Postcolonial Studies

ABSTRACT Since the signing of the Belfast Good Friday Agreement of 1998, Northern Ireland has made significant progress towards a postcolonising transformation of its political culture and its major political and social institutions, as it has shifted away from violence and the dominance of political ideologies structured by the friend–enemy distinction. These ideological formations and the practices of social and political antagonism that they prescribed have been challenged by adversary–neighbour ideological formations that construct identities and relations through more inclusive norms of recognition and that support a more complex emotional constellation. However, as this cultural transformation has been neither thoroughgoing nor universal, Northern Ireland finds itself in the somewhat counter-intuitive situation in which the shift away from the violence of the past has increased, rather than reduced, the ontological insecurity of its citizens. Moreover, as ontological security may be supported by either friend–enemy or adversary–neighbour ideological formations, two distinct ways in which ontological security may collapse or re-configure have emerged in Northern Ireland.

This paper examines alternatives to top-down approaches to heritage management and development. One of the key issues facing communities around the globe today is the Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD)--the determination of heritage values by “experts” and government officials on behalf of the people. It is all too common to find local people alienated by such practices and searching for ways in which they can take ownership of their own heritage. Community-based research that shares power and is participatory is one avenue that is quickly developing in many regions around the globe. In Africa, a number of villages and other small communities have taken the initiative to preserve and develop their heritage, free of outside control. Important lessons may be drawn from these experiences, particularly the use of discourse-based research that captures how the people define and live out their heritages through everyday practice.

Colonialism is a particular mode of domination exercised by a state or comparable entity over foreign lands and peoples. There is a good deal of overlap between the keyword colonialism and the more general concept of imperialism. The former has come to refer specifically to the European domination of vast expanses of the world during the modern period as well as to techniques of imperial control developed during this period and applied by powers such as Japan and the United States. Colonialism and decolonization have had a profound impact on all domains of cultural production, including music. After defining colonialism, this entry introduces some of the processes and musical effects of Western colonial expansion from the 15th century to the present.

This article sketches some of the main ideas that informed the work of the post-colonial Indian philosopher Margaret Chatterjee (1925-2019). A philosopher of language and religion, her work straddles the "frozen" traditions of the east and the west, and astutely philosophizes about Gandhian thought in the realm of religious alterity and coevality.

The book Nonidentities. Tillion, Fanon, Bourdieu, Derrida and the Dilemma of Decolonization presents the histories of four French-writing, XXth century intellectuals whose biographies were associated with Independence War-era Algiers. Its goal is such a reading of their works that could uncover its Algerian-French duality. On one hand, the experience of close, direct biographic contact with Algiers allowed for a view from a distance (cultural, social and political) on France and Europe, which sharpened the view and imbued it with characteristics of criticism, but on the other education in the French cultural circle allowed for a specific way of writing and thinking about Algiers, a specific way of understanding and experiencing it. At the same time, that specific way (ways), which was shaped by assumptions placed at the foundations of certain traditions of thinking and related interpretative strategies - displays its power, but also its limitations in the confrontation with experience. The postcolonial timbre that connects the works of those authors does not limit itself to the confines of a single theory, but is located inside the entirety of contemporary humanities. It gives it its dynamism, but it also blows it up, that is to say by not allowing a permanent identity to be established. The decolonization of Algiers was not just a direct cause of the crystallization of basic terms characteristic to emancipatory discourses of the second half of the XXth century and first decades of the XXIst, but also a kind of social laboratory in which previous-century ideas of classic social philosophy could be put to test.
In exposing the Algerian entanglement of those authors, I did not seek to reveal hitherto unknown facts. My intention was an attempt at reading their works in a way that would highlight the French-Algerian duality and that unfull, unfinal and unfree of doubt belonging, cut across by the unerasable boundary between the two opposing shores of the Mediterranean, between “metropole” and “colonies”, “North” and “South”. This boundary is not only variously present in the texts I analyze, but also is the foundation of their strength and originality.

“Here” and “there” are not stable references. “Here” can at one time in France, at another in Algiers. This is the source of alterity, of the reversibility of points of view. To paraphrase a popular notion by Claude Lévi-Strauss, one can say that on one hand an experience of close, direct, biographical contact with Algiers can allow a view from afar, that is a look at France and Europe from a cultural, social and political distance. This makes the view sharper and imbues it with critical strength. On the other, education in the French culture allows a certain way of writing and thinking Algiers, a certain way of understanding and experiencing it. At the same time, this way (or those ways, because they are multiple) - established through assumptions laying at the foundations of certain traditions of thought and interpretative strategies associated with them - reveals then its limitations through confrontation with experiences, that is with with people, living and dead, people in flesh and bone.

The work I am describing here is not a book about the history of Algiers, but rather about a few French-speaking French intellectuals. They were all connected through Algiers, but also divided in how their varied biographical experiences of contact with the stormy history of that country in the XXth century was then processed by them. In that, it served to create an important, although always obvious, element of their attitudes and ways of critically examining the social, cultural, political and ethical. Neither is it a work from the field of research on collective memory. I am not posing questions about the causes of forgetting the history of Algiers and the European, especially French, participation in its fates. I am not attempting to “unforget” that story. However, it is my intention to directly address the colonial entanglement of the thought of the authors described, so that it can be properly appraised in the context of their intellectual work. It will allow a better understanding of what they had to say, and who and where we are, when we today ask questions in the language framework they built.

Matters of Algiers are not ones I follow closely, and postcolonialism understood as a complete, ready theory is not a perspective I employ to read the texts. What I call anticolonial or postcolonial timbre in analyzed works is not limited to a single theory, but is at home at the heart of the entirety of contemporary humanities. It gives it its dynamism, but also blows it up, allowing no stable identity. In searching for ways that Western critical thought can follow after the works of Bourdieu or Derrida, we find evidence that it is not, and maybe has never been “Western” in the sense that the language of identity implies, and that it is its nonidentity that makes it positive.

Nonidentities. Tillion, Fanon, Bourdieu, Derrida and the Dilemmas of Decolonization came to be as a result of at least two years of research based on queries both locally and abroad. To write it, I used foreign-language sources and materials that are poorly or not at all known in the Polish humanities, and which I hope to introduce to the local academic exchange. Many of them should be translated into Polish. I attempted to write the book in a way that, in spite of its extensive bibliographical references, allows it to be read by audiences outside the academic circles. In my view, the matters that the described authors touch and which I highlight, often against the grain of traditional interpretations, are of utmost importance. They deal with matters such as immigration, cultural fundamentalism or violence in service of political aims. In materials analyzed I show, on one hand, the nonobviousness of those issues, and on the other cognitive limits of the tools usually utilized to describe them.

Media research is finally internationalizing in its geopolitical ambitions, but what does or should this mean for how scholars theorize, analyze, and evaluate data? At least three distinct claims are being made about the challenges of truly international media research.

Most ―mainstream accounts of the West-East divergence gain theoretical inspiration from Max Weber and/or Karl Marx, and have therefore traced the ―rise of the West to the unique social processes that apparently fostered capitalism in Europe. Critics have labelled these accounts ―Eurocentric insofar as they imply the inherent superiority of the West over the East,1 and they have offered alternative ―anti-Eurocentric narratives which ostensibly avoid such analytical and normative pitfalls. These critics have succeeded in directing our attention to experiences in the non-European world. However, they have sought to validate these experiences by simply extending (in space and time), rather than transcending, the problematic concepts and assumptions that plagued the ―Eurocentric Weberian and Marxist accounts of the origins of capitalism. This paper argues that a truly non-Eurocentric approach requires a definitive break with these assumptions and the adoption of an alternative historical materialist understanding of the origins of capitalism pioneered by Robert Brenner. While not explicitly conceived as non-Eurocentric, Brenner‘s concept of social-property relations offers the surest foundation for understanding ―the great divergence‖ without doing violence to history or succumbing to European triumphalism.

Not-guilty verdicts, mistrials, and impunity for the Bundy family and many of their supporters in the armed confrontations over public land use in Nevada and Oregon. Expanded access for private oil, gas, mining, and logging industries and the downsizing of national monuments such as Bears Ears lead by Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke. A number of highly contentious debates and sensationalized events have again focused attention on land held in the public domain by the United States. This essay argues that federal land policy as a form of colonial administration has been constitutive for the logic of expectation as property in what is now the United States. From the state land cessions negotiated on behalf of the Articles of Confederation to the preemption acts (1830–1841) to the homestead acts (1862–1916) to present-day demands for land transfer, the acquisition and disposal of the so-called public domain have been central to westward colonization, the consolidation of the nation-state, and the promise of land ownership as the ostensible foundation of individual liberty. These dynamics are evident in contemporary conflicts over public lands and arguments for the transfer of public lands to either state or private ownership. Approaching the Bundy occupations as flashpoints that illuminate competing interpretations and claims to land within the history of westward colonization, this essay seeks to demonstrate the ways in which expectation emerges from particular economies of dispossession of indigenous peoples that have historically worked through and across the division of public and private property.

This paper engages with the formative concepts of diversity and intersectionality, inquiring how far they are used as tools for achieving (gender) justice that opens up spaces for marginalized constituencies, including racial and religious minorities, colonial subjects, queers, and women and how they unwittingly reify the hegemony of an entitled majority by failing to realize their emancipatory possibilities.

URL: http://webhost1.cortland.edu/wagadu/

The dislocated, deterritorialized discourse produced by repatriates from formerly European colonies has remained overlooked in academic scholarship. One such group is the Eurasian “Indo” community that has its roots in the former Dutch East Indies, today’s Indonesia. This article focuses on Tjalie Robinson, the intellectual leader of this community from the 1950s to the mid-1970s. The son of a Dutch father and a British-Javanese mother, Robinson became the leading voice of the diasporic Indo community in the Netherlands and later also in the United States. His engagement resulted in the foundation of the Indo magazine Tong Tong and the annual Pasar Malam Besar, what was to become the world’s biggest Eurasian festival. Robinson played an essential role in the cultural awareness and self-pride of the eventually global Indo community through his elaboration of a hybrid and transnational identity concept. By placing his focus “tussen twee werelden” (in-between two worlds) and identifying “mixties-schap” (mestizaje) as the essential characteristic of Indo identity, Robinson anticipated debates on hybridity, transnationalism, and creolism that only much later would draw attention from scholars in the field of postcolonial studies. This article highlights Robinson’s pioneering role in framing a deterritorialized hybrid alternative to nationalist essentialism in the postcolonial era.

Compte rendu Hassan Rachik.- Le Proche et le lointain. Un
siècle d’anthropologie au Maroc, par Cédric Baylocq, 
Rachik nous offre ici une remarquable synthèse critique de
l’anthropologie orientaliste et postorientaliste qui se révèle très utile pour tout enseignant en anthropologie du Maroc…
Biais épistémologiques, ethnocentrisme, situation ethnographique, Edmond Doutté, Edward Westermarck, anthropologie coloniale, Jacques Berque, Clifford Geertz, Ernest Gellner

Development is a complicated word. In its most benign form, everyone can agree that babies should not die from malnourishment or preventable disease. In its more contentious form, development can be understood as a discursive taxonomy and hierarchy of states and ways of knowing the world that manifests as neo-imperialism. In this seminar, we consider how the modern notion of " development " as a contested discourse and practice came into existence. In particular, we will seek to better our understanding of how the colonial encounter in different parts of the world created the empirical and conceptual conditions, categories, and relations out of which the idea of modern development has emerged. We will consider the evolving colonial idea of "improvement " as it applied to peoples, places, and cosmologies, reading primary and secondary texts that will offer students of International Development Studies a strong intellectual foundation in the study and practice of "development."

The indigene/settler question has been central to scholarly discourses on land ownership, ethnicity and identity in Nigeria. The legacies of the 1804 Jihad and the subsequent divide and rule colonial model of governance are extant in the perennial struggles for territorial control and dominance of political, economic, religious and socio-cultural spaces. In Northcentral Nigeria, the Southern Kaduna scenario in Zangon Kataf presents a context of the overlaps of ethnoreligious crises across macro and micro spaces in which the broad Hausa versus non Hausa sentiments influenced the political, economic and social exclusion claims of the Atyap within the context of indigene/settler debates. The study results from a two-year ethnographic fieldwork in the community (between 2012 and 2014) during, which observations, key-informant interviews and focus group discussions were combined with historical data; in unpacking the political economy of the 1992 market crises, and also exploring the politics of inclusion as an effective management strategy on which different state interventions on recent crises in Southern Kaduna could be modelled.

This study aims at highlighting the role of the Irish theatre in reviving Irish culture and establishing a dependent Irish identity. It also seeks to prove that theatre is used as means of resistance to English colonialism; it presents W. B. Yeats as an example of the Irish dramatists who played a significant role in the recreation of Irish national identity as an independent distinct identity. Actually, Yeats' efforts in the national employment of literature for national purposes were the fountainhead by which he was able to present the national cause of his country. The study concludes that the Irish theatre played a great national role by presenting nationalism-oriented plays that aroused the sense of national feelings of audiences and created a national identity as well. Irish theatre imposingly for grounded itself powerfully not on the literary level, but also on the national level by its role in identity creation.

En faisant l’apologie d’une certaine manière de circuler entre les mondes, les promoteurs de l’ « afropolitanisme » cherchent à opposer un « style de vie » au raidissement afrocentriste qui travaille idéologiquement un continent africain pris dans de nombreuses contradictions postcoloniales. Les textes pleins d’humour et d’auto-dérision de l’écrivaine suisso-gabonaise Bessora nous donnent l’occasion d’interroger les conditions sociales d’une telle stylisation de la transculturalité, qui pourrait bien se retrouver prise au piège de centres-villes élitistes et mondains. En plaçant un style de vie et une manière d’écrire dans un horizon de séduction, Bessora remet en perspective les enjeux de genre, dans un monde de plus en plus menacé par une fracture sociale transculturelle, qui place les séducteurs et les séductrices du bon côté de la barrière.

This article examines how Salman Rushdie's Fury (2001) registers a signal crisis of American hegemony through its hyperreal production of an aesthetics of excess, constituted by fragmented subjectivities, a frenetic narrative form, references to the decaying years of the Roman Empire, and irruptions of violence against women. The text's libidinal investment of personal anguish with public discontent, or a psychopathological fury, is read through Fredric Jameson's account of third-world allegory as a symptom of the novel's registration of America's hegemonic decline. The scalping of several upper-class young women in New York City by their financier boyfriends is examined as an aspect of the text's aesthetics of excess and use of allegory, which frames the violent interrelation between public discontent and private hubris. The murdered women are read as symbols of American hegemony and class under threat by turbulent financial markets, and hoarding their scalps is represented as a crude and violent attempt by their boyfriends to halt the dwindling value of America's cultural capital and financial markets.

While " inclusion " has been seen as a central mode of redressing ongoing injustices against communities of color in the US, Indigenous political experiences feature more complex legacies of contesting US citizenship. Turning to an important episode of contestation, this essay examines the relation between inclusion and the politics of eliminating Indigenous nations that was part of a shared policy shift toward " Termination " in the Anglo-settler world of the 1950s and 1960s. Through a reading of Indigenous activist-intellectual Vine Deloria Jr.'s Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969), it demonstrates how the construction of what I call the " civic inclusion narrative " in post–World War II American political discourse disavowed practices of empire-formation. Widely considered a foundational text of the Indigenous Sovereignty Movement, the work repositioned Indigenous peoples not as passive recipients of civil rights and incorporation into the nation-state but as colonized peoples actively demanding decolonization. Deloria's work provides an exemplary counterpoint to the enduring thread of civic inclusion in American political thought and an alternative tradition of decolonization—an imperative that continues to resonate in today's North American and global Indigenous struggles over land, jurisdiction, and sovereignty.

The essay focuses on the “travel”of various debates—orientalism, post-colonialism, postzionism—between the U.S. and Israel, between one institutional zone and political semantics and another. Through a comparative history of these critical intellectual debates, the author considers some key moments and issues in the “translation” of Said’s ideas into Hebrew. The reception of Said’s work is engaged in its contradictory dimensions, especially in liberal-leftist circles, where the desire to go-beyond-Said offers some ironic twists. The issues examined include: the nature of the “post” in the concepts of the “post-colonial” and “post-Zionism”; the problem of “hybridity”and “resistance” in the land of partitions and walls; and the mediation in Israel, via the Anglo- American academy, of the “subaltern” intellectual.

Enacted February 24, 2014 and effective until August 1, 2014, Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act targeted Ugandans of minority sexual orientations and gender identities—many of whom self-identify as 'kuchu'—by imposing life sentences for homosexual sex and same-sex marriage. The original Anti-Homosexuality Bill introduced in 2009 promised even worse for kuchus: it would have mandated that all Ugandans report known homosexuals and threatened execution for serial offenders and other perpetrators of “aggravated homosexuality.” In the context of Ugandan political conflict, emerging international human rights norms, and global asymmetries of power, Uganda has become an ideological battlefront where competing actors—both US-based and Ugandan—advance their respective visions of a just and righteous global society. These factors mandate that US-based activists and organizations painstakingly consider how (or whether) they can advocate responsibly and effectively for international human rights related to gender identity and sexual orientation. Through interdisciplinary lenses and critical analysis, this paper explores three questions:

• How is Uganda distinct from other sites of antigay legislation?
• How have US-based organizations impacted Ugandan discourse and policy toward kuchus?
• How can US-based rights advocates and activists campaign for kuchus without doing them further harm?

Pre-print draft of an article to be published in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing

In the work of Zimbabwean novelist Yvonne Vera, land is shown to be a complex and contested resource to which the typically abject fates of her female protagonists are inextricably bound. As she put it in a 2001 interview shortly before the publication of her final novel: " the connection between women and land in Zimbabwe is negative ". This article situates Vera's work in the context of debates over Zimbabwean land reform, and considers examples of how the " negative " connection between women and land is articulated in her fiction through contrasting leitmotifs of abjection and habitat, culminating in the cautiously redemptive conclusion of her last published novel, The Stone Virgins (2002). The discussion draws on Silvia Federici's work on women, the body and primitive accumulation and on Jason Moore's theory of negative-value in the capitalist world-ecology, to account for why, in Vera's work, the female body is invariably positioned, abjectly, at the nexus of colonial governance and what David Moore has described as Zimbabwe's postcolonial regime of " violent accumulation " .

The Middle East played a critical role in the development of photography as a new technology and an art form. Likewise, photography was instrumental in cultivating and maintaining Europe’s distinctively Orientalist vision of the Middle East. As new advances enhanced the versatility of the medium, nineteenth-century photographers were able to mass-produce images to incite and satisfy the demands of the region’s burgeoning tourist industry and the appetites of armchair travelers in Europe. In this way, the evolution of modern photography fueled an interest in visual contact with the rest of the world.

Photography’s Orientalism offers the first in-depth cultural study of the works of European and non-European photographers active in the Middle East and India, focusing on the relationship between photographic, literary, and historical representations of this region and beyond. The essays explore the relationship between art and politics by considering the connection between the European presence there and aesthetic representations produced by traveling and resident photographers, thereby contributing to how the history of photography is understood.

No translation is a perfect replication. A translation may by judged on its uses of the gaps opened up between the original text and the new version. When Christian missionaries encountered the Panare people and discovered that they had no understanding of guilt, “something had to be concocted” so that the Panare might convert to Christianity. This paper explores the implications of translating the message of the death of Jesus Christ as: “The Panare killed Jesus Christ,” and then uses the insights of postcolonial theologians to point towards alternative possibilities for translating without imposing guilt and fear.

In 2008, sixty-one years after India’s independence from British rule, Scottish heritage professionals began an ambitious project to revive a neglected cemetery in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) with the backing of both the Scottish and West Bengal governments. As the final resting place of an estimated 2,000 Scots who lived and worked in Kolkata during the British colonial period, the cemetery was deemed of significant cultural and historical importance to Scotland. Shortly after work was begun on the conservation of the cemetery, Scotland and West Bengal took a further step to foster a stronger heritage relationship, signing a Protocol of Co-operation which was intended to facilitate Scottish involvement in additional conservation projects in Kolkata.

This paper will discuss Scotland’s on-going interests in Kolkata, and will highlight the role these heritage projects play in the broader political and/or diplomatic interests held by Scotland. In taking this approach this paper will also discuss the willingness of Indian authorities to be involved in such projects as part of a broader agenda to promote the city as a global attraction. This paper will argue that in recent years the ambitions of Scotland and Kolkata have aligned, and this has ultimately facilitated a heritage partnership based on a mutual desire for recognition of the Scottish nation and the West Bengal city as modern, enlightened entities.

NEW BOOK SERIES: Maritime Literature and Culture offers alternative rubrics for literary and cultural studies to those of nation, continent and area, which inter-articulate with current debates on comparative and world literatures, globalization and planetary or Anthropocene thought in illuminating ways. The humanities have paid increasing attention to oceans, islands and shores as sites of cultural production, while the maritime imagination in contemporary literatures and other cultural forms has presented ways of responding to human migration, global neoliberalism and climate change. This series provides a forum for discussion of these and other maritime expressions, including enquiries that engage maritime and coastal zones as spaces that enable reflection on labour and leisure; racial terror and performances of freedom; environmental wonder and degradation; metaphor and materiality; and the various implications of globe, world and planet.

This doctoral dissertation investigates the development of the norm of sovereignty as responsibility by focusing on its institutionalization in the framework of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Prominent observers have regarded the emergence of a new norm of sovereignty as responsibility as one of the most significant normative shifts in international society since the aftermath of World War II. Against this backdrop, accounts have proliferated situating the ICC at the cutting edge of normative change. The present study critically engages with the whole set of theoretical foundations underlying this view, including the conventional constructivist understanding of norm development upon which the latter is premised. This, on the one hand, emphasizes the importance of norm institutionalization within “tangible” sets of rules or organizations. On the other, it understands institutionalization itself as a moment of clarity and stabilization, thus largely reducing it to an end-point of the norm emergence process. In other words, norm institutionalization is confined to a positivist view in which institutions fall back to the role of neutral fora. The result is a linear, static, and largely depoliticized account of norm content, which, while yielding to the traditional lack of communication between normative and empirical studies, ends up reiterating a dichotomic and simplistic view in which norms are scripts of emancipation, and power a practice of domination. The dissertation aims to unravel this dilemma altogether by offering a step forward in the development of a post-positivist constructivist approach. In other words, it takes a genuinely trans-disciplinary perspective and delves into the configuration of normativity as part of institutional practice, paying special attention to how the relative power of relevant actors reconstitutes norms during norm negotiation and implementation. Hence, the study  unfolds from an unusual location – at the intersection between normative international theory and the politics of international criminal law; and from there, it seeks to revive discussions about the power-laden nature of the normative fabric of international society, its own dis-symmetries, and its outright hierarchies. To this end, the dissertation asks two major sequential questions: how the overarching system negotiated by states at the Rome Conference affects the selection of situations and cases before the ICC and their outcomes; and how the selection of situations and cases and their outcomes, in turn, “feeds back” to the norm of sovereignty institutionalized through the Court’s practice. The resulting analysis shows the following. While the Rome Statute reflects the persistence of the state as the primary site of political authority and coercion, it also cuts against the normative aspirations of sovereignty as responsibility by leaving the Court specifically ill-equipped to break with a notorious pattern of hyper-protected sovereignty. Outstanding issues such as the ICC’s selectivity and African bias, as well as the Court’s future prospects, are then reconsidered under this light. Those findings are then discussed in the final part of the study. Focusing on questions of delegation to international institutions, this ends with a note of caution. It concludes that the prospects of sovereignty as responsibility, as well as the broader discussion about cosmopolitan governance, lie more with the re-politicization of the debate than a straightforward invocation of greater forms of supranationalism.

pp. 45-75.

This chapter builds off of Nuala Finnegan’s recent work on Rulfo’s influential 1955 novella Pedro Páramo, and Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s 1949 Irish-language classic Cré na Cille.  Both texts deploy the fragmented and decomposing speech of the dead in order to vocalize the trauma perpetrated upon impoverished rural communities in the aftermath of the early-20th century revolutions that shook Mexico and Ireland alike (the 1910 Revolution and 1916 Easter Rising respectively).  This chapter also pushes back against the larger critical tendency to presume these communities to be de facto failed states.  Turning instead to critic Yvette Jiménez-Báez, this chapter examines how the dead voices in both texts reformulate and revive their decimated communities via the Carnivalesque.

In 1972, Syed Mustafa Siraj (1930-2012) published Māyā Mridanga, a novel which has attained an iconic status in recent years[1], with the advent of queer studies and a proliferation of queer texts in South Asia. Since its first appearance, the novel, set within an almost extinct itinerant folk theatre group, Alkaap, drew the attention of scholars working on aboriginal and folk cultures of Bengal; but, they have largely ignored Siraj’s declaration in the 1972 preface that the novel primarily deals with the cross-dressing male actors (p.5), the chhokras–jara purush tobu purush noy, nari – tobu nari o noy (Men, who are not men, but women – yet, not quite women either, p. 12). Siraj’s novel is a rare modern Bengali text to address deep philosophical questions of sexual subject formation, of essence and existence, of being and becoming.

These two chapters provide an illuminating political and cultural history of the interior design of India’s presidential residence which was originally designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens to be the house for the British viceroy. They also provides a detailed catalogue of select artworks kept in the house. Rich illustrations reveal how the interiors stand now, and they are contrasted with archival photographs that show how the house has evolved over the past 90 years including previously unpublished plans and sketches for the décor of the interiors of the house some of which date back to as early as 1914—these provide a rare
glimpse into how it was originally intended.
While the architecture of the actual edifice of the Rashtrapati Bhavan may be Lutyens’s most enduring legacy, the interiors of the building preserve a much more versatile history. These chapters trace how Lutyens achieved a stylish interior that accommodated the tastes and needs of various British aristocratic residents, politicians and bureaucrats, but equally had to impress an Indian public—for which, it needed also to incorporate a vocabulary of Indian design ornament. After the independence of India, many symbols of the colonial empire were rendered inappropriate and the interiors of the Rashtrapati Bhavan had to be transformed into the home of the president of a democratic republic with a rich history. This glimpse into the tastes of its different residents and the compulsions that guided them traces a most telling history of a changing world.