In this article, Inderpal Grewal and Rohit De discuss the history of the application of India’s law against sedition in relation to questions of sexuality and gender. The conversation between them ...frames the project of modernity and the state in each of these two scholars’ work, and the ways in which questions of modernity intersect those of “national” and “anti-national” subjectivation. Here, they are interested in how modernity has been formulated in relation to nations, nationalism and commensurate reform movements, and how critiquing these relationships is so deeply informed by feminist scholarship on South Asia, by feminist scholarship on race and ethnicity in the US, and the critique of empire in all of these bodies of work.
Outsourcing Patriarchy Grewal, Inderpal
International feminist journal of politics,
20/3/1/, Letnik:
15, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
While much has been written on the violence of honour killings and the women who are their victims, little has been written on the production of the concept of 'honour killing', or the ways that ...concept produces meanings, cultures and identities. This article takes on that question, looking at when, where and how violence against women gets named as a specific crime called 'honour killing', in which honour comes to be a stable and unchanging term, particularly as the term comes to have hegemonic meanings which submerge other possibilities, struggles and violence. In this article, I argue that the concept of patriarchy has been outsourced from the USA and Europe to do its messy work elsewhere. I do so by examining the circulations of 'honour killings' as a concept in the media coverage in India and in the 'West'. This article finds this method particularly useful in analysing the concept of 'honour killings', particularly in terms of feminist struggles to give violence a voice and bring it to the public. The article concludes that attention to the production of the idea of 'honour killing' along these racialized lines is all the more important given the fact that the identification of violence as 'honour killing' may even foreclose an analytic that might be more historicized, multifaceted or conflictual.
Theories of authoritarianism and populism are insufficient if they do not take into account the power of gender and sexuality, in relation to other social divisions, within authoritarian power and ...the erotics that produce populism. Patriarchal power is a more comprehensive approach, showing how the new authoritarians rely on gendered security and securitization to produce the new post-secular and the post-postcolonial nationalisms of today. While populisms are divergent in empire and postcolony, for instance in the US and India, generated by grievances and disappointments of a waning empire on the one hand, and a failed modernization on the other, their authoritarian leaders are linked not just in modes of power and governance but also through sharing technologies of surveillance, security and accumulation.
The Fury Archives considers human rights internationalism as an opening rather than a horizon of claims for early twentieth-century radical movements. Jill Richards’s emphasis on the affective power ...of struggles rather than their outcomes reveals both the limitations of human rights and also the resonance of the human for resistance to fascism, patriarchy, racism and imperialism. While our contemporary moment confirms human rights as a failed project, it also reveals the recuperation of this internationalism as an instrument for humanitarianism as governance that reinscribes European and Western racial and imperial hegemony even as the human seems itself inadequate for planetary politics.
In Transnational America, Inderpal Grewal examines how the circulation of people, goods, social movements, and rights discourses during the 1990s created transnational subjects shaped by a global ...American culture. Rather than simply frame the United States as an imperialist nation-state that imposes unilateral political power in the world, Grewal analyzes how the concept of “America” functions as a nationalist discourse beyond the boundaries of the United States by disseminating an ideal of democratic citizenship through consumer practices. She develops her argument by focusing on South Asians in India and the United States.Grewal combines a postcolonial perspective with social and cultural theory to argue that contemporary notions of gender, race, class, and nationality are linked to earlier histories of colonization. Through an analysis of Mattel’s sales of Barbie dolls in India, she discusses the consumption of American products by middle-class Indian women newly empowered with financial means created by India’s market liberalization. Considering the fate of asylum-seekers, Grewal looks at how a global feminism in which female refugees are figured as human rights victims emerged from a distinctly Western perspective. She reveals in the work of three novelists who emigrated from India to the United States—Bharati Mukherjee, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and Amitav Ghosh—a concept of Americanness linked to cosmopolitanism. In Transnational America Grewal makes a powerful, nuanced case that the United States must be understood—and studied—as a dynamic entity produced and transformed both within and far beyond its territorial boundaries.
This article reviews key theoretical and methodological contributions that anthropologists have made to the study of what we call security regimes. While anthropologists have been instrumental in ...denaturalizing discourses of security, much of the existing literature on who security actors are or where their work and force are to be found remains focused on the masculinist frontlines and visibly spectacular instances of security state power. We adopt a transnational feminist lens to rethink what we understand security regimes to be and where they are to be found by drawing attention to the multiscalar sites (e.g., home, family, kinship, intimacy) and technologies of rule (e.g., affect, aesthetics, discourse) through which security regimes are constituted, expanded, and challenged. The final section of the review examines methodological and ethical challenges, which are made more complex by the changing profile of the multiply racialized, gendered, nationalized, and classed researchers of security regimes.
This article examines the memoirs of Indian Civil Service officers as they continued to work in what became the Indian Administrative Service after independence. Rather than being understood solely ...as historical archives, these texts constitute a genre that can be called the ‘bureaucratic memoir’ which reveals masculinities that are both colonial and post-colonial. These memoirs, and their publication decades after independence reveal attempts by elites to preserve the power of the bureaucracy into subsequent decades. The texts hope to disavow but instead also reveal the patriarchal intimacies of these elites, even as these were challenged by charges of corruption and failure which emerged almost from the first moments of independence.
In this paper, we examine the afterlives of insurgent and counterinsurgent violence in Punjab and the US. We explore how the period of the 1980s and 1990s came to have effects that linger into the ...present, and how violence is remembered by ordinary people, especially non-elite women. We argue that memories unfold in relation to the slow and structural violence that has manifested through years of Punjabis living with the after-effects of insurgency and counterinsurgency. Our research on remembering and forgetting shows that the period of violence of the 1980s and 1990s remains alive and formative in contemporary forms of community, gender, and identity across Punjab and its diasporas.
In Transnational America, Inderpal Grewal examines how the circulation of people, goods, social movements, and rights discourses during the 1990s created transnational subjects shaped by a global ...American culture. Rather than simply frame the United States as an imperialist nation-state that imposes unilateral political power in the world, Grewal analyzes how the concept of "America" functions as a nationalist discourse beyond the boundaries of the United States by disseminating an ideal of democratic citizenship through consumer practices. She develops her argument by focusing on South Asians in India and the United States. Grewal combines a postcolonial perspective with social and cultural theory to argue that contemporary notions of gender, race, class, and nationality are linked to earlier histories of colonization. Through an analysis of Mattel's sales of Barbie dolls in India, she discusses the consumption of American products by middle-class Indian women newly empowered with financial means created by India's market liberalization. Considering the fate of asylum- seekers, Grewal looks at how a global feminism in which female refugees are figured as human rights victims emerged from a distinctly Western perspective. She reveals in the work of three novelists who emigrated from India to the United States—Bharati Mukherjee, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and Amitav Ghosh—a concept of Americanness linked to cosmopolitanism. In Transnational America Grewal makes a powerful, nuanced case that the United States must be understood—and studied—as a dynamic entity produced and transformed both within and far beyond its territorial boundaries.
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