Archaeologies of future

Title: Archaeologies of future
Author: Frederic Jameson
ISBN: 978 1 84467 538 8
Binding: Paper
Publisher: VFerso
Number of Pages: 480
Price: £14.99

Fredric Jameson is America’s leading Marxist critic. A prodigiously energetic thinker whose writings sweep majestically from Sophocles to science fiction.” — Terry Eagleton

In an age of globalization characterized by the dizzying technologies of the First World, and the social disintegration of the Third, is the concept of utopia still meaningful? Archaeologies of the Future, Jameson’s most substantial work since Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, investigates the development of this form since Thomas More, and interrogates the functions of utopian thinking in a post-Communist age.

The relationship between utopia and science fiction is explored through the representations of otherness … alien life and alien worlds … and a study of the works of Philip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin, William Gibson, Brian Aldiss, Kim Stanley Robinson and more. Jameson’s essential essays, including “The Desire Called Utopia,” conclude with an examination of the opposing positions on utopia and an assessment of its political value today.

Archaeologies of the Future is the third volume, after Postmodernism and A Singular Modernity, of Jameson’s project on the Poetics of Social Forms.

Praise for A Singular Modernity
“This is Jameson’s most important and comprehensive account of the theoretical implication and the question of modernity/postmodernity since his path-breaking Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” — Choice

Praise for Brecht and Method
“There is no better example of a “Marxist scholastic” than Fredric Jameson.” — The Economist

“Perhaps the secret of Jameson’s greatness, like Brecht’s, is that he doesn’t adhere to his method too strictly.” — In These Times

Imagining a Place for Buddhism

Title: Imagining a Place for Buddhism : Literary Culture and Religious Community in Tamil-Speaking South India
Author: Anne E. Monius
ISBN: 9788189059194
Binding: paperback
Date: 2009
Publisher: Navayana
Number of Pages:
Price: Rs 350/-

Non-Hindu communities such as Buddhists, Jains and Ājiīvakas played such an important role in South Indian literary and religious culture, and in the administration of the state between the fourth and seventh centuries that the later Śaiva traditions labeled this period the Kalabhra interregnum—the interruption of the wicked ones. Despite their presence in Tamil inscriptional, archaeological and literary record, their significance has been undermined in historical narratives that have valorised the triumph of Tamil Śaivism, casting Buddhists and Jains as ‘foreigners’ to be spurned, ridiculed and dismissed as anti-Tamil. In this pioneering study, focusing on two extant Buddhist Tamil texts – Maṇimēkalai (a sixth-century poetic narrative) and Vīracōliyam (an eleventh-century treatise on grammar and poetics) – Anne Monius, Professor of South Asian Religions at Harvard Divinity School, sheds light on the role of literature and literary culture in the formation, articulation and evolution of Tamil Buddhist religious identity and community.

The cover features S. Anvar’s photograph of a 12th century statue of the Buddha at the Paravai bus stop, Perambalur, Tamilnadu.

Adding insult to injury

Title: Adding insult to injury

Author: Nancy Fraser

ISBN: 9781859842232

Binding: Paper

Date: 2008

Publisher: Verso

Number of Pages: 360

Price: £16.99

Historically, leftwing accounts of injustice focussed primarily on economic harms, such as poverty, exploitation, and inequality. Recently, however, with the collapse of Communism and the rise of identity politics, attention has turned toward cultural harms, such as cultural imperialism, 'misrecognition,' and disrespect. New challenges for the left are raised: How to do justice to the legitimate claims of multiculturalism without abandoning the left's historic-and still indispensable-commitment to economic equality? How to broaden the understanding of injustice by adding (cultural) insult to (economic) injury? Adding Insult to Injury traces the debate sparked by Nancy Fraser's controversial effort to combine the social politics of equality and the cultural politics of difference, while probing the tensions between them. Introduced by Richard Rorty, the volume contains Fraser's influential essay 'From Redistribution to Recognition?'; critical responses by Judith Butler, Joseph Heath, Kevin Olson, Anne Phillips, and Iris Marion Young; and Fraser's rejoinders to them. The result is a wide-ranging and at times contentious exploration of alternative approaches to rebuilding the left.

Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market

Title: Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market
Author: Pierre Bourdieu
ISBN: 9781859846582
Binding: Paper
Date: 2003
Publisher: Verso
Number of Pages: 96
Price: £9.00

Globalization's threat to artists and intellectuals, and how they can rebut it. Pierre Bourdieu, described by The Nation as "worthy of the militant mantle of Sartre and Foucault," here continues the themes advanced so successfully in his previous book Acts of Resistance. Firing Back is an eloquent dissection of globalization's intellectual and cultural role throughout the world, and a discussion of the ways in which effective opposition to it can be mounted. Bourdieu examines Europe's potential as a counterweight to America's globalizing policy and discusses how intellectuals and those working in the cultural sphere can create meaningful alternatives. He also raises challenging questions about the depoliticization of the academic world, arguing that scholars can no longer maintain that their research is objective or value-free. In a preface written for this edition, Bourdieu directly addresses American readers about the role they can play in the burgeoning anti-globalization movement.

The Present as History : Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Global Power

Title: The Present as History : Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Global Power
Author: Nermeen Shaikh
ISBN: 978-81-89632-17-5
Binding: Hardback
Date: 2008 
Publisher: Stanza 
Number of Pages: 276  
Price:  RS 495/-

Contents:

Acknowledgements.

Introduction.

I. The global economy: 1. Amartya Sen. 2. Helena Norberg-Hodge. 3. Sanjay Reddy. 4. Joseph Stiglitz.

II. Post colonialism and the new imperialism: 5. Partha Chatterjee. 6. Mahmood Mamdani. 7. Anatol Lieven.

III. Feminism and human rights: 8. Shirin Ebadi. 9. Lila Abu-Lughod. 10. Saba Mahmood. 11. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

IV. Secularism and Islam: 12. Talal Asad. 13. Gil Anidjar.

Notes.

Index.

The Present as History is a rare opportunity to hear world-renowned scholars speak on the new imperialism, feminism and human rights, secularism and Islam, post-colonialism, and the global economy. They treat the United States as an object to be historically and politically interrogated rather than as the norm from which all else is to be evaluated and assess the Third World through its history of colonialism and neocolonialism rather than focusing on issues of culture and morality. Amartya Sen discusses the shortcomings of the development agenda as it was conceived at the close of the Second World War, while Joseph Stiglitz explains economic globalization and the power of the International Monetary Fund in guiding its trajectory. Sanjay Reddy argues that global poverty estimates are flawed, and Helena Norberg-Hodge uses her experience in Tibet to lay bare the problems with development practice. Political scientists Partha Chatterjee, Mahmood Mamdani, and Anatol Lieven chart the growth of hegemonic power from the colonial to the postcolonial period.Chatterjee examines the enduring effects of colonial administrative and governing practices, while Mamdani, focusing on the present global dispensation, explains the growth of terrorist movements around the world in the context of the Cold War. Lieven looks at the different strains of American nationalism and the continuities and ruptures between nineteenth-century empires and the present one. Iranian human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi elaborates the relationship between Islam, democracy, and human rights while anthropologists Lila Abu-Lughod and Saba Mahmood respectively trace the historical use of women as an excuse for imperial intervention and discuss the relationship between liberalism, Islam, and secularism. Literary theorist and cultural critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak looks at the legacy of colonialism in the domain of language and education, and isolates the problems associated with human rights discourse and practice.In conclusion, Talal Asad traces the genealogy of the term secularism, the special place of Islam within it, and its relationship to modernity.Gil Anidjar considers the distinction between religion and politics and elaborates the historical links between secularism and Christianity. Taken together, these interviews offer a valuable understanding of world history and a corrective to predominant conventional discourses on global power and justice.

Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left

Title: Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left
Author: Judith Butler , Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj Zizek
ISBN: 978-1859842782
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Verso
Number of Pages: 329
Price: £15.99

What is the contemporary legacy of Gramsci's notion of Hegemony? How can universality be reformulated now that its spurious versions have been so thoroughly criticized? In this ground-breaking project, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek engage in a dialogue on central questions of contemporary philosophy and politics. Their essays, organized as separate contributions that respond to one another, range over the Hegelian legacy in contemporary critical theory, the theoretical dilemmas of multiculturalism, the universalism- versus-particularism debate, the strategies of the Left in a globalized economy, and the relative merits of post-structumalism and Lacanian psychoanalysis for a critical social theory. While the rigour and intelligence with which these writers approach their work is formidable, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality benefits additionally from their clear sense of energy and enjoyment in a revealing and often unpredictable exchange.

The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 18801940

Title: The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 18801940 Author: Julian Carter
ISBN: 978-0822339489
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Duke University Press
Number of Pages: Duke University Press
Price: £17.95

Whiteness still carries enormous weight, yet many whites express bafflement when accused of exercising racial power. For them, exercising public power is not racist, but natural. Unfortunately, its racial dimensions remain largely invisible to the people who wield it. In this slim but complex volume, Julian B. Carter explores how the power of whiteness was rendered invisible in the early twentieth century. White Americans shifted their rhetoric from talking about the superiority of white civilization to focusing on normality. "Normal" was, in essence, a distillation of white values, and the white origins of normality could go without saying. Making racial signifiers redundant and thus unnecessary made it possible for whites to forget the role of whiteness and white power in determining what "good Americans" accepted and advocated in social behavior. In the process, American culture linked appropriate (meaning white) private behavior with the good of the nation, thus perpetuating "white" civilization.

Postmodernism and the Other

Title: Postmodernism and the Other
Author: Ziauddin Sardar
ISBN: 978-0745307497
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Pluto
Number of Pages: 344
Price: £ 19.95

This controversial work examines postmodernism from a non-Western perspective, and exposes its claims as a sham. Sardar makes a systematic assessment of the salient spheres of postmodernism - from philosophy and architecture, to film, music and new age religions - and reveals that, contrary to commonly-held notions, postmodernism operates to further marginalise the reality of the non-West and confound its aspirations.

Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination

Title: Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination
Author: Benedict Anderson
ISBN: 978-1844670901
Binding: Paper
Date: 2007
Publisher: Verso
Number of Pages: 256
Price: £9.99

In this sparkling new work, benedict anderson provides a radical recasting of themes from Imagined Communities, his classic book on nationalism, through an exploration of fin-de-siècle politics and culture that spans the Caribbean, Imperial Europe and the South China Sea.

A jewelled pomegranate packed with nitroglycerine is primed to blow away Manila’s 19th-century colonial elite at the climax of El Filibusterismo, whose author, the great political novelist José Rizal, was executed in 1896 by the Spanish authorities in the Philippines at the age of 35. Anderson explores the impact of avant-garde European literature and politics on Rizal and his contemporary, the pioneering folklorist Isabelo de los Reyes, who was imprisoned in Manila after the violent uprisings of 1896 and later incarcerated, together with Catalan anarchists, in the prison fortress of Montjuich in Barcelona. On his return to the Philippines, by now under American occupation, Isabelo formed the first militant trade unions under the influence of Malatesta and Bakunin.

Anderson considers the complex intellectual interactions of these young Filipinos with the new “science” of anthropology in Germany and Austro-Hungary, and with post-Communard experimentalists in Paris, against a background of militant anarchism in Spain, France, Italy and the Americas, José Marti’s armed uprising in Cuba and anti-imperialist protests in China and Japan. In doing so, he depicts the dense intertwining of anarchist internationalism and radical anti-colonialism.

Under Three Flags is a brilliantly original work on the explosive history of national independence and global politics.

Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction

Title: Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction
Author: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
ISBN: 978-0822320401
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Duke University Press
Number of Pages: 516
Price: £ 20.99

Novel Gazing is the first collection of queer criticism on the history of the novel. The contributors to this volume navigate new territory in literary theory with essays that implicitly challenge the "hermeneutic of suspicion" widespread in current critical theory. In a stunning introductory essay, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick delineates the possibilities for a criticism that would be "reparative" rather than cynical or paranoid. The startlingly imaginative essays in the volume explore new critical practices that can weave the pleasures and disorientations of reading into the fabric of queer analyses.Through discussions of a diverse array of British, French, and American novels—including major canonical novels, best-sellers, children’s fiction, and science fiction—these essays explore queer worlds of taste, texture, joy, and ennui, focusing on such subjects as flogging, wizardry, exorcism, dance, Zionist desire, and Internet sexuality.

Interpreting the works of authors as diverse as Benjamin Constant, Toni Morrison, T. H. White, and William Gibson, along with canonical queer modernists such as James, Proust, Woolf, and Cather, contributors reveal the wealth of ways in which selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them. The dramatic reframing that these essays perform will make the significance of Novel Gazing extend beyond the scope of queer studies to literary criticism in general.

Contributors. Stephen Barber, Renu Bora, Anne Chandler, James Creech, Tyler Curtain, Jonathan Goldberg, Joseph Litvak, Michael Lucey, Jeff Nunokawa, Cindy Patton, Jacob Press, Robert F. Reid-Pharr, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Melissa Solomon, Kathryn Bond Stockton, John Vincent, Maurice Wallace, Barry Weller

“This is brilliant. . . and it represents some brilliant critics at their best. These essays illustrate a different and immensely attractive discursive mode. I know of no work more resonant or anywhere near as generous. Beyond that, it marks Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s first move into reparative criticism—and that is a momentous event. ”—James R. Kincaid, University of Southern California

The indivisible remainder , Slavoj Zizek

Title: The indivisible remainder
Author: Slavoj Zizek
ISBN:139781844675814
Binding: Paper back
Date: 2007
Publisher: Radical thinkers,London new york
Number of Pages: 248
Price: £ 6.99

The feature which distinguishes the great works of materialist thought, from Lucretius’ De rerum natura through Capital to the writings of Lacan, is their unfinished character: again and again they tackle their chosen problem. Schelling’s Weltalter drafts belong to this same series, with their repeated attempt at the formulation of the ‘beginning of the world,’ of the passage from the pre-symbolic pulsation of the Real to the universe of logos.

F.W.J. Schelling, the German idealist who for too long dwelled in the shadow of Kant and Hegel, was the first to formulate the post-idealist motifs of finitude, contingency and temporality. His unique work announces Marx's critique of speculative idealism, as well as the properly Freudian notion of drive, of a blind compulsion to repeat which can never be sublated in the ideal medium of language.

The Indivisible Remainder begins with a detailed examination of the two works in which Schelling's speculative audacity reached its peak: his essay on human freedom and his drafts on the “Ages of the World.” After reconstituting their line of argumentation, Slavoj Zizek confronts Schelling with Hegel, and concludes by throwing a Schellingian light on some “related matters”: the consequences of the computerization of daily life for sexual experience; cynicism as today's predominant form of ideology; the epistemological deadlocks of quantum physics.

Although the book is packed with examples from politics and popular culture — the unmistakable token of Zizek’s style — from Speed and Groundhog Day to Forrest Gump, it signals a major shift towards a systematic concern with the basic questions of philosophy and the roots of the crisis of our late-capitalist universe, centred around the enigma of modern subjectivity.

Global Sex

Title: Global Sex

Author: Dennis Altman
ISBN: 978-0226016054
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press

Number of Pages: 216 pages
Price: $15

From Publishers WeeklyTracing the combined impact of telecommunications, faster air-travel and the Internet on sexual expression the world over, Altman (Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation) historicizes sexual activity while exploring specific changes resulting from advances in technology. Covering such issues as the impact of prostitution and pornography on global economics, and how AIDS affects sexual practices, legislation and the commercialization of sex, he presents a gripping portrait of a world barely able to keep pace psychologically, sociologically and theologically with enormous, rapid-fire changes. An AIDS/HIV activist as well as a professor in the School of Politics, Sociology and Anthropology at La Trobe University, Australia, Altman is best when he's most specific for example, when he compares Bangkok's current reputation with Vienna's as "the global brothel" circa 1900; when he traces the dissemination of U.S. gay culture around the world; or when he discusses how Reagan and Thatcher used traditional "moral panics" to promote their agendas. Drawing upon a wide range of sources and cultural artifacts including Playboy, U.N. Development Programme reports, Sharon Stone's famous leg crossing in Basic Instinct, and La Cage aux Folles, as well as the theories of Freud, Herbert Marcuse, William Reich and Franz Fanon Altman ranges outside the usual boundaries of academic research. Offering neither a dire warning nor a reason to rejoice (he sees "the interconnectedness of the world [as] both a threat and an opportunity) his savvy, energetic book truly maintains a global perspective.

The Agamben Effect (South Atlantic Quarterly)

Title: The Agamben Effect (South Atlantic Quarterly)
Author: Alison Ross (Editor)
ISBN: 10: 0822366843 ISBN-13: 978-0822366843
Binding: Paper
Date: 2008
Publisher: Duke University Press
Number of Pages: 216 pages
Price: £ 10.99

Product DescriptionItalian philosopher Giorgio Agamben--whose work has influenced intellectuals in political theory, political philosophy, legal theory, literature, and art--stands among the foremost intellectual figures of the modern era. Engaging with a range of thinkers from Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger to Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou, Agamben considers some of the most pressing issues in recent history and politics. His work explores the relationship between the sovereign state and the politically marginalized Homo Sacer--exiles, refugees, prisoners of war, and others whom the state actively excludes from political participation and full humanity. Further, his critique of the increasing deployment of a "state of exception"--the declaration of a state of emergency that legitimizes the sovereign state's suspension of law for the public good--as a dominant paradigm for governing has particular power in today's global political climate.

Infused with the spirit of Agamben's critical self-reflection, this special issue of SAQ examines his seminal works Homo Sacer (1995), The Open (2002), and State of Exception (2003). Some contributors use Agamben's work to examine the history of abortion law in the West, the history of slavery, and women's rights. Others analyze the connections between Agamben's work and that of his contemporaries, including Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Zizek, and Jean-Luc Nancy. Still other essays identify new points of interdisciplinary communication between some of Agamben's most provocative ideas and popular twentieth-century writing.

Contributors. Andrew Benjamin, Claire Colebrook, Jean-Philippe Deranty, Penelope Deutscher, Eleanor Kaufman, Adrian Mackenzie, Catherine Mills, Alison Ross, Lee Spinks, Ewa Płonowska Ziarek, Krzysztof Ziarek

Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject

Title: Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject
Author: Saba Mahmood
ISBN: 978-0-691-08695-8
Binding: Paper
Date: 2004
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Number of Pages: 264
Price: $23.95

Politics of Piety is a groundbreaking analysis of Islamist cultural politics through the ethnography of a thriving, grassroots women's piety movement in the mosques of Cairo, Egypt. Unlike those organized Islamist activities that seek to seize or transform the state, this is a moral reform movement whose orthodox practices are commonly viewed as inconsequential to Egypt's political landscape. Saba Mahmood's compelling exposition of these practices challenges this assumption by showing how the ethical and the political are indelibly linked within the context of such movements.

Not only is this book a sensitive ethnography of a critical but largely ignored dimension of the Islamic revival, it is also an unflinching critique of the secular-liberal principles by which some people hold such movements to account. The book addresses three central questions: How do movements of moral reform help us rethink the normative liberal account of politics? How does the adherence of women to the patriarchal norms at the core of such movements parochialize key assumptions within feminist theory about freedom, agency, authority, and the human subject? How does a consideration of debates about embodied religious rituals among Islamists and their secular critics help us understand the conceptual relationship between bodily form and political imaginaries? Politics of Piety is essential reading for anyone interested in issues at the nexus of ethics and politics, embodiment and gender, and liberalism and postcolonialism.

Homosexual Desire

Title: Homosexual Desire
Author: Guy Hocquenghem
ISBN: 978-0-8223-1384-7
Binding: Paper
Date: 2006

Publisher: Duke University Press
Number of Pages: 160
Price: £16.99

Originally published in 1972 in France, Guy Hocquenghem's Homosexual Desire has become a classic in gay theory. Translated into English for the first time in 1978 and out of print since the early 1980s, this new edition, with an introduction by Michael Moon, will make available this vital and still relevant work to contemporary audiences. Integrating psychoanalytic and Marxist theory, this book describes the social and psychic dynamics of what has come to be called homophobia and on how the "homosexual" as social being has come to be constituted in capitalist society.Significant as one of the earliest products of the international gay liberation movement, Hocquenghem's work was influenced by the extraordinary energies unleashed by the political upheavals of both the Paris "May Days" of 1968 and the gay and lesbian political rebellions that occurred in cities around the world in the wake of New York's Stonewall riots of June 1969.Drawing on the theoretical work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and on the shattering effects of innumerable gay "comings-out," Hocquenghem critiqued the influential models of the psyche and sexual desire derived from Lacan and Freud. The author also addressed the relation of capitalism to sexualities, the dynamics of anal desire, and the political effects of gay group-identities.Two decades after its appearance, Homosexual Desire remains an exhilarating analysis of capitalist societies' pervasive fascination with, and violent fear of, same-sex desire and addresses issues that continue to be highly charged and productive ones for queer politics.

"Written over two decades ago, in the aftermath of May '68 and Stonewall, Hocquenghem's Homosexual Desire may well be the first example of what we now call queer theory. But its significance is more than historical: it remains an indispensable analysis of, and polemic against, institutionalized homophobia."--Douglas Crimp

"Homosexual Desire represents the best of left social theory of sexual politics, a tradition that has never had an adequate reception in the United States. Reprinting this book now is a step toward recovering that tradition, and could therefore open debates about the significance of sexuality."--Michael Warner

Guy Hocquenghem (1944-1988) taught philosophy at the University of Vincennes, Paris. He was the author of numerous novels, works of theory, and was a staff writer for the French publication Libération. He was a founding member of le Front Homosexuel d'Action Révolutionnaire (F.H.A.R.). Hocquenghem died of an AIDS-related illness in 1988.

Radical history review 100/ winter 2008 - Queer Futures

Title: Queer Futures (Radical History Review (Duke University Press)) (Paperback)
Contributors: Regina Kunzel, Dan Irving, Christina Hanhardt, Margot D.Weiss, Anna M.Agathangelou, Daniel Bassichis, Tamara L.Spira, Susan Stryker, Maxime Cervulle, Aaron Belkin, Patrick McCreery, Vincent Doyle, Nan AlamillaBoyd
ISBN: 978-0822366867
Binding: Paper
Date: 2008
Publisher: Duke University Press
Number of Pages: 257
Price: £ 10.99

In this special issue of Radical History Review, scholars and activists examine the rise of "homonormativity," a lesbian and gay politics that embraces neoliberal values under the guise of queer sexual liberation. Contributors look at the historical forces through which lesbian and gay rights organizations and community advocates align with social conservatives and endorse family-oriented formations associated with domestic partnership, adoption, military service, and gender-normative social roles.

Distinguished by its historical approach, "Queer Futures" examines homonormativity as a phenomenon that emerged in the United States after World War II and gained traction in the 1960s and 1970s. One essay compares Anita Bryant's antigay campaigns in the late 1970s with those of current same-sex marriage proponents to show how both focus on the abstract figure of the "endangered child." Another essay explores how the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation's organizational amnesia has shaped its often conservative agenda. Other essays include a Marxist reading of the transsexual body, an examination of reactionary politics at the core of the movement to repeal the U.S. military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, and a history of how "safe streets" patrols in the 1970s and 1980s became opportunities for urban gentrification and community exploitation.

Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation

Title: Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation
Author: Tariq Ramadan
ISBN ISBN13: 9780195331714, ISBN10: 0195331710
Binding: Hardback
Date: Oct 2008
Publisher: Oxford USA
Number of Pages: 384
Original price: $29.95

Our Price: INR 775/-

Tariq Ramadan has emerged as one of the foremost voices of reformist Islam in the West, notable for urging his fellow Muslims to participate fully in the civil life of the Western societies in which they live. In this new book, Ramadan addresses Muslim societies and communities everywhere with a bold call for radical reform. He challenges those who argue defensively that reform is a dangerous and foreign deviation, and a betrayal of the faith. Authentic reform, he says, has always been grounded in Islam's textual sources, spiritual objectives, and intellectual traditions. But the reformist movements that are based on renewed reading of textual sources while using traditional methodologies and categories have achieved only adaptive responses to the crisis facing a globalizing world. Such readings, Ramadan argues, have reached the limits of their usefulness. Ramadan calls for a radical reform that goes beyond adaptation to envision bold and creative solutions to transform the present and the future of our societies. This new approach interrogates the historically established sources, categories, higher objectives, tools, and methodologies of Islamic law and jurisprudence, and the authority this traditional geography of knowledge has granted to textual scholars. He proposes a new geography which redefines the sources and the spiritual and ethical objectives of the law creating room for the authority of scholars of the social and hard sciences. This will equip this transformative reform with the spiritual, ethical, social and scientific knowledge necessary to address contemporary challenges. Ramadan argues that radical reform demands not only the equal contributions of scholars of both the text and the context, but the critical engagement and creative imagination of the Muslim masses. This proposal for radical reform dramatically shifts the center of gravity of authority. It is bound to provoke controversy and spark debate among Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Tariq Ramadan is a Research Fellow at St. Antony's College, Oxford University and the Lokahi Foundation (London). He is the author of Western Muslims and the Future of Islam; Islam, the West, and the Challenges of Modernity ; and To Be a European Muslim .

Publish and be Damned

Title: Publish and be Damned
Author: Rajeev Dhavan
ISBN: 978-81-89487-45-4
Binding: Hardback
Date: 2008
Publisher: Tulika books
Number of Pages: 312
Price: INR 595.00

The essays collected in this volume explore the relationship between political and social censorship, and, more significantly, the rise of an insidious communal censorship that seeks to divide civil society and intimidate all those who value the gift of self-expression. They show how the forces of censorship in our society use lumpen power to threaten this gift of free speech as they burn books, silence dissent, destroy works of art, and intimidate the artist, researcher, writer, film-maker, actor and free thinker.The author reflects on how free speech in India has been compromised by state censorship through 'slapp' suits in court, and on issues of official secrecy, contempt of court, and censorship by intolerance in civil society and government. More specifically, he examines the uses and abuses of the law, the case of harassing Husain, the Danish 'Toon' controversy and the right to strike.The author argues, unrepentantly, that free speech has to be preserved in the overcrowded spaces of the media, on the streets and in the open spaces of our mind, against the onslaught of corporatism, doubtful governance and invidious divisiveness. Freedom of the mind and the right to self-expression and argument can only survive if intolerance is met with tolerance, and tolerance is not seen as weakness.Rajeev Dhavan was educated in Allahabad, Cambridge and London. He has taught at various universities, written several books and articles and is now a Senior Advocate practicing in the Supreme Court of India, having participated in some of the many campaigns described in this volume.

The Myth of the Holy Cow

Title: The Myth of the Holy Cow
Author: D.N. Jha
ISBN: 9788189059163
Binding: Paper
Date: 2009
Publisher: Navayana
Number of Pages: 208
Price: INR 200/-

With additional material: B.R. Ambedkar on beef-eating and untouchability.

In this book, historian Dwijendra Narayan Jha argues that the ‘holiness’ of the cow is a myth and its flesh played an important part in the cuisine of ancient India. Citing Hindu, Buddhist and Jaina religious scriptures, he underlines the fact that beef-eating was not Islam’s ‘baneful bequeathal’ to India. Nor can abstention from it be a mark of ‘Hindu’ identity, notwithstanding the averments of Hindutva forces who have tried to foster the false consciousness of the ‘otherness’ on the followers of Islam.

This new Navayana edition features an excerpt from Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s 1948 work on the connections between untouchability and beef-eating. Ambedkar marshals evidence to argue that in the Vedic period, ‘for the Brahmin every day was a beef-steak day.’

“While cow veneration and vegetarianism may be the hallmarks of Hinduism today, Jha compiles copious evidence that this has hardly always been the case.” — New York Times

“Jha draws on an amazingly wide range of material … an enlightening endeavour, demonstrating a critical understanding of a popular misconception.” — Journal of Asian Studies

“Jha traces the history of the doctrine forbidding the eating of cows… soundly and thoroughly covering both the classic texts and cutting-edge scholarship, Indian and European.” — Times Literary Supplement

“This little gem of a book provides a wealth of evidence exposing myth creation and the way symbols are used politically to divide people.” — Socialist Review

FASCINATING HINDUTVA: Saffron Politics and Dalit Mobilisation

Title: FASCINATING HINDUTVA: Saffron Politics and Dalit Mobilisation
Author: BADRI NARAYAN
ISBN: 9788178299068
Binding: Paper
Date: December 2008
Publisher: SAGE India
Number of Pages: 216

Price: INR 295/-

In the present socio-political scenario of India, Dalits have emerged as a major force in the electoral arena and politically mobilising them has almost become a compulsion for all political parties.
Fascinating Hindutva: Saffron Politics and Dalit Mobilisation is a deconstruction of the fascinating tactics used by the Hindutva forces to politically mobilise Dalits. Based on original empirical data from extensive field work in UP and Bihar, the book documents how the Hindutva forces are adept at digging out the myths, memories and legends of Dalit castes that are popular at the local level and reinterpreting them in a Hinduised way. They project the heroes of these myths and popular folk narratives either as brave Indian warriors who protected the Hindu religion and culture from the Muslim invaders of the medieval period, or as reincarnations of Lord Rama, so as to link the myths of these Dalit castes with the unified Hindu meta-narrative. The author has also tried to deconstruct the making of the ‘popular’ in the North Indian rural society and investigate the communal elements induced in it.
Interestingly, the author argues that this reinterpretation of the past serves as a powerful cultural capital for the Dalit communities, who use it, on the one hand, to seek acceptance from the upper caste Hindus by glorifying their caste position and, on the other, to subvert the dominance of the upper castes.
The book will interest a wide readership including students, academicians and researchers in the fields of History, Political Science, Anthropology and South Asian Studies, as well as political activists.