Inderpal Grewal

Moving across academic disciplines, geographical boundaries, and literary genres, Home and Harem examines how travel shaped ideas about culture and nation in nineteenth-century imperialist England and colonial India. Inderpal Grewal’s study of the narratives and discourses of travel reveals the ways in which the colonial encounter created linked yet distinct constructs of nation and gender and explores the impact of this encounter on both English and Indian men and women. Reworking colonial discourse studies to include both sides of the colonial divide, this work is also the first to discuss Indian women traveling West as well as English women touring the East. In her look at England, Grewal draws on nineteenth-century aesthetics, landscape art, and debates about women’s suffrage and working-class education to show how all social classes, not only the privileged, were educated and influenced by imperialist travel narratives. By examining diverse forms of Indian travel to the West and its colonies and focusing on forms of modernity offered by colonial notions of travel, she explores how Indian men and women adopted and appropriated aspects of European travel discourse, particularly the set of oppositions between self and other, East and West, home and abroad. Rather than being simply comparative, Home and Harem is a transnational cultural study of the interaction of ideas between two cultures. Addressing theoretical and methodological developments across a wide range of fields, this highly interdisciplinary work will interest scholars in the fields of postcolonial and cultural studies, feminist studies, English literature, South Asian studies, and comparative literature.

Nation, Gender, Empire and the Cultures of Travel

Home and Harem

Caren Kaplan

This anthology for first and second year students introduces them to the history of key ideas in the modern period related to sexual difference, gender, race, class, and sexuality. While most introductory Women's Studies textbooks focus on the United States, even if they add multiculturalism to the discussion, this book looks at the history of important differences between women in diverse locations around the world and continually challenges students to think through the issues that are raised. This transnational approach to understanding gender brings Women's Studies into an era of globalization and connects women’s issues in the United States to women’s issues elsewhere. The book shows how colonialism and imperialism, as they spread across the world, shaped ideas about gender as much as other modern phenomena. It addresses issues of power and inequalities and focuses on links and connections rather than commonalties. The readings are truly interdisciplinary, drawing upon scholarly work in many disciplines and interdisciplinary fields as well as non-scholarly sources.

Gender in a Transnational World

An Introduction to Women's Studies

New readings offer insights into the opportunities and limitations offered by cyberspace, ideas of domesticity and the public/private split within politics and culture. Other topics include women's health, disability, citizenship and nationalism.

An Introduction to Women's Studies: Gender in a Transnational World

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.

Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms

Transnational America

Extrait de la couverture : " 'Those of us who take intellectual production as a site for politics badly need the kind of profound and sophisticated thinking that went into this collection... The pleasures of this text are rare multiple : it reminds us that critique can be an act of creation and alliance ; it opens up needful conversations ; it establishes the difference between understanding what it means to refer to the global without mistaking it for all that there is.' - Wahneema Lubiano, Princeton University."

Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices

Scattered Hegemonies

Cathy N. Davidson

Jessamyn Hatcher

DIVArgues against the use of male/female gender categories to characterize public and domestic life./div

Inderpal Grewal

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