experience and representation of violent events. It concludes with a comment on the different kinds of political community that may still be imagined even in the wake of Partition and events like it.

Much has been written about the "extraordinary" violence of recent history, its brutality, and the impossibility of describing it. Routine Violence focuses on the violence of much more routine political practices—the drawing up of political categories and the writing of national histories. The book takes its material from the history of twentieth-century India: the land of Gandhi and of effective nonviolent resistance to British colonial rule. It asks questions about how particular histories are claimed as the "real" histories of a nation; how the "sacred" nation, and its ("mainstream") culture and politics, come to be constructed; and how a certain inducement to violence, and a collective amnesia regarding that violence, follow from all of this.This is the first book to engage in a sustained investigation of the routine political violence of our times. No sales in India, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan.

Much has been written about the "extraordinary" violence of recent history, its brutality, and the impossibility of describing it. Routine Violence focuses on the violence of much more routine political practices—the drawing up of political categories and the writing of national histories. The book takes its material from the history of twentieth-century India: the land of Gandhi and of effective nonviolent resistance to British colonial rule. It asks questions about how particular histories are claimed as the "real" histories of a nation; how the "sacred" nation, and its ("mainstream") culture and politics, come to be constructed; and how a certain inducement to violence, and a collective amnesia regarding that violence, follow from all of this.This is the first book to engage in a sustained investigation of the routine political violence of our times. No sales in India, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan.

For some time now, scholars have recognized the archive less as a neutral repository of documents of the past, and rather more as a politically interested representation of it, and recognized that the very act of archiving is accompanied by a process of un-archiving. Michel Foucault pointed to "madness" as describing one limit of reason, history and the archive. This book draws attention to another boundary, marked not by exile, but by the ordinary and everyday, yet trivialized or "trifling." It is the status of being exiled within – by prejudices, procedures, activities and interactions so fundamental as to not even be noticed – that marks the unarchived histories investigated in this volume.Bringing together contributions covering South Asia, North and South America, and North Africa, this innovative analysis presents novel interpretations of unfamiliar sources and insightful reconsiderations of well-known materials that lie at the centre of many current debates on history and the archive.

This is a book about prejudice and democracy, and the prejudice of democracy. In comparing the historical struggles of two geographically disparate populations - Indian Dalits (once known as Untouchables) and African Americans - Gyanendra Pandey, the leading subaltern historian, examines the multiple dimensions of prejudice in two of the world's leading democracies. The juxtaposition of two very different locations and histories, and within each of them of varying public and private narratives of struggle, allows for an uncommon analysis of the limits of citizenship in modern societies and states. Pandey, with his characteristic delicacy, probes the histories of his protagonists to uncover a shadowy world where intolerance and discrimination are part of both public and private lives. This unusual and sobering book is revelatory in its exploration of the contradictory history of promise and denial that is common to the official narratives of nations such as India and the United States and the ideologies of many opposition movements.

This is a book about prejudice and democracy, and the prejudice of democracy. In comparing the historical struggles of two geographically disparate populations - Indian Dalits (once known as Untouchables) and African Americans - Gyanendra Pandey, the leading subaltern historian, examines the multiple dimensions of prejudice in two of the world's leading democracies. The juxtaposition of two very different locations and histories, and within each of them of varying public and private narratives of struggle, allows for an uncommon analysis of the limits of citizenship in modern societies and states. Pandey, with his characteristic delicacy, probes the histories of his protagonists to uncover a shadowy world where intolerance and discrimination are part of both public and private lives. This unusual and sobering book is revelatory in its exploration of the contradictory history of promise and denial that is common to the official narratives of nations such as India and the United States and the ideologies of many opposition movements.

In Men at Home, Gyanendra Pandey offers a detailed exploration of men’s comportment and conduct in the home and the implications of their ambiguous commitment to this critical part of their lives. The author draws on a wealth of archival materials-autobiographies, memoirs, fiction, and ethnographies-to situate Indian men firmly in the domestic world, underlining their dependence on the family and home. He investigates how men negotiate marriage, intimacy, and conjugality and focuses the effects of the humiliating and constant assertion of gender, caste, and class power in familial interactions. To uncover the nuances of these relationships, Pandey attends to the domestic commitments of upper-, middle-, and lower-class men across religion and caste. He considers issues of honor and shame, rights and responsibilities, citizenship and belonging through this exploration of how men across the subcontinent understand themselves in and beyond their domestic relationships. As much as it is a book about masculinity and conjugality, this is a book about Indian modernity, nationalism, and society as seen from the location of men in the home.

In Men at Home, Gyanendra Pandey offers a detailed exploration of men’s comportment and conduct in the home and the implications of their ambiguous commitment to this critical part of their lives. The author draws on a wealth of archival materials-autobiographies, memoirs, fiction, and ethnographies-to situate Indian men firmly in the domestic world, underlining their dependence on the family and home. He investigates how men negotiate marriage, intimacy, and conjugality and focuses the effects of the humiliating and constant assertion of gender, caste, and class power in familial interactions. To uncover the nuances of these relationships, Pandey attends to the domestic commitments of upper-, middle-, and lower-class men across religion and caste. He considers issues of honor and shame, rights and responsibilities, citizenship and belonging through this exploration of how men across the subcontinent understand themselves in and beyond their domestic relationships. As much as it is a book about masculinity and conjugality, this is a book about Indian modernity, nationalism, and society as seen from the location of men in the home.

A revised edition of the classic monograph, 'The Ascendancy of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh' investigates the social contradictions, class forces, and efforts at political organization and mobilization that lay behind the emergence of a powerful nationalist movement in Uttar Pradesh in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It also considers the concurrent emergence of Hindu–Muslim differences as a major factor affecting nationalist politics and the anti-colonial struggle in India.

A revised edition of the classic monograph, 'The Ascendancy of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh' investigates the social contradictions, class forces, and efforts at political organization and mobilization that lay behind the emergence of a powerful nationalist movement in Uttar Pradesh in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It also considers the concurrent emergence of Hindu–Muslim differences as a major factor affecting nationalist politics and the anti-colonial struggle in India.