Mapping South Asian Masculinities
This book offers the first substantial critical examination of men and masculinities in relation to political crises in South Asian literatures and cultures. It employs political crisis as a frame to analyze how South Asian men and masculinities have been shaped by critical historical events, events which have redrawn maps and remapped or unmapped bodies with different effects. These include colonialism, anti-colonialism, state formations, civil wars, religious conflicts, and migration. Political crisis functions as a framing device to offer nuances and clarifications to the assumed visibility of male bodies and male activities during political crisis.
The focus on masculinities in historical moments of crisis divests masculinity of its naturalization and calls for a heterogeneous conceptualization of the everyday practices and experiences of being a man. Written by scholars from a variety of theoretical perspectives and disciplinary approaches, and drawing on a range of written and visual texts, this book contributes to this recent rethinking of South Asian literary and cultural history by engaging masculinity as a historicized category of analysis that accommodates an understanding of history as differentiated encounters among bodies, cultures, and nations.
This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.
Chandrima Chakraborty is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. She has published extensively on Indian nationalism and the South Asian Diaspora. Publications include, Masculinity, Asceticism, Hinduism: Past and Present Imaginings of India (2011), a Feature Section in Topia on the 1985 Air India bombings, and a coedited collection, The Art of Public Mourning: Remembering Air India (forthcoming).
Mapping South Asian Masculinities
Men and political crises
Edited by
Chandrima Chakraborty
First published 2015
by Routledge
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South Asian History and Culture
David WashbrookUniversity of Cambridge, UK
Boria MajumdarUniversity of Central Lancashire, UK
Sharmistha GooptuSouth Asia Research Foundation, India
Nalin MehtaLa Trobe University, Melbourne
This series offers a forum that will provide an integrated perspective on the field at large. It brings together research on South Asia in the humanities and social sciences, and provides scholars with a platform covering, but not restricted to, their particular fields of interest and specialization. Such an approach is critical to any expanding field of study, for the development of more informed and broader perspectives, and of more overarching theoretical conceptions.
The series achieves a multidisciplinary forum for the study of South Asia under the aegis of established disciplines (e.g. history, politics, gender studies) combined with more recent fields (e.g. sport studies, sexuality studies). A focus is also to make available to a broader readership new research on film, media, photography, medicine and the environment, which have to date remained more specialized fields within South Asian studies.
A significant concern for the series is to focus across the whole of the region known as South Asia, and not simply on India, as most South Asia forums inevitably tend to do. We are most conscious of this gap in South Asian studies and work to bring into focus more scholarship on and from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and other parts of South Asia.
Health, Culture and Religion in South Asia
Critical Perspectives
Edited by Assa Doron and Alex Broom
Minority Nationalisms in South Asia
Edited by Tanweer Fazal
Gujarat Beyond Gandhi
Identity, Society and Conflict
Edited by Nalin Mehta and Mona Mehta
South Asian Transnationalisms
Cultural Exchange in the Twentieth Century
Edited by Babli Sinha
Religious Cultures in Early Modern India
New Perspectives
Edited by Rosalind OHanlon and David Washbrook
Gender and Masculinities
Histories, Texts and Practices in India and Sri Lanka
Edited by Assa Doron and Alex Broom
Television At Large in South Asia
Edited by Aswin Punathambekar and Shanti Kumar
Mapping South Asian Masculinities
Men and Political Crises
Edited by Chandrima Chakraborty
Culture and Power in South Asian Islam
Defying the Perpetual Exception
Edited by Neilesh Bose
Contents
Chandrima Chakraborty
Sailaja Krishnamurti
Jani de Silva
Bina DCosta
Rahul K. Gairola
Shazia Sadaf
Arafaat A. Valiani
Jana Fedtke
Umme Al-wazedi
Kasim Husain
The chapters in this book were originally published in South Asian History and Culture, volume 5, issue 4 (October 2014). When citing this material, please use the original page numbering for each article, as follows:
Introduction
Mapping South Asian masculinities: men and political crises
Chandrima Chakraborty
South Asian History and Culture, volume 5, issue 4 (October 2014) pp. 411420
Chapter 1
Uncles of the nation: avuncular masculinity in partition-era politics
Sailaja Krishnamurti
South Asian History and Culture, volume 5, issue 4 (October 2014) pp. 421437
Chapter 2
Valour, violence and the ethics of struggle: constructing militant masculinities in Sri Lanka
Jani de Silva
South Asian History and Culture
