An Empire of Touch: Women's Political Labor and the Fabrication of East Bengal

Poulomi Saha

Published by Columbia University Press 2019

An Empire of Touch

Women's Political Labor and the Fabrication of East Bengal

Poulomi Saha

In the series Gender and Culture Series

https://doi.org/10.7312/saha19208

Overview
Contents

About this book

Poulomi 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.

Author / Editor information

Saha Poulomi :

Poulomi Saha (PhD, English, Pennsylvania) is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley, with affiliations in the Program in Critical Theory, the Department of Gender and Women's Studies, the Center for Race and Gender, and the Institute for South Asia Studies. She has published articles in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, the Journal of Modern Literature, and Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. This is her first book.Poulomi Saha is assistant professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.

Reviews

Ranjana Khanna, author of Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation, 1830 to the Present:
Saha 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.

Erin Manning, author of Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty:
Saha 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.

Mrinalini Sinha, author of Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire:
A 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.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Part I. Reading the Body Politic
1. Virgin Suicides Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	27
Part II. The Fetish of Nationalism
2. The Fetish Touch Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	77
3. Oceanic Feelings Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	117
Part III. International Basket Case
4. Archive Asylum Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	171
5. Machine Made Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	210
Epilogue Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	247
Glossary Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	251
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	253
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	293
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	313

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;

eBook

Published: April 15, 2019
ISBN: 9780231549646