Description
Book SynopsisShameem Black travels into unexpected realms of popular culture in English from India, its diaspora, and the West to explore and critique yoga as an exercise in cultural power.
Trade ReviewShameem Black’s
Flexible India provides an important new perspective on the complex politics of yoga in contemporary India. In a style that is lucid, incisive, and critically insightful, her analysis sheds light on how the practice of yoga, and claims to authority over its historical representation, are riven with contradictions that reinforce inequities and injustices. At the same time, yoga’s flexible multivocality animates the possibility of practice that transcends entrenched forms of exclusion, exploitation, and alienation. With deep empathy and critical reasoning, Black shows how the rigidity of India’s twenty-first-century modernity can be understood in terms that work out the tensions of nationalism and the contortions of neoliberalism. -- Joseph S. Alter, author of
Yoga in Modern IndiaShameem Black invites us to reassess the idea of ‘yoga’ in the popular cultural imaginary. Her timely, thoughtful, and erudite study tackles notions of cultural appropriation, social inequality, and political critique, channeled through a wonderfully blended academic and creative endeavor. -- E. Dawson Varughese, author of
author of Reading New India: Post-Millennial Indian Fiction in EnglishBlack’s richly textured analysis takes us on a journey across disciplines, genres, and lenses, highlighting crucial questions surrounding the meaning, value, and practice of yoga, all the while gloriously centering its messy multiplicity and internal contradictions. An ambitious, skillfully written book—and a truly edifying, rewarding read. -- Farah Godrej, author of
Freedom Inside? Yoga and Meditation in the Carceral StateFlexible India is a stirringly intimate portrait of both the beauty and the vicissitudes of global yoga. Black expertly unfurls the complex ethical debates of modern yoga without relinquishing its generative possibilities for hope, imagination, and flexibility. A must read. -- Amanda Lucia, author of
White Utopias: The Religious Exoticism of Transformational FestivalsFlexible India offers a powerful panorama of the paradoxes and transformative potential of yoga. Never reductive, Shameem Black lays bare painful contradictions in sensitive and compassionate prose. She interrogates power imbalances, cultural appropriation, and the possibility of positive transformation through yoga with integrity and bravery. -- Suzanne Newcombe, author of
Yoga in Britain: Stretching Spirituality and Educating YogisTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
Prologue: The Bracelet
1. Setting Up: Yoga’s Flexible Forms
2. Conducting Mass Practice: India’s Vision for Yoga
3. Aligning Both Hands: Yoga in Indian Fiction
4. Assuming Corpse Pose: Yoga in U.S. Popular Culture
5. Bending Over Backward: Yoga’s Precarious Work
6. Framing New Parts: Yoga Through Diasporic Critique
7. Lying Out: Spectral Yoga
Epilogue: The Moon
Notes
Bibliography
Index
