This book represents a significant contribution to academic knowledge, making a compelling case for a contemporary analytical re-reading of a number of “core” postcolonial women’s narratives, such as Erna Brodber’s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood, and Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter. These narratives highlight diversity, contextuality, opposition, and metachrony, have a “generative literary function”, and anticipate what have now become postcolonial feminist issues and debates. Bringing together feminist writing from a range of postcolonial contexts, the book contributes to a field represented by the critical writings of Francoise Lionnet, Ketu Katrak, and Elleke Boehmer, among others. The deconstructive, cultural approach of the book is mobilised to support an in-depth literary analysis which focuses on female oppression, difference, voice, and agency. Questions of what it means to be “a woman” and to be “postcolonial” are read as central debates which emphasise “multi-vocal and multi-focal” female narratives and perspectives. That is, they highlight the temporal, as well as cross-cultural links and implications of the selected narratives, which give the project a kind of positive complexity and linkage. Above all, the analysis of several unconventional modes and (physical/imaginative) spaces of female resistance, such as prison, widow confinement, and madness, yields some surprising results that are sustained by a close reading of the texts which are not only attentive to questions of genre, structure, imagery and narrative endings, but also oppositional, instructive and reconstructive.

Mahasweta Devi occupies a singular position in the history of modern Indian literature and world literature. This book engages with Devi’s works as a writer-activist who critically explored subaltern subjectivities, the limits of history and the harsh social realities of post-independence India. The volume showcases Devi’s oeuvre and versatility through samples of her writing – in translation from the original Bengali—including Jhansir Rani, Hajar Churashir Ma, and Bayen among others. It also looks at the use of language, symbolism, mythic elements and heteroglossia in Devi’s exploration of heterogeneous themes such as exploitation, violence, women’s subjectivities, depredation of the environment and failures of the nation state. The book analyses translations and adaptations of her work, debates surrounding her activism and politics and critical reception to give readers an overview of the writer’s life, influences, achievements and legacy. It highlights the multiple concerns in her writings and argues that the aesthetic aspects of Mahasweta Devi’s work form an essential part of her politics. Part of the ‘Writer in Context’ series, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of Indian literature, Bengali literature, English literature, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, global south studies and translation studies.

Late Modern Palestine looks at the ways in which the relationship between the subject and representation and the political problematic of postcolonial late modernity is articulated in the context of the Palestinians’ struggle for liberation. Junko-Aikio provides a rich, theoretically and empirically, and in part also visually grounded study of the complex ways in which ordinary Palestinians face, negotiate and resist multiple regimes of power and desire in the context of everyday life in the West Bank and Gaza. The volume examines the early years of the second Palestinian uprising, an intifada, whose political status remains highly disputed. The book examines the ways in which Palestinian politics during the second intifada has been entangled with the broader social and political changes that are associated with postcolonial late modernity. It is argued that the dislocation between modern colonial and late modern/postcolonial regimes of power and subjectivity greatly complicates the map of power and resistance in contemporary Palestine, and also renders articulation of national unity and hegemonic political strategy increasingly unlikely. This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of Middle East Studies, Postcolonial Studies, International Relations, Political Sociology, Critical Security Studies, and Political Theory.

Music in Conflict studies the complex relationship of musical culture to political life in Palestine-Israel, where conflict has both shaped and claimed the lives of Palestinians and Jews. In the context of the geography of violence that characterizes the conflict, borders and boundaries are material and social manifestations of the ways in which the production of knowledge is conditioned by political and structural violence. Ethical and aesthetic positions that shape artistic production in this context are informed by profound imbalances of power and contingent exposure to violence. Viewing expressive culture as a potent site for understanding these dynamics, the book examines the politics of sound to show how music-making reflects and forms identities, and in the process, shapes communities. The ethnography is based on fieldwork conducted in Israel and the West Bank in 2011–2012 and other excursions since then. Author has "followed the conflict" by "following the music," from concert halls to demonstrations, mixed-city community centers to Palestinian refugee camp children’s clubs, alternative urban scenes and even a checkpoint. In all the different contexts presented, the monograph is thematically and theoretically underpinned by the ways in which music is used to culturally assert or reterritorialize both spatial and social boundaries in a situation of conflict.

'Space Gender Knowledge' is an innovative and comprehensive introduction to the geographies of gender and the gendered nature of spatial relations. It examines the major issues raised by women's movements and academic feminism, and outlines the main shifts in feminist geographical work, from the geography of women to the impact of post-structuralism. In making their selection, the editors have drawn on a wide range of interdisciplinary material, ranging across spatial scales from the body to the globe. The book presents influential arguments for the importance of the intersection between space and gender. Looking both at geography and beyond the discipline, it explores the gendered construction of space and the spatial construction of gender. Divided into a number of conceptual sections, each prefaced by an editorial introduction, this reader includes extracts from both landmark texts and less well-known works, making it an indispensable introduction to this dynamic field of study.

Representation and Resistance: South Asian and African Women's Texts at Home and in the Diaspora compares colonial and national constructions of gender identity in Western-educated African and South Asian women's texts. Jaspal Kaur Singh argues that, while some writers conceptualize women's equality in terms of educational and professional opportunity, sexual liberation, and individualism, others recognize the limitations of a paradigm of liberation that focuses only on individual freedom. Certain diasporic artists and writers assert that transformation of gender identity construction occurs, but only in transnational cultural spaces of the first world-spaces which have emerged in an era of rampant globalization and market liberalism. In particular, Singh advocates the inclusion of texts from women of different classes, religions, and castes, both in the Global North and in the South.

This crucial new work draws on empirical findings from rural North India in relation to madness and subjectivity, revealing the different structures of subjectivity underlying the narratives of schizophrenia, spirits, ghosts, and deities. Unravelling the loose ends of madness, the author explores the cultural differences in understanding and experiencing madness to examine how modern insanity is treated as a clinical disorder, but historically it represents how we form knowledge and understand self-knowledge. The author begins by theoretically investigating how the schizophrenic personifies the fractures in modern Western thought to explain why, despite decades of intense contention, the category of schizophrenia is still alive. She then examines the narratives of people in the Himalayan Mountains of rural India to reveal the discursive conditions that animate their stories around what psychology calls psychosis, critiquing the monoculturalism in trauma theory and challenging the ongoing march of the Global Mental Health Movement in the Global South. Examining what a study of madness reveals about two different cultures, and their ways of thinking and being, this is fascinating reading for students interested in mental health, critical psychology, and Indian culture.

With the pressures of globalization, internationalization of production, migration, and the transmission of information, former concepts of identity and cultural configuration are increasingly challenged. In Explorations on Subjectivity, Borders, and Demarcation, editors and contributors Raúl A. Galoppe and Richard Weiner examine the shift in subjectivity, borders, and demarcation within Iberian and Latin American studies. This comprehensive volume examines these issues in terms of race, economy, gender, and marginality. By using an interdisciplinary approach that draws from literature, literary theory, and history this collection offers a timely discourse for the entire academic community. In contrast to similar studies this collection goes beyond the geographic aspects of borders and demarcation. These articles not only examine Latin American places and people; but, also the Latin American identity in Europe and the Mediterranean, and the experiences of other groups such as Asian Latin Americans and Indians. This collection of nine articles from both established scholars and new academic voices serves as a well-knit mosaic of perspectives that reflect the intermingling state of subjectivity, borders, and demarcation; and in turn, postmodern academia.

No word is more central to the contemporary political imagination and action than 'resistance'. In its various manifestations - from the armed guerrilla to Gandhian mass pacifist protest, from Wikileaks and the Arab Spring to the global eruption and violent repression of the Occupy movement - concepts of resistance are becoming ubiquitous and urgent. In this book, Howard Caygill conducts the first ever systematic analysis of 'resistance': as a means of defying political oppression, in its relationship with military violence and its cultural representation. Beginning with the militaristic doctrine of Clausewitz and the evolution of a new model of guerrilla warfare to resist the forces of Napoleonic France, On Resistance elucidates and critiques the contributions of seminal resistant thinkers from Marx and Nietzsche to Mao, Gandhi, Sartre and Fanon to identify continuities of resistance and rebellion from the Paris Commune to the Greenham Women's Peace Camp. Employing a threefold line of inquiry, Caygill exposes the persistent discourses through which resistance has been framed in terms of force, violence, consciousness and subjectivity to evolve a critique of resistance. Tracing the features of resistance, its strategies, character and habitual forms throughout modern world history Caygill identifies the typological consistencies which make up resistance. Finally, by teasing out the conceptual nuances of resistance and its affinities to concepts of repression, reform and revolution, Caygill reflects upon contemporary manifestations of resistance to identify whether the 21st century is evolving new understandings of protest and struggle.

The Postcolonial Body in Queer Space and Time examines the ways in which the notion of the postcolonial correlates to Judith Halberstam’s idea of queer space and time, the non-normative path of Western lifestyles and hegemonies. Emphasizing authors from Africa and Southeast Asia in the diaspora in London from the mid-1960s through 1990, the reading of both postcolonial lands and subjects as “queer counterproductive” space reveals a depiction of bodies in these texts as located in and performing queer space and time, redefining and relocating the understanding of the postcolonial. The first wave of postcolonial literature produced by diasporics presents the body as the site where the non-normative is performed, revealing the beginnings of a corporeal resistance to the re-colonization of the diasporic individual residing in England from the Wilson through the Thatcher regimes. This study emphasizes the ways in which early postcolonial literature embodies and encounters the topics of race, gender and sexuality, proving that a rejection of subjectifying processes through the representation of the body has always been present in diasporic postcolonial literature. Reading through postcolonial theory as well as the works of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Hardt and Negri, Homi Bhabha, and Giorgio Agamben, as well as Halberstam and queer theory, The Postcolonial Body in Queer Space and Time discusses the poetry and journals of Arthur Nortje, Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia and his film Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, and Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, tracing a geographic arc from homeland to London to the return to the homeland, traveling through the queer space and time of the postcolonial.