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Dear Colleagues,
I am pleased to announce the recent publication of my book:
Manuela Ciotti, Retro-modern India. Forging the Low-caste Self
(New Delhi, London: Routledge 2010), 312pp
ISBN 978-0-415-56311-6
Firmly situated within the analytics of the political economy of a
north Indian province, this book explores self-fashioning in pursuit
of the modern amongst low-caste Chamars. Challenging existing accounts
of national modernity in the non-West, the book argues that subaltern
classes shape their own ideas about modernity by taking and rejecting
from models of other classes within the same national context.
While displacing the West - in its colonial and non-colonial manifestations
- as the immanent comparative focus, the book puts forward a unique
framework for the analysis of subaltern modernity. This builds on the
entanglements between two main trajectories, both of which are viewed
as the outcome of the generative impetus of modernisation in India:
the first consists of the Chamar appropriation of socio-cultural
distinctions forged by 19th-century Indian middle classes in their
encounter with colonial modernity; the second features the Chamar
subversion of high-caste ideals and practices as a result of low-caste
politics initiated during the 20th century.
The author contends that these conflicting trends give rise to a
temporal antinomy within the Chamar politics of self-making, caught up
between compulsions of a past modern and of a contemporary one. The
eclectic outcome is termed as 'retro-modernity'. While the book
signals a politics of becoming whose dynamics had previously been
overlooked by scholars,it simultaneously opens up novel avenues for
the understanding of non-elite modern life-forms in postcolonial
settings.
Table of contents:
Orthography and Transliteration
Glossary of Selected Terms
Foreword
Acknowledgements
1. Chamar Modernity: Progressing into the Past
2. 'Today We Can Touch Anything': Reflections on the Crux of Identity
and Political Economy
3. Ethnohistories behind Local and Global Bazaars: Chronicle of a
Weaving Community and its Disappearance
4. 'We Used to Live like Animals': Education as a Self- and
Community-engineering Process
5. Nonrational Modernity? Religious Agency, Science and Spirits
6. Beyond the Vote: Politics as Sociality, Imagination and Identity
7. The Bourgeois Woman and the Half-naked One: Gendering Retro-modernity
8. The Politics of Indian Modernity
Bibliography
Index
For further information, see attached flyer and:
http://www.newasiabooks.org/publication/retro-modern-india-forging-low-caste-self
http://www.routledge.com/books/Retro-modern-India-isbn9780415563116
Manuela Ciotti
Centre for South Asian Studies
University of Edinburgh
Chrystal MacMillan Building
George Square
Edinburgh EH8 9LD
UK
--
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
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