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Resisting Paradise asserts the importance of both tourism and diaspora in shaping Caribbean cultural and sexual identity. It examines Caribbean cultural producers who contend with the region’s overdependence on the tourist industry and address the many ways that tourism continues the legacy of colonialism. The book explores the relationship between culture and sex within the production of paradise and investigates the ways in which Caribbean writers, artists, activists, and other cultural producers respond to and powerfully resist this production. Forms of resistance include critiquing exploitation, challenging dominant narratives of history, exposing tourism’s influence on cultural and sexual identity in the Caribbean and its diaspora, and offering alternative models of tourism and travel. Resisting Paradise offers an intriguing emphasis on Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora subjects as travelers and as cultural workers contributing to alternative and resistant understandings of tourism in the Caribbean. Through a unique multi-disciplinary approach to comparative literary analysis, interview material, and participant observation, Angelique V. Nixon analyzes the ways Caribbean cultural producers are taking control of representation and sustaining subjectivity. While focused mainly on the Anglophone Caribbean, the study covers a range of geographical territories including Antigua, The Bahamas, Grenada, Haiti, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago. Overall, the book utilizes a transnational feminist postcolonial framework in order to theorize “resisting paradise” and the sexual-cultural politics of tourism. This research posits an intervention within tourism and diaspora studies by making gender and sexuality the center of inquiry and analysis.

Since the 1960s, universities have ignited new discourse as free speech movements, LGBT, feminism movements in the West. Universities not only served as centers of learning but also promoted resistance through critical thinking. The recent wave of student resistance in India has brought the role of the university to the forefront. The University as a Site of Resistance analyses massive protests that emerged in the aftermath of Rohith Vemula’s death in Hyderabad Central University, as well as the Azadi Campaign started by Jawaharlal Nehru University students in Delhi in 2016. Taking Osmania University in Hyderabad as a case study, the book provides an ethnographic account of the emergence of one of India’s longest student movements— the movement for Telangana statehood. Since its inception in the 1960s to its culmination in the formation of Telangana state in 2014, students at Osmania University played a decisive role. The book discusses protest strategies, methods, and networks among students. It also examines the role played by various caste and sub-caste groups and civil society in making the movement a success. The author argues that contemporary identity-based student movements are primarily cultural movements. As the traditional caste and class analysis becomes redundant to explain such contemporary collective action, the book establishes these unique resistances as New Social Movements and claim that these movements contribute to the democratization of institutional spaces. In this context, the volume provides a conceptual debate on contemporary cultural politics among university students.

The government of early modern Japan (1603-1868), the Tokugawa shogunate, consistently demonstrated a keen interest in regulating the outwardly inconsequential urban popular culture of Edo (present-day Tokyo)— fashion, leisure, street entertainments, woodblock prints, novella, and theater— as part of the effort to preserve its power and authority. This work probes how and why popular cultural practices occupied such a central place in governmental policies and shows how literary, visual, and theatrical practices of representation defied the official images of desirable subjects, which were designed to reflect a strict hierarchical organization of social order based on status and division of labor. Furthermore, the book looks at the important shift in the regulation of popular culture from the Tokugawa regime to Japan’s first modern state, the early Meiji government (1868-1890). By examining this shift, it outlines a general theory of the transformation in modes of subject-formation from Tokugawa to Meiji, and thus provides a new way to critically conceptualize this momentous historical change.

Vidyapati was a poet and a scholar who lived in the fifteenth century north Bihar and composed nearly a dozen texts on varied themes in three languages. The book focuses on three of Vidyapati’s texts: Likhanāvalī, a Sanskrit treatise on writing letters and documents; Puruṣaparīkṣā, a Sanskrit compilation of mytho-historical stories focused on masculinity and political ethics; and Kīrtilatā, a political biography in Apabhraṃśa of a prince of Mithila composed in the ākhyāyikā style. Together, these compositions provide an exciting entry point into the knowledge formations of the fifteenth century. As such, the book marks a fascinating reading of politics in the literatures of a time that is known for a notorious absence of any ‘imperial’ formation. It does so by placing each of the three texts side by side with other texts composed earlier on identical or similar themes, genres, and ideas in the same and other languages. A critical historicization of the language, composition, and contents of the texts reveal an exciting and messy world of idioms, ideas, and skills drawn from different literary-political traditions. Strikingly, each upheld the ideal of imperium and provided for the cultivation of skills, ethics, and useable pasts appropriate for imperial projects. The book argues that the literary visions that sustained (and gained from) the imperial states in the earlier centuries did not disappear with the disintegration of the Delhi Sultanate. They lingered and found hospitable grounds in humbler locations. Vidyapati inherited and reworked these visions into newer, more ‘actionable’ knowledge forms.