ABOUT THIS BOOK

A Thai foodseller on the streets of Bangkok, a cyclo driver in a Vietnamese village, a Pahari migrant laborer in the Himalayas, a Parsi-Christian professional social worker shuttling back and forth between London and Calcutta—Trans-Status Subjects examines how these and other South and Southeast Asians affect and are affected by globalization. While much work has focused on the changes wrought by globalization—describing how people maintain foundations or are permanently destabilized—this collection theorizes the complex ways individuals negotiate their identities and create alliances in the midst of both stability and instability, as what the editors call trans-status subjects. Using gender paradigms, historical time, and geographic space as driving analytic concerns, the essays gathered here consider the various ways South and Southeast Asians both perpetuate and resist various hierarchies despite unequal mobilities within economic, social, cultural, and political contexts.

The contributors—including literary and film theorists, geographers, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists—show how the dominant colonial powers prefigured the ideologies of gender and sexuality that neocolonial nation-states have later refigured; investigate economic and artistic production; and explore labor, capital, and social change. The essays cover a range of locales—including Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, Borneo, Indonesia, and the United States. In investigating issues of power, mobility, memory, and solidarity in recent eras of globalization, the contributors—scholars and activists from South Asia, Southeast Asia, England, Australia, Canada, and the United States—illuminate various facets of the new concept of trans-status subjects.

Trans-Status Subjects carves out a new area of inquiry at the intersection of feminisim and critical geography, as well as globalization, postcolonial, and cultural studies.

Contributors. Anannya Bhattacharjee, Esha Niyogi De, Karen Gaul, Ketu Katrak, Karen Leonard, Philippa Levine, Kathryn McMahon, Andrew McRae, Susan Morgan, Nihal Perera, Sonita Sarker, Jael Silliman, Sylvia Tiwon, Gisele Yasmeen

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Sonita Sarker is Chair and Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Associate Professor of English at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Esha Niyogi De teaches English and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

REVIEWS

“This collection brings together an astonishingly wide variety of original research about the problem of globalization and the relationship of gender, time, and space to it. Focusing on ‘embodied subjects’ in diverse locations and shifting grounds allows the authors to excavate conditions—cultural, political, socioeconomic—under which the people they are writing about become what the editors call ‘trans-status subjects.’”—Antoinette Burton, author of At the Heart of the Empire

“This valuable anthology gathers together feminist perspectives on gender, postcolonial critique, and critiques of Western modernity, and the considerable work on global capitalism and transnationalism. The work is theoretically sophisticated and ethnographically rich, intervening in the discussions of women, colonial and neocolonial modernity, and globalization with respect to South Asian and Southeast Asian women and locales.”—Lisa Lowe, author of Immigrant Acts

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Pahari

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