Description
Book SynopsisPoulomi Saha offers an innovative account of women's political labor in East Bengal over more than a century. Through a material account of text and textile, An Empire of Touch crafts a new narrative of gendered political labor under empire.
Trade ReviewA brilliant provocation in the debate about female political subjectivity in the Global South
, An Empire of Touch is an important and timely book. Going beyond the typical focus on women’s empowerment and independence, it demonstrates how women in East Bengal through their symbolic and material labor produce the terms of their own political self-conception. Saha’s deft and sophisticated readings of the material particulars of women’s labor reveal a relational politics of the self that expands what and who count as political. -- Mrinalini Sinha, author of
Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an EmpireSaha has given us a thought-provoking, incisive, elegant, and necessary work wherein she recasts and regenerates postcolonial criticism. This book is well written, beautifully researched, creative, and politically vital. -- Erin Manning, author of
Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, SovereigntySaha proposes that the diaphanous nature first of muslin and then of other fabrics constitutes neither a simple product with exchange value nor an ephemeral or affective form of labor we have come to associate with certain kinds of women’s work. Forms of touch are woven into the fabric of colonial and postcolonial exchange. And they carry a spectral quality. Rather like the visor effect in Derrida’s reading of Hamlet in
Specters of Marx, fabric casts a shadow on abstracted beings moving through history teleologically, and weaves a different affect. -- Ranjana Khanna, author of
Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation, 1830 to the PresentA must-read for students of Bengal, historical and contemporary. Given the diversity of themes, the book will appeal to a wide range of scholars, of political movements, literature and language, social and economic history, colonialism and imperialism, labor and artisanal production, and development and gender studies. * H-Asia *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Reading the Body Politic1. Virgin Suicides
Part II: The Fetish of Nationalism2. The Fetish Touch
3. Oceanic Feelings
Part III: International Basket Case4. Archive Asylum
5. Machine Made
Epilogue
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index
