Critical Asian Studies is devoted to in-depth studies of emergent social and cultural phenomena in the countries of the region. While recognizing the important ways in which the specific and often violent histories of the nation-state have influenced the social formations in this region, the hooks in this series also examine the processes of translation, exchange, boundary crossings in the linked identities and histories of the region. The authors in this series engage with social theory through ethnographically grounded research and archival work.
Edited
By Saurabh Dube
August 13, 2010
The notion of modernity hinges on a break with the past, such as superstitions, medieval worlds, and hierarchical traditions. It follows that modernity suggests the disenchantment of the world, yet the processes of modernity also create their own enchantments in the mapping and making of the modern...
Edited
By Naveeda Khan
June 13, 2019
Through the essays in this volume, we see how the failure of the state becomes a moment to ruminate on the artificiality of this most modern construct, the failure of nationalism, an opportunity to dream of alternative modes of association, and the failure of sovereignty to consider the threats and...
Edited
By Huri Islamoglu, Peter C. Perdue
June 13, 2019
While pre-modernity is often considered to be the 'time' of non-European regions and modernity is seen as belonging to the West, this book seeks to transcend the temporal bifurcation of that world history into 'pre-modern' and 'modern', as well as question its geographical split into two ...
By Roma Chatterji
April 25, 2019
This book gives a detailed account of thecommunal riots between Hindus and Muslims in Mumbai in 1992-93. It departs from the historiography of the riot, which assumes that Hindu-Muslim conflict is independent of the participants of the violence.Speaking to and interacting with the residents of ...
By Farhana Ibrahim
April 25, 2019
This book is an anthropological study located along India‘s western border with Pakistan. The core arguments are situated within the context of contemporary religious nationalism, communal strife, and border politics in the Indian state of Gujarat. It seeks to understand how, within these contexts,...
By Perveez Mody
April 25, 2019
This book provides an ethnography of love-marriages in the late 1990s in Delhi, identifying the ways in which marriage is ever more a pitch of intense political contestation. It bears upon anthropological understandings of marriageability, urban morality, gender, kinship and the study of the ...