In its early phase, "Subaltern Studies" dealt extensively with the issue of community and violence in the context of peasant uprisings. Once the problems of peasant involvement in the modern politics of the nation were subjected to the same critical scrutiny, complexities in that relationship began to emerge. A new dimension was introduced when gender and national politics came to be taken seriously and in this volume the whole range of new issues raised by the relations between community, gender and violence are addressed. The question of women and the nation, especially among minorities, features strongly in this work. Qadri Ismail examines the claims of Tamil nationalism in Sri Lanka from the standpoint of the Southern Tamil woman; Aamir Mufti looks not at the familiar gendered figure of the nation as mother but, from the standpoint of the rejected minority, at the brutalized prostitute; while Tejaswini Niranjana writes on the "new woman" in contemporary Indian cinema. Further chapters look at women and minorities in the context of the law: Flavia Agnes examines the colonial and nationalist histories of the Hindu law of marriage and women's property, Nivedita Menon critically reviews the Indian debate over the universal civil code, and David Scott discusses, with an eye to Sri Lanka, the concept of minority rights within modern theories of citizenship. The issue of violence is taken up by Satish Deshpande in his study of the imagined space within which the new Hindu Right seeks to assert its dominance, and by Pradeep Jeganathan in his exploration of violence in the cultivation of masculinity. In her conclusion, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak considers the position within a globalized economic space of the "new subaltern" - the Third World labouring woman.

In its early phase, "Subaltern Studies" dealt extensively with the issue of community and violence in the context of peasant uprisings. Once the problems of peasant involvement in the modern politics of the nation were subjected to the same critical scrutiny, complexities in that relationship began to emerge. A new dimension was introduced when gender and national politics came to be taken seriously and in this volume the whole range of new issues raised by the relations between community, gender and violence are addressed. The question of women and the nation, especially among minorities, features strongly in this work. Qadri Ismail examines the claims of Tamil nationalism in Sri Lanka from the standpoint of the Southern Tamil woman; Aamir Mufti looks not at the familiar gendered figure of the nation as mother but, from the standpoint of the rejected minority, at the brutalized prostitute; while Tejaswini Niranjana writes on the "new woman" in contemporary Indian cinema. Further chapters look at women and minorities in the context of the law: Flavia Agnes examines the colonial and nationalist histories of the Hindu law of marriage and women's property, Nivedita Menon critically reviews the Indian debate over the universal civil code, and David Scott discusses, with an eye to Sri Lanka, the concept of minority rights within modern theories of citizenship. The issue of violence is taken up by Satish Deshpande in his study of the imagined space within which the new Hindu Right seeks to assert its dominance, and by Pradeep Jeganathan in his exploration of violence in the cultivation of masculinity. In her conclusion, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak considers the position within a globalized economic space of the "new subaltern" - the Third World labouring woman.

This now classic work provides challenging new ways of thinking about nationalism, colonialism and modernity, in Sri Lanka. Situated at the conceptual intersection of history and identity, the essays in the volume denaturalizes the claims of the nation, taking it apart analytically, pointing to hidden relations of power and inequality that undergird it It is edited by Pradeep Jeganathan & Qadri Ismail, who are internationally renowed scholars.

The papers in this special issue of Domains deal with the category of the communal riot in India, specifically the anti-Sikh riot of 1984 in Delhi, the Hindu-Muslim riots of 1992-93 in Mumbai and the Hindu-Muslim riots of Gujarat in 2002. The literature, both academic and in the print and visual media, on each of these riots is vast, but as yet we do not find a sustained effort to put together these events of violence, much less reflect on their common modalities. The papers in this issue mark an ethnographic attempt to come to terms with what in India (and perhaps the Subcontinent, at large) has been a ubiquitous phenomenon since at least the mid-1980s - a pervasive repetition and visibility of intra-religious warfare. The papers show that the communal riot is both a practice and a discursive condition, anchored in documentary, pictorial, ethnographic, narrative, and judicial accounts. In the process the papers shed light on different dimensions of the riot, while also revealing regularities and diversity in its discursive formation. Domains is the Journal of the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo.

The second volume of Domains, contains: "Selvi's Revenge" by Mangalika de Silva; "Ethnic differences and urban neighbourhood relationships among slum dwellers of Colombo" by Niriellage Chandrasiri Niriella; "Towards a political economy of Sri Lanka's 'ethnic' conflict," Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah & "Broken Glass: Women, Violence and the Rule of Law," Radhika Coomaraswamy. Domains is the refereed, scholarly journal of the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo, Sri Lanka, and is edited by senior research fellow Pradeep Jeganathan.

Assured and accomplished, Pradeep Jeganathan's long awaited debut collection of short fiction is a spare, controlled meditation on the details of inhabitation: power and inequality, friendship and enmity, love and loss, violence and its memories. The seven interconnected stories span a near thirty years of his county's recent past; each traces a delicately textured frame of troubling, telling beauty, weaving together, with almost incredible economy, not the often composed image of Sri Lanka - a paradise isle where 'only man is vile' - but a life world, live and remembered, to be lived in again.