Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence And Representation In Postcolonial India Paperback

Deepti Misri

In Beyond Partition, Deepti Misri shows how 1947 marked the beginning of a history of politicized animosity associated with the differing ideas of "India" held by communities and in regions on one hand, and by the political-military Indian state on the other. Assembling literary, historiographic, performative, and visual representations of gendered violence against men and women, she establishes that cultural expressions do not just follow violence but determine its very contours, and interrogates the gendered scripts underwriting the violence originating in the contested visions of what "India" means. Ambitious and ranging across disciplines, Beyond Partition offers both an overview of and nuanced new perspectives on the ways caste, identity, and class complicate representations of violence, and how such representations shape our understandings of both violence and of India.

9780252080395

English

University of Illinois Press

30/Oct/14

224

Deepti Misri is an assistant professor of women and gender studies at University of Colorado Boulder.

An original and engaging piece of scholarship. It ranges widely and easily across materials in many genres and disciplines; it demonstrates a very fine eye for the telling textual detail; in a field vulnerable to sentimentality, it is clear-eyed and willing to pose uncomfortable questions; and it is written with verve and force. --Parama Roy, University of California, Davis "This brilliant and exciting book illuminates how representational practices of violence are co-constitutive of power and resistance."--Pacific Affairs