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The essays in this volume speak of Indian, British, American, Latin American narra-tives, with an emphasis on forms,
ideologies and class relations. They cohere around several themes: the connections between local, metropolitan and colonial
geographies as they bear on debates about epistemological uncertainty; the transnational and regional production of
ideologies under the aegis of colonialism; ways of theorizing women’s literacy, labour and agency, and consent to patriarchal
arrangements and ideologies. The essays provoke retheorizing of: the varied ensembles of ‘English’ in India; the relationships between ‘literature’ and the non-literary; the divisions between the metropolitan and the subcontinental. Notions of cultural autonomy, hybridity, precapitalist essentialisms and some
anticolonialisms are interrogated through an egalitarian feminism. And the reformulation of patriarchal ideologies through the interdependent constitution of race, caste, class, religious difference, misogyny, turns the multiple locations of women into an object of critique. The essays can be read as mapping a
politics of ‘the possible’. This presents itself in several registers: as a more sensitive feminist historiography; as a reinflection of
culture that keeps alternatives open for integrative political praxis; as social possibilities for the secular in a situation
that seems to deny it; as historical possibilities created by contradictions that did not have inevitable outcomes; as
resistant elements produced through contradictions between multiple structures of oppression. Kumkum Sangari teaches English at Indraprastha College, Delhi University, and is at present a professorial fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Studies, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi. She has published extensively on literature, critical theory, religious
conversion, medieval devotional traditions, and contemporary gender issues. Among her edited volumes are Women and
Culture, Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, and From Myths to Markets: Essays on Gender. Paperback xIix + 504 pages
8.5 x 5.5 inches ISBN: 81-85229-45-7
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