Suchergebnisse

In today's world of unequal globalization, Bangladesh has drawn international attention for the spate of factory disasters that have taken the lives of numerous garment workers, mostly young women. The contemporary garment industry - and the labor organizing pushing back - draws on a long history of gendered labor division and exploitation in East Bengal, the historical antecedent of Bangladesh. Yet despite the centrality of women's labor to anticolonial protest and postcolonial state-building, historiography has struggled with what appears to be its absence from the archive. Poulomi Saha offers an innovative account of women's political labor in East Bengal over more than a century, one that suggests new ways to think about textiles and the gendered labors of their making. An Empire of Touch argues that women have articulated--in writing, in political action, in stitching--their own desires in their own terms. They produce narratives beyond women's empowerment and independence as global and national projects; they refuse critical pronouncements of their own subjugation. Saha follows the historical traces of how women have claimed their own labor, contending that their political commitments are captured in the material objects of their manufacture. Her analysis of the production of historical memory through and by the bodies of women spans British colonialism and American empire, anticolonial nationalism to neoliberal globalization, depicting East Bengal between development economics and postcolonial studies. Through a material account of text and textile, An Empire of Touch crafts a new narrative of gendered political labor under empire

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part I. Reading the Body Politic -- 1. Virgin Suicides -- Part II. The Fetish of Nationalism -- 2. The Fetish Touch -- 3. Oceanic Feelings -- Part III. International Basket Case -- 4. Archive Asylum -- 5. Machine Made -- Epilogue -- Glossary -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Abstract
This essay takes up conspiracy as a discursive, political, and philosophical concept. By tracing the ideological and textual kinship between anticolonialism in India and Ireland and radicalism in the United States, it illuminates transcolonial circuits of a curiously shared revolutionary project. Rather than simply offer a historical account of those interconnections, it theorizes a practice of reading revolutionary violence as perpetual, repetitive haunting, a politics of the undead. It argues for a historiographical live burial by which violences of the past reappear to disrupt the imperial promise of futurity and continuity. From the 1916 "Hindu-German Conspiracy Trial" in San Francisco, during which members of the Ghadr Party—consisting of diasporic Indian students at the University of California, Berkeley, and Punjabi farmers in the Central Valley—were accused of conspiring with German diplomats to arm anticolonial revolt in British India, this essay tracks forms of radical sympathy that emerge, flourish, and stutter in an era of ethnonationalist constriction.

The years between 1930 and 1933 saw a dramatic rise in anticolonial violence in Bengal. Young women who participated in this violence, caught between competing masculinist discourses of colonial authorities and nationalist communities that deemed them either dupes or martyrs, recognized an incongruity between their revolutionary insurgency and the conditions of possibility for its memorialization. This essay follows Pritilata Waddedar, the first woman to die in the commission of an anticolonial terrorist attack, as she is incarnated into legal, historical, and cultural evidence by colonial authorities and nationalists alike. It responds to Gayatri Spivak's canonical question of whether the subaltern woman's voice can be excavated from the historical archive by suggesting that Waddedar augurs and undermines the future narratives of her death and allegorically calls herself sati as a political strategy of refusal and illegibility. Waddedar's iteration of sati relies on its peculiar status in nineteenth-century colonial law, where it was classified as "voluntary culpable homicide by consent." This legislation inaugurated a new juridical index of female desire that shaped the political conditions of possibility for revolutionary women decades later. Waddedar prophesies the ways in which her death, like that of the immolated widow, will come to be the object of disputed meaning making and insistently jams the gears of systems of evidence that promise an epistemological clarity of the terms by which a woman lives or dies.