Sonita Sarker

Jennifer Nesbit

The collection is divided into three parts to address the practices of Whiteness in modernist studies: Aesthetics, Intersectionality, and Inter/disciplinary Practice. We begin with aesthetics because modernism is the aesthetic produced in dynamic relation to the cultural formations of modernity: perceived rapid changes in labor, transportation, technology, and perceptions of body, mind, and even character. Essays in this section examine how the production of Whiteness is baked in as a positive value in assessing the value of cultural production. The second section focuses on the embodiment of Whiteness, primarily through the gendered and racialized female body, as a deflective practice that unmarks Whiteness while making it central to cultural crises around morality, national borders, and futurity. The third section considers the tacit prioritization of Whiteness as a positive value through institutional structures and pedagogical practice; these case studies ruminate on the generative potential of isolating and marking these effects. In each essay, scholars examine the stakes of marking Whiteness as a category of analysis distinct from, yet wholly imbricated with, racial categorization, given the potential for reification inherent in all strategies of marking.

Modernity's Self, Modernism's Other

Marking Whiteness

This book presents how Nation and Narrative are bound together through the figure of the "N/native" as it appears in the non-fictional writings of Cornelia Sorabji, Grazia Deledda, Zitkála-Sá, Virginia Woolf, Victoria Ocampo, and Gwendolyn Bennett. It addresses two questions: How did women writers in the early twentieth century tackle the entangled roots of political and cultural citizenship from which crises of belonging arise? How do their narrative negotiations of those crises inform modernist practice and modernity, then and now? The "N/native" moves between "born in" and "first in" in the context of the modern nation-state. In the dominant discourses of post-imperial as well as de-colonizing nations, "Native" is relegated to Time (static or fetishized through nostalgia and romance). History is envisioned as active and contoured, associated with motion and progress, which the "native" inhabits and for whom citizenship is a political as well as a temporal attribute. The six authors' identities as Native, settler, indigenous, immigrant, or native-citizen, are formed from their gendered, racialized, and classed locations in their respective nations. Each author negotiates the intertwined strands of Time and History by mobilizing the "N/native" to reclaim citizenship (cultural-political belonging). This study reveals how their lineage, connections to land, experiences in learning (education), and their labor generate their narratives. The juxtaposition of the six writers keeps in focus the asymmetries in their responses to their times, and illustrates how relevant women's/feminist production were, and are in today's versions of the same urgent debates about heightened nativisms and nationalisms

N/native

Women Writing Race, Nation, and History

Esha Niyogi De

Essays consider the relationship of gender, time, and space to globalization, describing conditions under which South and Southeast Asians can resist the attempted erasure of their spaces and histories.

Gender in the Globalization of South and Southeast Asia

Trans-status Subjects

A Thai foodseller on the streets of Bangkok, a cyclo driver in a Vietnamese village, a Pahari migrant laborer in the Himalayas, a Parsi-Christian professional social worker shuttling back and forth between London and Calcutta—Trans-Status Subjects examines how these and other South and Southeast Asians affect and are affected by globalization. While much work has focused on the changes wrought by globalization—describing how people maintain foundations or are permanently destabilized—this collection theorizes the complex ways individuals negotiate their identities and create alliances in the midst of both stability and instability, as what the editors call trans-status subjects. Using gender paradigms, historical time, and geographic space as driving analytic concerns, the essays gathered here consider the various ways South and Southeast Asians both perpetuate and resist various hierarchies despite unequal mobilities within economic, social, cultural, and political contexts. The contributors—including literary and film theorists, geographers, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists—show how the dominant colonial powers prefigured the ideologies of gender and sexuality that neocolonial nation-states have later refigured; investigate economic and artistic production; and explore labor, capital, and social change. The essays cover a range of locales—including Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, Borneo, Indonesia, and the United States. In investigating issues of power, mobility, memory, and solidarity in recent eras of globalization, the contributors—scholars and activists from South Asia, Southeast Asia, England, Australia, Canada, and the United States—illuminate various facets of the new concept of trans-status subjects. Trans-Status Subjects carves out a new area of inquiry at the intersection of feminisim and critical geography, as well as globalization, postcolonial, and cultural studies. Contributors. Anannya Bhattacharjee, Esha Niyogi De, Karen Gaul, Ketu Katrak, Karen Leonard, Philippa Levine, Kathryn McMahon, Andrew McRae, Susan Morgan, Nihal Perera, Sonita Sarker, Jael Silliman, Sylvia Tiwon, Gisele Yasmeen

Trans-Status Subjects

Illuminates the encounter of feminist activism with scholarship in political science, cultural studies, sociology, ethnic studies, and economics. This volume gives a genealogical account of various different kinds of feminisms. It offers various dimensions on the relationships across time and place among activisms and scholarships.

Sonita Sarker

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