Contributors to this special issue use a pluriversal lens to trace the colonial continuities, the imperial geographies, and the forms of difference through which people become subjects of, resist, and shore up security regimes across the world. Using a transnational feminist approach, the authors contest the boundedness of the category Global South, instead emphasizing the fluidity between supposedly separate scales, such as North/South and intimate/global. Essay topics include imperial warfare in East Africa, national security and the politics of protest at India's borderlands, the diasporic politics of race and class in Jamaica's security dynamics, the use of religion to designate state-sanctioned violence as legitimate, and securitizing patriarchies in postcolonial India. Contributors. Samar Al-Bulushi, Sahana Ghosh, Inderpal Grewal, Dipin Kaur, Negar Razavi, Sasha Sabherwal, Deborah A. Thomas

In Saving the Security State Inderpal Grewal traces the changing relations between the US state and its citizens in an era she calls advanced neoliberalism. Marked by the decline of US geopolitical power, endless war, and increasing surveillance, advanced neoliberalism militarizes everyday life while producing the "exceptional citizens"-primarily white Christian men who reinforce the security state as they claim responsibility for protecting the country from racialized others. Under advanced neoliberalism, Grewal shows, others in the United States strive to become exceptional by participating in humanitarian projects that compensate for the security state's inability to provide for the welfare of its citizens. In her analyses of microfinance programs in the global South, security moms, the murders at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, and the post-9/11 crackdown on Muslim charities, Grewal exposes the fissures and contradictions at the heart of the US neoliberal empire and the centrality of race, gender, and religion to the securitized state.

In Saving the Security State Inderpal Grewal traces the changing relations between the US state and its citizens in an era she calls advanced neoliberalism. Marked by the decline of US geopolitical power, endless war, and increasing surveillance, advanced neoliberalism militarizes everyday life while producing the "exceptional citizens"-primarily white Christian men who reinforce the security state as they claim responsibility for protecting the country from racialized others. Under advanced neoliberalism, Grewal shows, others in the United States strive to become exceptional by participating in humanitarian projects that compensate for the security state's inability to provide for the welfare of its citizens. In her analyses of microfinance programs in the global South, security moms, the murders at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, and the post-9/11 crackdown on Muslim charities, Grewal exposes the fissures and contradictions at the heart of the US neoliberal empire and the centrality of race, gender, and religion to the securitized state.

Throughout the West, theory - in particular feminist theory - tends either to ignore difference altogether or to lapse into a kind of cultural relativism. Resisting these two moves, the authors here explore the possibilities of achieving feminist work across cultural divides. In doing so, they bring the issues of colonialism and post-colonialism into the typically aesthetic debates over postmodernism and the construction of culture; at the same time, they broaden these debates to include the normally excluded issue of feminist participation. Asking how ideas of postmodernism and post-colonialism are variously deployed by feminists and others in different locations allows the authors to trace the flow of information and theory in transnational cultural production. To this end, they pursue two lines of questioning: What kinds of feminist practices engender theories that resist of the question of modernism? And how do we understand the production and reception of diverse forms of feminism within a framework of transnational social/cultural/economic movements?

Moving across academic disciplines, geographical boundaries, and literary genres, Home and Harem examines how travel shaped ideas about culture and nation in nineteenth-century imperialist England and colonial India. Inderpal Grewal's study of the narratives and discourses of travel reveals the ways in which the colonial encounter created linked yet distinct constructs of nation and gender and explores the impact of this encounter on both English and Indian men and women. Reworking colonial discourse studies to include both sides of the colonial divide, this work is also the first to discuss Indian women traveling West as well as English women touring the East.
In her look at England, Grewal draws on nineteenth-century aesthetics, landscape art, and debates about women's suffrage and working-class education to show how all social classes, not only the privileged, were educated and influenced by imperialist travel narratives. By examining diverse forms of Indian travel to the West and its colonies and focusing on forms of modernity offered by colonial notions of travel, she explores how Indian men and women adopted and appropriated aspects of European travel discourse, particularly the set of oppositions between self and other, East and West, home and abroad.
Rather than being simply comparative, Home and Harem is a transnational cultural study of the interaction of ideas between two cultures. Addressing theoretical and methodological developments across a wide range of fields, this highly interdisciplinary work will interest scholars in the fields of postcolonial and cultural studies, feminist studies, English literature, South Asian studies, and comparative literature.

Theorizing NGOs examines how the rise of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) has transformed the conditions of women's lives and of feminist organizing. Victoria Bernal and Inderpal Grewal suggest that we can understand the proliferation of NGOs through a focus on the NGO as a unified form, despite the enormous variation and diversity contained within that form. Theorizing NGOs brings together cutting-edge feminist research on NGOs from various perspectives and disciplines. Contributors locate NGOs within local and transnational configurations of power; interrogate the relationships of nongovernmental organizations to states and to privatization; and map the complex, ambiguous, and ultimately unstable synergies between feminisms and NGOs. While some of the contributors draw on personal experience in NGOs, others employ regional or national perspectives. Spanning a broad range of issues with which NGOs are engaged, from microcredit and domestic violence to democratization, this groundbreaking collection shows that NGOs are not simply vehicles for serving or empowering women but are themselves fields of gendered struggles over power, resources, and status.
Contributors. Sonia E. Alvarez, Victoria Bernal, LeeRay M. Costa, Inderpal Grewal, Laura Grunberg, Elissa Helms, Julie Hemment, Saida Hod i, Lamia Karim, Sabine Lang, Lauren Leve, Kathleen O'Reilly, Aradhana Sharma"

Transnational America is a path-breaking study of the production of middle-class Indian and American citizens in the context of late-twentieth-century neoliberalism. Inderpal Grewal considers how the circulation and travels of South Asian Indians between India and the U.S. during the 1990s created transnational subjects shaped by a global American culture. Rather than simply framing the United States as an imperialist nation-state that imposes unilateral political power in the world, Grewal analyzes how the concept of America functions as a nationalist discourse beyond the boundaries of the United States by disseminating an ideal of democratic citizenship through consumer practices. argue that contemporary notions of gender, race, class, and nationality are linked to earlier histories of colonization and, in particular, to the consumer culture that emerged from colonization. Focusing on three novelists who emigrated from India to the United States, she considers how a concept of Americanness becomes linked to cosmopolitanism. Through an analysis of Mattel's sales of Barbie dolls in India, she shows how American products are consumed by middle-class Indian women with financial means created by India's market liberalization. Considering the fate of asylum-seekers, Grewal looks at how a global feminism in which female refugees are figured as human rights victims emerged from a Western subjectivity. In drawing attention to an America created through the global circulation of people, goods, social movements, rights discourses and more, Grewal makes a powerful, nuanced argument that America must be understood--and studied--as a dynamic entity produced and transformed both within and far beyond its territorial boundaries.

Reflecting the burgeoning academic interest in issues of nation, race, gender, sexuality, and other axes of identity, Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media brings all of these concerns under the same umbrella, contending that these issues must be discussed in relation to each other. Communities, societies, nations, and even entire continents, the book suggests, exist not autonomously but rather in a densely woven web of connectedness. To explore this complexity, the editors have forged links between usually compartmentalized fields (especially media studies, literary theory, visual culture, and critical anthropology) and areas of inquiry-particularly postcolonial and diasporic studies and a diverse set of ethnic and area studies. This book, which links all these issues in suggestive ways, provides an indispensable guide for students and scholars in a wide variety of disciplines. Essays in this groundbreaking volume include Julianne Burton-Carvajal on ethnic identity in Lone Star; Manthia Diawara on diasporic documentary; Hamid Naficy on independent transnational film genres; Robyn Wiegman on whiteness studies; Faye Ginsburg on indigenous media; and Jennifer Gonzales on race in cyberspace; Ana M. Lopez on modernity and Latin American cinema; and Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan on Warrior Marks and multiculturalism and globalization. A volume in the Depth of Field Series, edited by Charles Affron, Mirella Jona Affron, and Robert Lyons Ella Shohat is a professor of cultural studies at New York University. Her books include Israeli Cinema, Dangerous Liaisons, and Talking Visions. Robert Stam has been named University Professor at New York University. He is the author of over ten books on film and cultural studies. Together, Shohat and Stam authored the award-winning Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media.

Theorizing NGOs examines how the rise of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) has transformed the conditions of women's lives and of feminist organizing. Victoria Bernal and Inderpal Grewal suggest that we can understand the proliferation of NGOs through a focus on the NGO as a unified form despite the enormous variation and diversity contained within that form. Theorizing NGOs brings together cutting-edge feminist research on NGOs from various perspectives and disciplines. Contributors locate NGOs within local and transnational configurations of power, interrogate the relationships of nongovernmental organizations to states and to privatization, and map the complex, ambiguous, and ultimately unstable synergies between feminisms and NGOs. While some of the contributors draw on personal experience with NGOs, others employ regional or national perspectives. Spanning a broad range of issues with which NGOs are engaged, from microcredit and domestic violence to democratization, this groundbreaking collection shows that NGOs are, themselves, fields of gendered struggles over power, resources, and status. Contributors. Sonia E. Alvarez, Victoria Bernal, LeeRay M. Costa, Inderpal Grewal, Laura Grunberg, Elissa Helms, Julie Hemment, Saida Hodzic, Lamia Karim, Sabine Lang, Lauren Leve, Kathleen O'Reilly, Aradhana Sharma

Anthropological field studies of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in their unique cultural and political contexts. Cultures of Doing Good: Anthropologists and NGOs serves as a foundational text to advance a growing subfield of social science inquiry: the anthropology of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Thorough introductory chapters provide a short history of NGO anthropology, address how the study of NGOs contributes to anthropology more broadly, and examine ways that anthropological studies of NGOs expand research agendas spawned by other disciplines. In addition, the theoretical concepts and debates that have anchored the analysis of NGOs since they entered scholarly discourse after World War II are explained. The wide-ranging volume is organized into thematic parts: "Changing Landscapes of Power," "Doing Good Work," and "Methodological Challenges of NGO Anthropology." Each part is introduced by an original, reflective essay that contextualizes and links the themes of each chapter to broader bodies of research and to theoretical and methodological debates. A concluding chapter synthesizes how current lines of inquiry consolidate and advance the first generation of anthropological NGO studies, highlighting new and promising directions in this field. In contrast to studies about surveys of NGOs that cover a single issue or region, this book offers a survey of NGO dynamics in varied cultural and political settings. The chapters herein cover NGO life in Tanzania, Serbia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Peru, the United States, and India. The diverse institutional worlds and networks include feminist activism, international aid donors, USAID democracy experts, Romani housing activism, academic gender studies, volunteer tourism, Jewish philanthropy, Islamic faith-based development, child welfare, women's legal arbitration, and environmental conservation. The collection explores issues such as normative democratic civic engagement, elitism and professionalization, the governance of feminist advocacy, disciplining religion, the politics of philanthropic neutrality, NGO tourism and consumption, blurred boundaries between anthropologists as researchers and activists, and barriers to producing critical NGO ethnographies.