Contents:
I. Introduction
Austen in the world: postcolonial mappings Rajeswari Sunder Rajan
II. Austen in the world
Jane Austen goes to the seaside: Sanditon, English identity and the 'West Indian' schoolgirl Elaine Jordan Learning to ride at Mansfield Park Donna Landry Austen's treacherous ivory: female patriotism, domestic ideology, and empire Jon Mee Domestic retrenchment, colonial expansion, and the traffic of improvement: the property plots of Mansfield Park Clara Tuite Of windows and country walks: frames of space and movement in 1990s Austen adaptations Julianne Pidduck
III. Austen abroad
Reluctant janeites: daughterly value in Jane Austen and Sarat Chatterjee's Swami Nalini Natarajan Jane Austen goes to India: Emily Eden's home thoughts from abroad Judith Plotz Farewell to Jane Austen: uses of realism in Vikram Seths Suitable Boy Himansu Mohapatra and Jatin Nayak Father's daughters: critical realism examines patriarchy in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Pak Wanso's A Faltering Afternoon [Hwichongkorinun Ohu] You-me Park Clueless in the neocolonial world order Gayle Wald
IV. Poem
To a 'Jane Austen' class at Ibadan University Molara Ogundipe

Jane Austen has proved to be one of the most accessible and enduring legacies of Western culture in the last two hundred years. As a cultural icon, as well as an object of serious intellectual investigation, 'Jane Austen' has influenced the critical understanding of and the popular imagination around social relations and cultural rituals - the institution of marriage, the ideology of romantic relationship, the cultural imagining of class, or social prestige - as well as larger historical pictures that include slavery and colonialism.
This cutting-edge volume brings together works by Jane Austen scholars and experts in film studies, postcolonial studies and feminism from four different continents. Their essays investigate the ways in which travelling theories and narratives are reinterpreted and translated in the global context; explore how cultural representations affect the ways social relations are reordered and conceptual boundaries are realigned; and the ways that gender operates in the discourses of nationalism, colonialism and postcoloniality.
This book is the first to bridge two significant bodies of recent Austen scholarship: one emphasising the issue of gender and one centralising the history of colonialism and slavery. It reveals the presence of Austen in India, Korea, and the United States as well as the influence of 'the Other' in Jane Austen's 'known community.' For students and researchers in literary, postcolonial, media and gender studies, this book provides a groundbreaking reappraisal of classical literature using postcolonial methodology.

An essential addition to the postcolonial debate which offers a challenging mode of `reading resistance' which destroys the stereotyped and sensationalised humanist image of the `third world woman' as victim.

Real and Imagined Women explores a number of fascinating and important theoretical questions for feminists by offering a challenging mode of 'reading resistance', set against the stereotyped and sensationalist image of the 'third world woman' as victim.
Real and Imagined Women reconceptualizes this overdetermined subjectivity in separate but related essays that explore the practice and representation of sati, the issues around rape and wife-murder, and the official and media construction of the 'new' woman in colonial and post-Independence India. In addition, an essay on the 'case' of Indira Gandhi identifies, at the other end, the elite female subject, the woman-as-leader, and seeks to reclaim her for a feminist politics. The central and repeated concern of these essays thus emerges as the (re)construction of female subjectivity in the interests of a feminist praxis.
Rajeswari Sunder Rajan reads the cultural representations of women through a wide and varied range of texts - from the classical Tamil epic Silapaddikaram to recent film, popular fiction, commercial advertisements, legal texts and journalism - and by this means raises the issue of how the postcolonial situation frames the context between 'real' and 'imagined' women.

The texts that make up postcolonial print cultures are often found outside the archival catalogue, and in lesser-examined repositories such as personal collections, the streets, or appendages to established collections. This volume examines the published and unpublished writing, magazines, pamphlets, paratexts, advertisements, cartoons, radio, and street art that serve as the intellectual forces behind opposition to colonial orders, as meditations on the futures of embryonic nation states, and as visions of new forms of equality. The print cultures examined here are necessarily anti-institutional; they serve as a counterpoint to the colonial archive and, relatedly, to more traditional genres and text formats coming out of large-scale publishers. This means that much of the primary material analyzed in this book has not been scrutinized before. Many of these print productions articulate collective liberation projects with origins in the grassroots. They include debates around the shape of the postcolonial nation and the new state formation that necessarily draw on a diverse and contentious public sphere of opinion. Their rhetoric ranges from the reformist to the revolutionary. Reflecting the diversity, indeed the disorderliness, of postcolonial print cultures this book covers local, national, and transnational cultures from Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. Its wide-ranging essays offer a nuanced and, taken together, a definitive (though that is not to say comprehensive or systematic) study of a global phenomenon: postcolonial print cultures as a distinct literary field. The chapters recover the efforts of writers, readers and publishers to produce a postcolonialism ‘from below’, and thereby offer a range of fresh perspectives on the meaning and history of postcolonialism.

"The Scandal of the State" is a revealing study of the relationship between the postcolonial, democratic Indian nation-state and Indian women's actual needs and lives. Well-known for her work combining feminist theory and postcolonial studies, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan shows how the state is central to understanding women's identities and how, reciprocally, women and "women's issues" affect the state's role and function. She argues that in India law and citizenship define for women not only the scope of political rights but also cultural identity and everyday life. Sunder Rajan delineates the postcolonial state in implicit contrast with the "enlightened," postfeminist neoliberal state in the West. Her analysis wrestles with complex social realities, taking into account the influence of age, ethnicity, religion, and class on individual and group identities as well as the shifting, heterogeneous nature of the state itself.

"The Scandal of the State "develops through a series of compelling case studies, each of which centers around an incident exposing the contradictory position of the Indian state vis-a-vis its female citizens and, ultimately, the inadequacy of its commitment to women's rights. Sunder Rajan focuses on the custody battle over a Muslim child bride, the compulsory sterilization of mentally retarded women in state institutional care, female infanticide in Tamilnadu, prostitution as labor rather than crime, and the surrender of the female outlaw Phoolan Devi. She also looks at the ways the Uniform Civil Code presented many women with a stark choice between allegiance to their religion and community or the secular assertion of individual rights. Rich with theoretical acumen and activist passion, "The Scandal of the State" is a powerful critique of the mutual dependence of women and the state on one another in the specific context of a postcolonial modernity.