Priti Ramamurthy – författare

Stories of migrants building precarious futures through ingenuity, desire, obligation, and resilienceIndia’s cities depend on millions of rural migrants whose labor sustains urban life. City Lives, Rural Ties brings their overlooked stories into focus through vivid portraits of migrants who have forged footholds in cities such as Delhi and Hyderabad while remaining strongly connected to rural homes.Neither the most privileged nor the most destitute, they occupy an often-ignored middle ground. Vinay Gidwani and Priti Ramamurthy call them “middle migrants”: people who balance unstable urban livelihoods with enduring obligations to family and community in the countryside. They navigate uncertain work, precarious housing, and shifting aspirations while sustaining complex networks of care and support that stretch between village and city.The stories illuminate dreams of dignity, education, and independence along with the daily improvisations required by the informal economy. Women’s strategies for maneuvering emerge as especially powerful threads. Combining ethnographic insight with compelling storytelling, City Lives, Rural Ties offers a deeply human portrait of lives lived between places, possibilities, and responsibilities.

Stories of migrants building precarious futures through ingenuity, desire, obligation, and resilienceIndia’s cities depend on millions of rural migrants whose labor sustains urban life. City Lives, Rural Ties brings their overlooked stories into focus through vivid portraits of migrants who have forged footholds in cities such as Delhi and Hyderabad while remaining strongly connected to rural homes.Neither the most privileged nor the most destitute, they occupy an often-ignored middle ground. Vinay Gidwani and Priti Ramamurthy call them “middle migrants”: people who balance unstable urban livelihoods with enduring obligations to family and community in the countryside. They navigate uncertain work, precarious housing, and shifting aspirations while sustaining complex networks of care and support that stretch between village and city.The stories illuminate dreams of dignity, education, and independence along with the daily improvisations required by the informal economy. Women’s strategies for maneuvering emerge as especially powerful threads. Combining ethnographic insight with compelling storytelling, City Lives, Rural Ties offers a deeply human portrait of lives lived between places, possibilities, and responsibilities.

During the 1920s and 1930s, in cities from Beijing to Bombay, Tokyo to Berlin, Johannesburg to New York, the Modern Girl made her sometimes flashy, always fashionable appearance in city streets and cafes, in films, advertisements, and illustrated magazines. Modern Girls wore sexy clothes and high heels; they applied lipstick and other cosmetics. Dressed in provocative attire and in hot pursuit of romantic love, Modern Girls appeared on the surface to disregard the prescribed roles of dutiful daughter, wife, and mother. Contemporaries debated whether the Modern Girl was looking for sexual, economic, or political emancipation, or whether she was little more than an image, a hollow product of the emerging global commodity culture. The contributors to this collection track the Modern Girl as she emerged as a global phenomenon in the interwar period. Scholars of history, women’s studies, literature, and cultural studies follow the Modern Girl around the world, analyzing her manifestations in Germany, Australia, China, Japan, France, India, the United States, Russia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. Along the way, they demonstrate how the economic structures and cultural flows that shaped a particular form of modern femininity crossed national and imperial boundaries. In so doing, they highlight the gendered dynamics of interwar processes of racial formation, showing how images and ideas of the Modern Girl were used to shore up or critique nationalist and imperial agendas. A mix of collaborative and individually authored chapters, the volume concludes with commentaries by Kathy Peiss, Miriam Silverberg, and Timothy Burke.Contributors: Davarian L. Baldwin, Tani E. Barlow, Timothy Burke, Liz Conor, Madeleine Yue Dong, Anne E. Gorsuch, Ruri Ito, Kathy Peiss, Uta G. Poiger, Priti Ramamurthy, Mary Louise Roberts, Barbara Sato, Miriam Silverberg, Lynn M. Thomas, Alys Eve Weinbaum