Contesting Nation

Book excerpt: An innovative collection of essays on events and dynamics across South Asia, this volume addresses how violence marks the present in wars of direct and indirect conquest. Anti-colonial struggles that achieved independence to form postcolonial nation-states have consolidated themselves through prodigious violence that defines and disfigures communities and futures. This book examines the very borders such brutality enshrines and its intimate inscriptions upon bodies and memories, examining the performance of gendered violence through the spectacular and in everyday life, through wars, nationalisms and displacements. Women in and of South Asia offer inspired, gendered and contested histories of the discontinuous present, excavating nation-making and its intersections with projects of militarisation and cultural assertion, modernisation and globalisation, noting how Gujarat, post-9/11 mobilisations, and the war on Afghanistan and Iraq by Empire, signify the rapidity with which brutal events continue to encompass lives and cultures globally. Published by Zubaan.