Description
Book SynopsisSince the early 1990s hundreds of thousands of Tamil villagers in southern India have participated in literacy lessons, science demonstrations, and other events designed to transform them into active citizens with access to state power. These efforts to spread enlightenment among the oppressed are part of a movement known as the Arivoli Iyakkam (the Enlightenment Movement), considered to be among the most successful mass literacy movements in recent history. In The Light of Knowledge, Francis Cody's ethnography of the Arivoli Iyakkam highlights the paradoxes inherent in such movements that seek to emancipate people through literacy when literacy is a power-laden social practice in its own right.
The Light of Knowledge is set primarily in the rural district of Pudukkottai in Tamil Nadu, and it is about activism among laboring women from marginalized castes who have been particularly active as learners and volunteers in the movement. In their endeavors to remake the Tamil count
Trade Review
One might characterize Cody as involved in an attempt to theorize literacy activism in a manner at once with and beyond Foucault.... No doubt this [book] is a space worthy of further exploration. I would additionally suggest that the topics of desire and social position—topics which appear once and again in the margins of The Light of Knowledge—are of equal importance.
* Polar: Political & Legal Anthropology Review *
Table of ContentsForeword
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Note on Transliteration
Introduction: Of Light, Literacy, and Knowledge in the Tamil Countryside
1. On Being a "Thumbprint": Time and Space in Arivoli Activism
2. Feminizing Enlightenment: The Social and Reciprocal Agency
3. Labors of Objectification: Words and Worlds of Pedagogy
4. Search for a Method: The Media of Enlightenment
5. Subject to Citizenship: Petitions and the Performativity of Signature
Epilogue: Reflections on a Time of Charismatic Enlightenment
Notes
Works Cited
Index
