Softcover

ISBN 10: 0813529123 ISBN 13: 9780813529127

Publisher: Rutgers University Press, 2001

The essays in this volume map the concerns of gender onto the terrain of nation, finding significant connections, disjunctions and tensions between them. The contributors argue that gender must take centre stage in any cultural analysis performed in the context of decolonized nation-space. They explore gender as a point of crisis in the cultural, social and political space of a nation. They attribute the existence of these crises to conflicts between gender, on the one hand, and the family, community and nation on the other. These are then analyzed in terms of female identity, subjectivity and agency within a narrative of historical modernity.

About the Author:

Rajeswari Sunder Rajan is the author of Real and imagined Women: Gender, Culture, and Postcolonialism as well as other books and articles on South Asian gender issues and feminist and postcolonial theory. She will be joining the English faculty at the University of Oxford in Fall 2001.

Review:

"...imaginative and rigorous scholarship...this book raises many and varied issues of great concern to scholars in gender and development studies, and activiats in the women's movement....It is bound to interest students of contemporary Indian society and politics." - The Statesman "A courageous and intellectually dazzling series of confrontations between Indian feminists and the specters of difference that haunt them. Required reading for anyone concerned with the stubborn complexities of postcolonial justice." - Bruce Robbins, English Department, Rutgers University"