The Vagabond in the South Asian Imagination

Resilience, Agency and Representation
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-032-04031-8
Verlag: Taylor & Francis

Buch, Englisch, 172 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 254 g

This book discusses the epistemic foundation of the heuristic construct ‘vagabond’ and the convergence between the politics of itinerancy and that of dissent in the context of South Asia.

It describes the fraught relationship between ‘native’ itinerant practices and techniques of governmentality which have furnished different categorizations and taxonomies of mobility. The book demonstrates the historical seismic breaks – from the Orientalist to the post-Orientalist, from the premodern to the modern, and from the colonial to the post-colonial – in the representation of the vagabond in the juridico-political imagination, in historiography and cultural articulation. For instance, the drunk European sailor, the quasi-religious mendicant, and the helpless famine refugee have all been referred to as ‘vagabonds’ in the colonial archive. This book examines the histories and conditions behind these conceptual overlaps, as well as the uncanny associations among categories that uneasily coexist and mirror each other as subsets of a vast range of phenomena, which may loosely be called ‘vagabond(age)’.

This volume will be of interest to students and researchers of literature, cultural studies, colonial and post-colonial studies, history, migration studies, sociology, and South Asia studies.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ray, Avishek

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Stadt- und Regionalsoziologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften Interdisziplinär Regionalwissenschaften, Regionalstudien

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Figures and Illustrations. Acknowledgements. 1. Introduction Part I: The Rupture(s) in the Non-West 2. Sacralizing the Vagabond: The Pre-History 3. Colonial Bengal and the Case of Mimicry 4. Insurgent Vagabond: The Postcolonial Turn Part II: Imag(in)ing the Vagabond: Virulent Mobility in Post-Colonial Times 5. Demographics and Territoriality 6. Picturing the Vagrant: Resurrecting from the Abyss of Proscription 7. Itinerancy as a Critique of Development Part III: Literarizing the Vagabond: Towards a Radical Theory of Wandering 8. The Politics of Orientalism and Pitfalls of Scripto-centricism 9. The Chimeral Face of History: Buddhist Subversion Reconsidered 10. Postcolonial Literature: The Return of the Repressed 11. Epilogue Index.

Über Autor(innen)

Avishek Ray teaches at the National Institute of Technology, Silchar. His research pivots around, broadly speaking, travel and mobility. He is the co-editor of Nation, Nationalism and the Public Sphere: Religious Politics in India (2020). His research appears in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Tourism Culture & Communication, the Journal of Literary Studies, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, the Multicultural Education Review, the Journal of Human Values, among others. He has held research fellowships at the University of Edinburgh, Purdue University Library, the Centre for Advanced Study, Sofia, Mahidol University, and Pavia University.