In a collection of essays that builds on the legacy of earlier feminist collaborations, Ania Loomba, Ritty A. Lukose, and a host of scholars take up the challenge of charting out a new terrain of feminist politics and activism to reframe a new engagement with political action. This framing productively coheres the essays in this insightful collection, which range widely between theme and region. The collection recognizes the achievement of late twentieth-century feminist interventions that transformed colonial and postcolonial readings of the Indian past, but also moves beyond the tropes of empire, nation, and community into the critical political assemblages of contemporary South Asia in theory and praxis.
The book is divided thematically into six sections to highlight different modes of dialogue between feminists. The book begins with a piece by Flavia Agnes on the legal construction of Islamic female subjectivity, stressing the need for an intersectional reading of religion, caste, class, and community that reveals the mechanisms behind the push for a legal definition of “Islamic.” Amina Jamal picks up on these themes in an exploration of the false dichotomy of religious versus secular in Pakistani women's organizing, and argues instead for a religious agency that reflects the subjectivity of women and activists. Atreyee Sen contributes an essay on the historical construction of Marathi martial womanhood to mobilize slum women in Gujarat, and artfully articulates the difficulty of assigning to right-wing women a political validity vis-à-vis the mobilization of women.
The next two sections take up an engagement with the global in framing the work that women do in South Asian publics the world over. In the section on labor and globalization, Sonali Perera surveys the centrality of Sri Lankan garment workers to the construction of an NGO discourse of empowerment and juxtaposes this image against garment workers' self-narrativization of their own subjectivity. Annanya Bhattacharjee, in a piece grounded in the trajectory of her politicization as an advocate for workers, spells out the centrality of specific iterations of class, labor, and migration to the larger project of organizing globally. In the third section, on feminism, war, and peace, Vasuki Nesiah evaluates the impact of UN and other internationalist language around gender and war on the fashioning of Sri Lankan women's struggles, and the limits of this language in thoroughly addressing the broader concerns of women beyond conflict. Malathi de Alwis explores the ways in which the “political” has been constituted in Sri Lanka in conjunction with the practice of “maternalist” feminism, which has, at times, worked to obscure and abstract the pragmatics of militarism and extreme violence in favor of a “maternalist agonism” (p. 167) that privileges a unitary interpretation of war and loss. Finally, Angana Chatterji reflects upon the potential for feminist praxis within the act of documenting, witnessing, and “writing” the conflict in Kashmir, in collaboration with the people's tribunal in the region.
The next two sections take up questions of sex, sexuality, and labor. In an insightful turn, Lamia Karim evaluates interregional political tensions in the case of Taslima Nasrin, disavowed by Bangladeshi feminists who disagree with the critique of nationalism and class that percolates in her writing, and, conversely, lauded by Indian feminists, who are able to extract a critique of patriarchy from her work. Laura Brueck explores the way in which Dalit women's writing narrativizes the sexual violence they experience in a way that critiques patriarchy alongside caste. Anjali Arondekar, in an innovative turn, thinks through the logics and methods of the historiography of sexuality to posit the Devadasi beyond the frames allowed her as sexual figure, and instead considers the possibilities she offers for more broadly framing the political. Part 5 is comprised of three chapters on sex-worker organizing: Firdous Azim examines the way in which the language of rights shapes the construction of sex workers as women and citizens, and also evaluates the limits of these categories for addressing the broader subjectivity of sex worker identity. Toroujo Ghose also critiques the language of rights as the platform for organizing, routing her arguments through a reading of Partha Chatterjee's framing of civil and political society, and evaluates the ways in which marginal communities can strategize to breach the divide. Finally, in a compelling “queering” of the conversation, Ashwini Sukhtankar explores a sex-worker-driven push beyond the framing of “rights” and towards the organization of trade unions.
A concluding section reflects upon the state of feminist scholarship and practice. Ratna Kapur examines the autonomous branch of the women's movement, and pushes for an engagement with critical theory that might reinvigorate the movement after the frustrations posed by a feminist agenda overly rooted in grassroots and development-focused organizing. Mrinalini Sinha reflects upon decades of studies that take up gender in regional spaces, and wonders how they can be reconfigured into a new theoretical reading of gender that brings the global to bear upon it.
The strengths of this book lie in its balancing of dialogues across region and theme. Taken together, these essays speak volumes on the state of feminism across the region and beyond its borders, well documenting the state(s) of activism and problems facing feminism in neoliberal times. That said, some themes are underrepresented: a serious engagement with gender-concerned advocacy in queer and Hijra communities, or with the ways in which bodies are commodified and disciplined by neoliberal economic practices. Perhaps a rumination on where South Asian feminism cannot reach or does not fit might have added some depth to the overall framing of the text. In any case, this volume provides a ground from which to ask other questions, and will be of interest and value to anyone interested in these themes.
