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This book is a collection of essays written from a Marxist feminist perspective, seeking to make a contribution in the field of historical sociology. The essays speak of the different ways in which social subjects and their agencies have been constructed
and represented in the context of the development of colonial hegemony and socio-cultural formations in India. The book primarily focusses, through four essays, on the constructive proposals for social subjectivities and agencies of Bengali
middle-class women by both the indigenous and the colonial elite. The remaining two essays speak of the invention or construction of “India’ as an ideological category for ruling, signalling towards a colonially ascribed identity. The essays capture the fluidity and complexity of subject construction or
formation, and read moral regulations and culture in terms of a hegemonic process. They range from middle-class Bengali
women’s attempts at self-fashioning, to the colonial ideological reflexes within which their projects are articulated. They both
disclose and query the tensions inherent in the processes of indigenous socio-cultural constructions and identity formations, and the reductionism involved in the creation of colonial ‘others’. Patriarchy and gender organization are treated in these essays as
more than ‘women’s problems’, as essentially constitutive domensions of hegemony, no matter aspired to by whom. Himani Bannerji is an Associate Professor of Sociology at York niversity, Toronto, Canada, and has an active research and
teaching connection with India, especially West Bengal, through the School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. She has taught and published extensively in the fields of Marxist theory, antiracist feminism, critical cultural studies, and on gender, nationalism and colonialism. She is the author of several
books, including The Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism and Racism (2000), The Mirror
of Class: Essays on Bengali Theatre (1998), and Thinking Through: Essays on Feminism, Marxism and Antiracism (1995). She is the editor of Returning the Gaze: Essays on Racism, Feminism and Politics (1993), and has most recently co-edited Of Property and Propriety: The Role of Gender and Class in
Imperialism and Nationalism (2001). 2001 Hardback xii + 222 pages
8.5 x 5.5 inches ISBN: 81-85229-47-3
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