In today’s world of unequal globalization, Bangladesh has drawn
international attention for the spate of factory disasters that
have taken the lives of numerous garment workers, mostly young
women. The contemporary garment industry—and the labor organizing
pushing back—draws on a long history of gendered labor division
and exploitation in East Bengal, the historical antecedent of
Bangladesh. Yet despite the centrality of women’s labor to
anticolonial protest and postcolonial state-building,
historiography has struggled with what appears to be its absence
from the archive. Poulomi Saha offers an innovative account of
women’s political labor in East Bengal over more than a century,
one that suggests new ways to think about textiles and the gendered
labors of their making. An Empire of Touch argues that women have
articulated—in writing, in political action, in stitching—their
own desires in their own terms. They produce narratives beyond
women’s empowerment and independence as global and national
projects; they refuse critical pronouncements of their own
subjugation. Saha follows the historical traces of how women have
claimed their own labor, contending that their political
commitments are captured in the material objects of their
manufacture. Her analysis of the production of historical memory
through and by the bodies of women spans British colonialism and
American empire, anticolonial nationalism to neoliberal
globalization, depicting East Bengal between development economics
and postcolonial studies. Through a material account of text and
textile, An Empire of Touch crafts a new narrative of gendered
political labor under empire.
General
Imprint: |
Columbia University Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Series: |
Gender and Culture Series |
Release date: |
December 2020 |
First published: |
2019 |
Authors: |
Poulomi Saha
|
Dimensions: |
235 x 156 x 22mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Paperback
|
Pages: |
344 |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-231-19209-5 |
Categories: |
Books
|
LSN: |
0-231-19209-6 |
Barcode: |
9780231192095 |
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