Nilanjana Chatterjee - Böcker

This book is an innovative and rigorous study of Jhumpa Lahiri's Indian American female characters' lived and imagined diasporic house space, using domesticity and the house as an analytical tool to explore their hidden domestic spaces. The book explores how the house as a spatial construct, shares a symbiotic relationship with its inhabitants, and through their implicit and explicit response to various parts of their diasporic house space, interprets their maladies, limitations and opportunities. Indian American diasporic women, especially homemakers, have long been grappling with issues of socio-cultural invisibility as they have no other space to interact with except their houses in the hostland, now more than ever, during the global corona crisis. A reading of this multi-layered relationship between houses and their women will help readers understand not only the political, intellectual, emotional and sexual dispositions of middleclass Indian women in America, but also social, cultural and economic positions they occupy within the hostland. The book shows the represented domestic interstices and looks at them as signifiers of distinct individual trajectories, wherein lies embedded the women inhabitants’ oppositions beneath the acceptance of normative Indian family values in diaspora. It also offers elemental insights into ways in which migration acts as an opportunity for establishing new, often hybridized, identities, for which it is important to realise their connections with their house space.Presenting an alternative methodology for reading real and imagined lives of women in Indian American diaspora, the book proposes an unconventional mode of understanding diasporic realities and representations in cultural studies that is not readily apparent. It will be of interest to researchers in the field of South Asian Studies, Diaspora Studies, Migration Studies, Culture Studies, Feminist Writings, Gender Studies and Asian Literature. Foreword by Bill Ashcroft

This book is an innovative and rigorous study of Jhumpa Lahiri's Indian American female characters' lived and imagined diasporic house space, using domesticity and the house as an analytical tool to explore their hidden domestic spaces. The book explores how the house as a spatial construct, shares a symbiotic relationship with its inhabitants, and through their implicit and explicit response to various parts of their diasporic house space, interprets their maladies, limitations and opportunities. Indian American diasporic women, especially homemakers, have long been grappling with issues of socio-cultural invisibility as they have no other space to interact with except their houses in the hostland, now more than ever, during the global corona crisis. A reading of this multi-layered relationship between houses and their women will help readers understand not only the political, intellectual, emotional and sexual dispositions of middleclass Indian women in America, but also social, cultural and economic positions they occupy within the hostland. The book shows the represented domestic interstices and looks at them as signifiers of distinct individual trajectories, wherein lies embedded the women inhabitants’ oppositions beneath the acceptance of normative Indian family values in diaspora. It also offers elemental insights into ways in which migration acts as an opportunity for establishing new, often hybridized, identities, for which it is important to realise their connections with their house space.Presenting an alternative methodology for reading real and imagined lives of women in Indian American diaspora, the book proposes an unconventional mode of understanding diasporic realities and representations in cultural studies that is not readily apparent. It will be of interest to researchers in the field of South Asian Studies, Diaspora Studies, Migration Studies, Culture Studies, Feminist Writings, Gender Studies and Asian Literature. Foreword by Bill Ashcroft

This book is a cultural exploration of health and wellness, with a focus on impacts of Covid-19 on the population of India. The chapters in this book present original research, systematic reviews, theoretical and conceptual frameworks, encompassing multidisciplinary, inter- and intra-disciplinary fields of study, in the context of how culture and disease sufficiently unpack and inform each other. The book includes contributions from the social sciences and the humanities and analyses issues that range from smallpox to the history of vaccine, indigenous healing practices, the Macbeth paradigm, Zizekian encounters, mental asylum, and marginalised genders. Using the theme of intellectual interconnectedness in the times of self-isolation and social distancing, the book is a collaboration of critical thinkers who identify and visibilize the hidden global issues related to ‘disease’ and ‘health’ that have divided the world into narrow binaries – individual/society, poor/rich, proletariat/bourgeoisie, margin/centre, colonised/coloniser, servitude/liberty, powerless/powerful. By doing so, the book emphasises the potential of holistic wellness to improve human life and humanity across the globe. A novel contribution on the cultural factors that played an important role in contemporary times of Covid-19, this book will be of interest to researchers in the fields of Cultural Studies, Health and Society and South Asian Studies.

This book is a cultural exploration of health and wellness, with a focus on impacts of Covid-19 on the population of India. The chapters in this book present original research, systematic reviews, theoretical and conceptual frameworks, encompassing multidisciplinary, inter- and intra-disciplinary fields of study, in the context of how culture and disease sufficiently unpack and inform each other. The book includes contributions from the social sciences and the humanities and analyses issues that range from smallpox to the history of vaccine, indigenous healing practices, the Macbeth paradigm, Zizekian encounters, mental asylum, and marginalised genders. Using the theme of intellectual interconnectedness in the times of self-isolation and social distancing, the book is a collaboration of critical thinkers who identify and visibilize the hidden global issues related to ‘disease’ and ‘health’ that have divided the world into narrow binaries – individual/society, poor/rich, proletariat/bourgeoisie, margin/centre, colonised/coloniser, servitude/liberty, powerless/powerful. By doing so, the book emphasises the potential of holistic wellness to improve human life and humanity across the globe. A novel contribution on the cultural factors that played an important role in contemporary times of Covid-19, this book will be of interest to researchers in the fields of Cultural Studies, Health and Society and South Asian Studies.

Controlling reproduction – who has children, how many, and when – is important to states, communities, families, and individuals across the globe. However, the stakes are even higher than might at first be appreciated: control over reproduction is an incredibly powerful tool.Contests over reproduction necessarily involve control over women and their bodies. Yet because reproduction is so intertwined with other social processes and institutions, controlling it also extends far into most corners of social, economic, and political life. Nancy Riley and Nilanjana Chatterjee explore how various social institutions beyond the individual – including state, religion, market, and family – are involved in the negotiation of reproductive power. They draw on examples from across the world, such as direct fertility policies in China and Romania, the influence of the Catholic Church in Poland and Brazil, racial discrimination and resistance in Mexico and the US, and how Japan and Norway use laws intended to encourage gender equality to indirectly shape reproduction.This engaging book sheds new light on the operations of power and gender in society. It will appeal to students taking courses on reproduction in departments of sociology, anthropology, and gender studies.