1st Edition
The Politics of Belonging in Contemporary India Anxiety and Intimacy
This volume looks at the emerging forms of intimacies in contemporary India. Drawing on rigorous academic research and pop culture phenomena, the volume:
- Brings together themes of nationhood, motherhood, disability, masculinity, ethnicity, kinship, and sexuality, and attempts to understand them within a more complex web of issues related to space, social justice, marginality, and communication;
- Focuses on the struggles for intimacy by the disabled, queer, Dalit, and other subalterns, as well as people with non-human intimacies, to propose an alternative theory of the politics of belonging;
- Explores the role of social and new media in understanding and negotiating intimacies and anxieties.
Comprehensive and thought-provoking, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of political studies, sociology, sexuality and gender studies, women’s studies, cultural studies, and minority studies.
List of contributors. Preface.
Introduction: the politics of belonging: anxiety and intimacy. Kaustav Chakraborty
Part I: Intimacy, marginality, and anxiety
1. Identification, belonging, and the category of Dalit. K. Satyanarayana 2. Emotions in the context of caste slavery: exploring the missionary writings on Kerala. P. Sanal Mohan 3. Nature and belonging: distance, development, and intimacy. R. Umamaheshwari
Part II: Rethinking intimacy, contemporarity vis-à-vis the conventional institutions
4. Intimacy in Tamil kinship. Isabelle Clark-Decès 5. Reading queerness: same-sex marriages in India. Sayan Bhattacharya 6. Homes as conversions: literalising the metaphor of Ghar Wapsi. Arunima Paul
Part III: Dissident body and belonging
7. Anti-caste communitas and outcaste experience: space, body, displacement, and writing. Dickens Leonard 8. Disability and intimacy in the making of Madurai Veeran. Shilpaa Anand
Part IV: Space, vigilance, and getting intimate
9. The modern-day sex worker: the intimate ‘Other’ of intimacy and belonging. Chandni Mehta 10. Public spaces and private intimacies: the ‘Politics of Belonging’ in parks. Pranta Pratik Patnaik 11. Queer intimacies in the time of new media: when Grindr produces alternative cartographies. Silpa Mukherjee
Part V: Textual belongings
12. Intimacy, belonging, and masculinity in Bhalachandra Nemade’s novel Kosla (Cocoon). Mangesh Kulkarni 13. Hesitant intimacy: North East Indian English poetry vis-à-vis the Indian nationhood. Sarat Kumar Doley
Part VI: Techno intimacies
14. Maternal intimacies online: how Indian mom bloggers reconfigure self, body, family, and community. Sucharita Sarkar 15. Routing techno intimacy, risk, anxiety, and the ambient political. Geeta Patel
Index
Biography
Kaustav Chakraborty is Assistant Professor at the Department of English, Southfield (formerly Loreto) College, Darjeeling, India. He was formerly a fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, India. Dr Chakraborty has edited Indian Drama in English, Tagore and Nationalism (co-edited with K.L. Tuteja), and is the author of Indigeneity, Tales and Alternatives: Revisiting Select Tribal Folktales. In addition, he has published articles in journals such as Feminist Theology, Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, and many other reputed journals. His research interests include indigenous literature and culture, queer theory, and cultural studies.