Transnational Feminism and Global Advocacy in South Asia
Transnational feminism has been critical to feminist theorizing in the global North over the last few decades. Perhaps due to its broad terminology, transnational feminism can become vague and dislocated, losing its ability to name specific critiques of and responses to empire, race, and globalization that are emboldened by its transnational remit. This volume encompasses an expansive engagement and exploration of transnational South Asian feminist movements, networks, and critiques within the context of the popular and the diaspora in South Asia. The contributing authors address key issues in a global context, especially as they operate both in a situated and the diasporic imaginary of South Asia.
While the idea of the popular in South Asia has often been circumscribed by the spaces and cultural politics of Bollywood, this interdisciplinary volume takes an innovative turn to examine how academics, advocates, activists, and artists envision the inroads and consequences of nationalism, globalization and/or empire, which continually remake communities and alter needs and allegiances. Through ethnography, literature, dance, cinema, activism, poetry, and storytelling, the authors analyse popular and social justice using a focused, multidisciplinary gendered lens.
This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian Popular Culture.
Gita Rajan is Professor of English and a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Faith and Public Life at Fairfield University, USA. Her research interests include South Asian literature and visual culture, feminist ethics, and advocacy models for sustainable globalization.
Jigna Desai is Associate Professor in the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies and Asian American Studies Program at the University of Minnesota, USA. Her research interests include Asian American, postcolonial, queer, disability, and diasporic cultural studies.
First published 2013
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This book is a reproduction of South Asian Popular Culture, volume 8, issue 1. The Publisher requests to those authors who may be citing this book to state, also, the bibliographical details of the special issue on which the book was based.
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ISBN13: 978-0-415-50385-3
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The publisher would like to make readers aware that the chapters in this book may be referred to as articles as they are identical to the articles published in the special issue. The publisher accepts responsibility for any inconsistencies that may have arisen in the course of preparing this volume for print.
Contents
Gita Rajan and Jigna Desai
Ananya Chatterjea
Richa Nagar and Richa Singh
Sunaina Maira
Kumarini Silva
Shreen Saroor
Rani Neutill
R. Diyah Larasati
Piya Chatterjee
Ananya Chatterjea is a dancer, choreographer, dance scholar, and dance educator, who envisions her work in the field of dance as a call to action with a particular focus on women artists of color. She is the Artistic Director of Ananya Dance Theatre, a company of women artists of color committed to the intersection of artistic excellence and social justice (www.ananyadancetheatre.org). She is also Director of Dance and Professor in the Department of Theater Arts and Dance at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA. Her most recent choreographic project, Ashesh Barsha, unending monsoon, the culmination of a trilogy on environmental justice, premiered in Minneapolis' Southern Theater, in September 2009. Her book, Butting out! Reading cultural politics in the work of Chandralekha and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2004.
Piya Chatterjee is Dorothy Cruickshank Backstrand Chair at the Department of Women and Gender Studies, Scripps College, Claremont, CA, USA. She is author of A Time for Tea: Women Labor and Post/Colonial Politics on an Indian Plantation (Duke, 2001) and co-editor (with Manali Desai and Parama Roy) of States of Trauma: Gender and Violence in South Asia (Zubaan, 2010). She is also the editor of a series at the University of Illinois Press, Dissident Feminisms. She lives bi-nationally and is involved in antiviolence organizing with rural plantation and village women in eastern India.
Jigna Desai is an associate professor in the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies and the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests include feminist science and disability, Asian American, postcolonial, queer, and diasporic cultural studies. Her book Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film is the first book on media and the South Asian diaspora. It analyzes the complex gender and racial politics of diasporas in the current moment of globalization (Routledge 2004). She is the co-editor of a collection entitled Bollywood: A Reader for Open University /McGraw Hill Press (2009) and for Asian Americans Down South: Race and Migration in Dixie forthcoming with the Univ. of Illinois Press. She has published widely on issues of race, media, gender, and sexuality in numerous international anthologies and journals such as Social Text, Journal of Asian American Studies, and Meridiens. Her current research is on neurodiversity, autism, and the globalization of disability.
R. Diyah Larasati is Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts & Dance at the University of Minnesota, USA. She explores in her advocacy/activist project, Choreographing History, the archiving of female dancing bodies in colonial reports and how moral codes stigmatize racialized, colonized bodies. She collaborates with Indonesian choreographer Setyastuti, and is supported by grants, including the Consortium Study of the Asias (2009), Office of International Programs (2008), the McKnight Travel Grant (2007), and Center for History and Political Ethic/PUSDEP Sanatadharma Indonesia, to create performances based on the oral history of Indonesian female dancers who are the survivors of the horrible genocide.
Sunaina Maira is Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Davis, USA. She is the author of Desis in the House: Indian American Youth Culturein New York City and co-editor of Youthscapes: The Popular, the National, the Global and Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map North America, which won the American Book Award in 1997. Her most recent book,
