In Aryans, Jews, Brahmins, Dorothy M. Figueira provides a fascinating account of the construction of the Aryan myth and its uses in both India and Europe from the Enlightenment to the twentieth century. The myth concerns a race that inhabits a utopian past and gives rise first to Brahmin Indian culture and then to European culture. In India, notions of the Aryan were used to develop a national identity under colonialism, one that allowed Indian elites to identify with their British rulers. It also allowed non-elites to set up a counter identity critical of their position in the caste system. In Europe, the Aryan myth provided certain thinkers with an origin story that could compete with the Biblical one and could be used to diminish the importance of the West's Jewish heritage. European racial hygienists made much of the myth of a pure Aryan race, and the Nazis later looked at India as a cautionary tale of what could happen if a nation did not remain "pure." As Figueira demonstrates, the history of the Aryan myth is also a history of reading, interpretation, and imaginative construction. Initially, the ideology of the Aryan was imposed upon absent or false texts. Over time, it involved strategies of constructing, evoking, or distorting the canon. Each construction of racial identity was concerned with key issues of reading: canonicity, textual accessibility, interpretive strategies of reading, and ideal readers. The book's cross-cultural investigation demonstrates how identities can be and are created from texts and illuminates an engrossing, often disturbing history that arose from these creations.

Explores the construction of the Aryan myth and its uses in both India and Europe.

Explores the construction of the Aryan myth and its uses in both India and Europe.

A collection of essays focusing on myth in Judaism from biblical to modern times, this book offers a sense of the great diversity of the Jewish religion.

Figueira (comparative literature, U. of Illinois) identifies how the Gadamerian concept of prejudice in the form of specific exotic clichTs elucidates the dynamics of exoticism, while tracing Sanskrit studies in the West, focusing on 19th-century German, French, and English scholarship and also touching on 20th-century associations between Indo-Ger

Tracing the historical development of recent identity-based trends in literary theory to their roots in structuralism, Dorothy M. Figueira questions the extent to which theories and pedagogies of alterity have actually enabled us to engage the Other. She tracks academic attempts to deal with alterity from their inception in critical thought in the 1960s to the present. Focusing on multiculturalism and postcolonialism as professional and institutional practices, Figueira examines how such theories and pedagogies informed the academic and public discourse regarding September 11. She also investigates the theories and pedagogies of alterity as crucial elements in the bureaucratization of diversity within academe and discusses their impact on affirmative action.

This book analyzes the relation of public memory to history, forgetting, and selective memory in three late-twentieth-century cities that have confronted major social or political traumas—Berlin, Buenos Aires, and New York.

This book is a collection of letters from a religious Jew in Israel to a Christian friend in Barcelona on life as an Orthodox Jew. Equal parts lighthearted and insightful, it's a thorough and entertaining introduction to the basic concepts of Judaism.

This book argues that the dominant descriptions of the ‘caste system’ are rooted in the Western Christian experience of India. Thus, caste studies tell us more about the West than about India. It further demonstrates the imperative to move beyond this scholarship in order to generate descriptions of Indian social reality. The dominant descriptions of the ‘caste system’ that we have today are results of originally Christian themes and questions. The authors of this collection show how this hypothesis can be applied beyond South Asia to the diasporic cultures that have made a home in Western countries, and how the inheritance of caste studies as structured by European scholarship impacts on our understanding of contemporary India and the Indians of the diaspora. This collection will be of interest to scholars and students of caste studies, India studies, religion in South Asia, postcolonial studies, history, anthropology and sociology.