During the past forty years, South Asia has been the location, as well as the focus, of dynamic, important feminist scholarship and activism. Building on that work, the contributors to this compelling collection, prominent feminist academics and activists, most of whom are based in South Asia and North America, examine recent feminist interventions in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. They address feminist responses to religious fundamentalism and secularism; globalization, labor, and migration; militarization and state repression; public representations of sexuality; and the cultural politics of sex work. The sixteen essays attest to the diversity and specificity of South Asian locations and feminist concerns, while also demonstrating how feminist engagements in the region can enrich feminist theorizing more broadly. They interrogate the limits, as well as the potential, of taking South Asia as the grounds for new theoretical work in feminism.

Contributors
Flavia Agnes
Anjali Arondekar
Firdous Azim
Anannya Bhattacharjee
Laura Brueck
Angana P. Chatterji
Malathi de Alwis
Toorjo Ghose
Amina Jamal
Ratna Kapur
Lamia Karim
Ania Loomba
Ritty A. Lukose
Vasuki Nesiah
Sonali Perera
Atreyee Sen
Mrinalini Sinha
Ashwini Sukthankar

"Liberalization's Children" explores how youth and gender have become crucial sites for a contested cultural politics of globalization in India. Popular discourses draw a contrast between "midnight's children," who were rooted in post-independence Nehruvian developmentalism, and "liberalization's children," who are global in outlook and unapologetically consumerist. Moral panics about beauty pageants and the celebration of St. Valentine's Day reflect ambivalence about the impact of an expanding commodity culture, especially on young women. By simply highlighting the triumph of consumerism, such discourses obscure more than they reveal. Through a careful analysis of "consumer citizenship," Ritty A. Lukose argues that the breakdown of the Nehruvian vision connects with ongoing struggles over the meanings of public life and the cultural politics of belonging. Those struggles play out in the ascendancy of Hindu nationalism; reconfigurations of youthful, middle-class femininity; attempts by the middle class to alter understandings of citizenship; and assertions of new forms of masculinity by members of lower castes.

Moving beyond elite figurations of globalizing Indian youth, Lukose draws on ethnographic research to examine how non-elite college students in the southern state of Kerala mediate region, nation, and globe. Kerala sits at the crossroads of development and globalization. Held up as a model of left-inspired development, it has also been transformed through an extensive and largely non-elite transnational circulation of labor, money, and commodities to the Persian Gulf and elsewhere. Focusing on fashion, romance, student politics, and education, Lukose carefully tracks how gender, caste, and class, as well as colonial and postcolonial legacies of culture and power, affect how students navigate their roles as citizens and consumers. She explores how mass-mediation and an expanding commodity culture have differentially incorporated young people into the structures and aspirational logics of globalization.