Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-10148260
Rajbir Singh Judge
Focusing on early twentieth-century Punjab, this article considers how situating the region into historical context circumscribes the literary by tying it to place, thereby creating a seamless economy of exchange. In contrast, noting the refusal of literary and artistic output to be adjudicated into context, this article asks, Is it possible to consider the encounters within the Punjabi literary and artistic scene through a dislocation rather than a circuitous exchange within a singular Punjab? The author ponders this question by considering how analyses centered on exchange are unavoidable when situated within historicity—analyses that emerged in the colonial period as a central way to understand Sikh literary production. Such a grasp on Punjab, the Sikh tradition, and historicity, however, is loosened when we consider the nonhuman. The nonhuman, in other words, challenges the overt focus on history, conquest, and vision that undergirds our understanding of the Punjabi literary scene by functioning as an impediment to mediation, translation, and recognition. The focus on the nonhuman is not to offer a more robust or precise recognition to Punjab but to disarticulate the very contours of recognition through a focus on the eye.
{"title":"Birha","authors":"Rajbir Singh Judge","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-10148260","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-10148260","url":null,"abstract":"Focusing on early twentieth-century Punjab, this article considers how situating the region into historical context circumscribes the literary by tying it to place, thereby creating a seamless economy of exchange. In contrast, noting the refusal of literary and artistic output to be adjudicated into context, this article asks, Is it possible to consider the encounters within the Punjabi literary and artistic scene through a dislocation rather than a circuitous exchange within a singular Punjab? The author ponders this question by considering how analyses centered on exchange are unavoidable when situated within historicity—analyses that emerged in the colonial period as a central way to understand Sikh literary production. Such a grasp on Punjab, the Sikh tradition, and historicity, however, is loosened when we consider the nonhuman. The nonhuman, in other words, challenges the overt focus on history, conquest, and vision that undergirds our understanding of the Punjabi literary scene by functioning as an impediment to mediation, translation, and recognition. The focus on the nonhuman is not to offer a more robust or precise recognition to Punjab but to disarticulate the very contours of recognition through a focus on the eye.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48509683","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-10148116
Parama Roy
Abstract:This article is an examination of the career of the “wolf child”—a human child lost or sacrificed by human parents but nurtured by wolf mothers—in imperial South Asia. Notably, wolf children become a particular concern of evangelical Protestant missionaries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; for the latter, these children featured as subjects in a miracle narrative, in which they were preserved from harm against all odds by their divinely animated lupine foster mothers. This history limns the curious trajectory that begins with an anthropology of the cultures that sacrifice children to wolves and ends in a missionary theology that claims wolf children as evidence of Christian grace and redemption. It underlines how unexpectedly significant a reckoning with the non-human was for evangelical theology and narrative in the colony, and how the narrative depended on trans-species alliance for imagining the operations of grace in imperial zones.
{"title":"Thinking with Wolves","authors":"Parama Roy","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-10148116","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-10148116","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article is an examination of the career of the “wolf child”—a human child lost or sacrificed by human parents but nurtured by wolf mothers—in imperial South Asia. Notably, wolf children become a particular concern of evangelical Protestant missionaries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; for the latter, these children featured as subjects in a miracle narrative, in which they were preserved from harm against all odds by their divinely animated lupine foster mothers. This history limns the curious trajectory that begins with an anthropology of the cultures that sacrifice children to wolves and ends in a missionary theology that claims wolf children as evidence of Christian grace and redemption. It underlines how unexpectedly significant a reckoning with the non-human was for evangelical theology and narrative in the colony, and how the narrative depended on trans-species alliance for imagining the operations of grace in imperial zones.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":"42 1","pages":"620 - 637"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48597430","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-10148356
S. Dankwa
{"title":"Politics and Poetics","authors":"S. Dankwa","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-10148356","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-10148356","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43165155","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-10148247
Megnaa Mehtta
The current ecological crisis and its accompanying environmental consciousness has prodded many to reject Western dualism and instead embrace animism. Taking the Sundarbans forests of India as a starting point, the author shows how several animated, nonhuman agents of the region guide both resource use and social relationships through a set of rules known as the “rules of the jungle.” The source of these rules are deities, demons, and spirits—that is, “cosmic polities”—that undeniably govern life in the Sundarbans and across the landscape of South Asia. Mehtta shows how such nonhuman forms of governance and animistic ontologies can act as a source not only of care and an ecological consciousness but also are capable of exclusion and discrimination. Consequently, the South Asian context provides an important cautionary tale about the blind embrace of animism as the sole savior of our ecological crisis by revealing a spectrum of violence within certain strands of animistic ontologies. Simultaneously the author shows how Western repertoires of thought reveal framing devices that transcend dualism and may be read as the precursors of contemporary environmental consciousness. This article ultimately proposes the importance of acknowledging a bricolage of ontologies and realities without entrenching them in a particular identity of caste, tribe, or “indigeneity” or in being of “the West” or of “the rest of the world.”
{"title":"Nonhuman Governance","authors":"Megnaa Mehtta","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-10148247","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-10148247","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The current ecological crisis and its accompanying environmental consciousness has prodded many to reject Western dualism and instead embrace animism. Taking the Sundarbans forests of India as a starting point, the author shows how several animated, nonhuman agents of the region guide both resource use and social relationships through a set of rules known as the “rules of the jungle.” The source of these rules are deities, demons, and spirits—that is, “cosmic polities”—that undeniably govern life in the Sundarbans and across the landscape of South Asia. Mehtta shows how such nonhuman forms of governance and animistic ontologies can act as a source not only of care and an ecological consciousness but also are capable of exclusion and discrimination. Consequently, the South Asian context provides an important cautionary tale about the blind embrace of animism as the sole savior of our ecological crisis by revealing a spectrum of violence within certain strands of animistic ontologies. Simultaneously the author shows how Western repertoires of thought reveal framing devices that transcend dualism and may be read as the precursors of contemporary environmental consciousness. This article ultimately proposes the importance of acknowledging a bricolage of ontologies and realities without entrenching them in a particular identity of caste, tribe, or “indigeneity” or in being of “the West” or of “the rest of the world.”","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42703227","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-10148233
M. Fernando
If secularity ushered in the notion of humans as buffered subjects immune to nonhuman agents, recent attempts to recognize the agency of nonhumans and to see humans as always in relation to nonhumans—the natureculture turn—may be understood as both a posthumanist and postsecularist project. Yet this scholarship has largely restricted nonhumans to entities previously classified as “natural” phenomena, leaving “supernatural” beings out of the conversation and leaving the distinction between nature and supernature intact. Fernando argues that fully undoing the nature/culture distinction means attending to this third domain—the more-than-natural—still banished from our ontological horizons. This is especially important for any consideration of the Anthropocene, since climate crisis affects communities that do not live only in secular worlds nor abide only by secular categories. The author therefore turns to South Asia to theorize what she calls uncanny ecologies—that is, interspecies webs of care and commitment among animals, humans, and deities. The author also asks why these nonsecular multispecies worlds have not been taken up as viable models of relationality and Anthropocene livability to the extent that Amerindian ontologies have, speculating that more-than-natural, more-than-human agency remains a problem for secular sensibilities.
{"title":"Uncanny Ecologies","authors":"M. Fernando","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-10148233","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-10148233","url":null,"abstract":"If secularity ushered in the notion of humans as buffered subjects immune to nonhuman agents, recent attempts to recognize the agency of nonhumans and to see humans as always in relation to nonhumans—the natureculture turn—may be understood as both a posthumanist and postsecularist project. Yet this scholarship has largely restricted nonhumans to entities previously classified as “natural” phenomena, leaving “supernatural” beings out of the conversation and leaving the distinction between nature and supernature intact. Fernando argues that fully undoing the nature/culture distinction means attending to this third domain—the more-than-natural—still banished from our ontological horizons. This is especially important for any consideration of the Anthropocene, since climate crisis affects communities that do not live only in secular worlds nor abide only by secular categories. The author therefore turns to South Asia to theorize what she calls uncanny ecologies—that is, interspecies webs of care and commitment among animals, humans, and deities. The author also asks why these nonsecular multispecies worlds have not been taken up as viable models of relationality and Anthropocene livability to the extent that Amerindian ontologies have, speculating that more-than-natural, more-than-human agency remains a problem for secular sensibilities.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42667188","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-10148181
Aminata Cécile Mbaye
{"title":"The Power of the “Knowing Women”","authors":"Aminata Cécile Mbaye","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-10148181","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-10148181","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48635790","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-10148220
Rajbir Singh Judge, Parama Roy
This special section, “Other Than Human: Rethinking Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia,” speaks to the ways in which the other than human puts pressure on our sense of the secular contours of imperial rule and the postcolonial condition. Shifting from simply undoing the distinction between human and the other than human, each contributor grapples with how the other than human refuses to provide any easy to grasp object or politics, especially once its secularity is not taken as given. The authors establish the epistemological possibilities and challenges that inhere in probing the secular limits of our received understanding of the other than human—a received understanding that typically undergirds the work even of those whose scholarly archive encompasses the nonsecular. Such an expansive, nonsecular sense of the other than human is a slippery one that is incommensurable rather than compatible with protocols of legibility and recognition, as well as the calculations these involve.
{"title":"Other than Human","authors":"Rajbir Singh Judge, Parama Roy","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-10148220","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-10148220","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This special section, “Other Than Human: Rethinking Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia,” speaks to the ways in which the other than human puts pressure on our sense of the secular contours of imperial rule and the postcolonial condition. Shifting from simply undoing the distinction between human and the other than human, each contributor grapples with how the other than human refuses to provide any easy to grasp object or politics, especially once its secularity is not taken as given. The authors establish the epistemological possibilities and challenges that inhere in probing the secular limits of our received understanding of the other than human—a received understanding that typically undergirds the work even of those whose scholarly archive encompasses the nonsecular. Such an expansive, nonsecular sense of the other than human is a slippery one that is incommensurable rather than compatible with protocols of legibility and recognition, as well as the calculations these involve.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46309052","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-10148129
Sandhya Shetty
Long read in relation to public health and gender/sexual mores, Katherine Mayo's Mother India (1927) has rarely been viewed from an animal studies perspective. This article proposes that the animal, tethered to the woman question and to the figure of the Muslim, is integral to the book's imperialist apologetics. Investigations of physical cruelty to women and to animals build Mayo's case against Hindu nationalists' bid for self-rule. Highlighting cruelty alongside the question of dietary choice, Mayo interrogates the self-representation of the Hindu vegetarian as nonviolent, rewriting him instead as rapacious carnivore in every sense but the literal. Mobilized in different contexts and modes, the abused animal becomes part of Mayo's arsenal of shaming rhetoric, as does the figure of the “internationalist” Muslim who is imagined as bulwark against the Hindu vegetarian and as dysgenic threat and “world-menace.” Mother India's political-theological engagement with “the Muslim” as the iconoclastic meat eater pits him against the unfit, diabetic Hindu in a fantasy of carnivory and carnage that enacts a wished-for solution to the problem of defending empire.
{"title":"Cruel Husbandry","authors":"Sandhya Shetty","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-10148129","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-10148129","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Long read in relation to public health and gender/sexual mores, Katherine Mayo's Mother India (1927) has rarely been viewed from an animal studies perspective. This article proposes that the animal, tethered to the woman question and to the figure of the Muslim, is integral to the book's imperialist apologetics. Investigations of physical cruelty to women and to animals build Mayo's case against Hindu nationalists' bid for self-rule. Highlighting cruelty alongside the question of dietary choice, Mayo interrogates the self-representation of the Hindu vegetarian as nonviolent, rewriting him instead as rapacious carnivore in every sense but the literal. Mobilized in different contexts and modes, the abused animal becomes part of Mayo's arsenal of shaming rhetoric, as does the figure of the “internationalist” Muslim who is imagined as bulwark against the Hindu vegetarian and as dysgenic threat and “world-menace.” Mother India's political-theological engagement with “the Muslim” as the iconoclastic meat eater pits him against the unfit, diabetic Hindu in a fantasy of carnivory and carnage that enacts a wished-for solution to the problem of defending empire.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45206552","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-10148142
Naisargi N. Davé
In this article, Naisargi N. Dave examines the relationship between animals and love in India, animals and love in multispecies anthropology, and between ethics and love more generally. She argues that ahimsa (nonviolence) and love share the characteristic of abnegating moral responsibility beyond the self and its attachments. Thus, Dave argues, against some strains of contemporary political thought, love is not the antithesis to ethical indifference but its very ground. Love is an indifference to all that does not accomplish its lovability. Dave's offering of an alternative interspecies ethic is what she calls indifference to difference—or “being in difference”—and she locates shades of this immanent ethic in precolonial South Asian conceptions of love as well as in a prenationalist revolutionary philosophy of ahimsa. Dave claims that love is an injustice because when we love it is the one or ones who are special to us that we save. She argues instead for an impassioned ethics without love: an indifference to difference.
在这篇文章中，Naisargi N. Dave研究了印度动物和爱之间的关系，多物种人类学中的动物和爱之间的关系，以及更普遍的伦理和爱之间的关系。她认为非暴力和爱都有一个共同的特点，那就是摒弃超越自我及其附属的道德责任。因此，戴夫反对一些当代政治思想，认为爱不是道德冷漠的对立面，而是它的根基。爱是对一切不能使它可爱的事物漠不关心。戴夫提出了另一种物种间伦理，她称之为对差异的冷漠——或者“存在于差异中”——她将这种内在伦理的阴影定位于殖民前南亚的爱情观以及民族主义前的革命哲学中。戴夫声称爱是不公平的，因为当我们爱的时候，我们拯救的是一个或几个对我们来说特别的人。相反，她主张一种没有爱的激情伦理:对差异的冷漠。
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Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201X-9698268
Sima Shakhsari
Abstract:This article focuses on different iterations of virality to explore the racial logic of death and the crisis of our time during the coronavirus pandemic. By examining the war on the coronavirus, the sanctions on Iran, and the rise of white supremacy in the United States, this article argues that the optimistic analyses of virus and virality are predicated upon the abstraction of the human, thus overlooking race and geopolitics.
{"title":"Against Abstractions: On Geopolitics, Humanness, Virus, and Death","authors":"Sima Shakhsari","doi":"10.1215/1089201X-9698268","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-9698268","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article focuses on different iterations of virality to explore the racial logic of death and the crisis of our time during the coronavirus pandemic. By examining the war on the coronavirus, the sanctions on Iran, and the rise of white supremacy in the United States, this article argues that the optimistic analyses of virus and virality are predicated upon the abstraction of the human, thus overlooking race and geopolitics.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":"42 1","pages":"237 - 253"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49136617","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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