"A groundbreaking move beyond the first generation of postcolonial criticism."—Nancy Armstrong, Brown University

In Religion and Women in India, Tanika Sarkar provides an account of gender prescriptions and proscriptions and their operation among various Indian religious communities, beginning with early British rule and concluding in the late twentieth century. Tracking various shifts and displacements in doctrinal thought and practice, she argues that Indian modernity was initiated largely through debates on gender, scripture, custom, and caste, which shaped ideal forms of masculine and feminine conduct. She demonstrates the organization of a modern public sphere around the controversies, cultural imaginaries, and political agitations over such issues as the age of consent, child marriage, widow remarriage, rape laws, and intercaste and interfaith relations. Gender norms are shown leaching into social attitudes, labor processes, and legal rights—leading eventually to modern Indian feminism. Closely analyzing the interpenetration and co-constitution of religion, politics, and gender in India, while also comparing parallel developments in Pakistan and Bangladesh, this pioneering work offers a brilliant and synthesizing account of the battles between orthodoxy and its opponents over two hundred years. No historian, no feminist, no student of politics can afford to miss it.

This book interprets a number of Dickens' works through the detailed analysis of a single characterization in each. It is mainly concerned with the textual functions of characters, i.e., with how analyses of Dickens's methods of characterization help us understand what characters do within his texts. The author presents a selective variety of major and minor characters. Included are examples from the three main periods of Dickens's career, from his non-fiction as well as fiction, and from the combination of both that is Sketches by Boz. There is an emphasis on the later books and particularly on Our Mutual Friend. Contents: IntroductionóSome Sketches by Boz; Modifying SummariesóThe Fat Boy in The Pickwick Papers; Young Bailey in Martin Chuzzlewit; Gaffer Hexam in Our Mutual Friend; NarratorsóSome Epistolary Personae; The Troubled Traveler in Pictures From Italy; The Sentimental Paternalist in A Christmas Carol; Extending the Interface: The Third Narrator in Bleak House; The Middle-aged Businessman: The Narrator of Great Expectations; Sexism and Class Bias: The Narrator of Our Mutual Friend; Two Re-readersóKnowing What Happens in Our Mutual Friend; Droodiana and The Mystery of Edwin Drood; Characterisation and Ideas in Little Dorrit: Clennam and Calvinism; Characterisation and Structure: John Harmon in Our Mutual Friend; Story and Text.

More than 600 women and girls have been murdered and more than 1,000 have disappeared in the Mexican state of Chihuahua since 1993. Violence against women has increased throughout Mexico and in other countries, including Argentina, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Peru. Law enforcement officials have often failed or refused to undertake investigations and prosecutions, creating a climate of impunity for perpetrators and denying truth and justice to survivors of violence and victims’ relatives. Terrorizing Women is an impassioned yet rigorously analytical response to the escalation in violence against women in Latin America during the past two decades. It is part of a feminist effort to categorize violence rooted in gendered power structures as a violation of human rights. The analytical framework of feminicide is crucial to that effort, as the editors explain in their introduction. They define feminicide as gender-based violence that implicates both the state (directly or indirectly) and individual perpetrators. It is structural violence rooted in social, political, economic, and cultural inequalities. Terrorizing Women brings together essays by feminist and human rights activists, attorneys, and scholars from Latin America and the United States, as well as testimonios by relatives of women who were disappeared or murdered. In addition to investigating egregious violations of women’s human rights, the contributors consider feminicide in relation to neoliberal economic policies, the violent legacies of military regimes, and the sexual fetishization of women’s bodies. They suggest strategies for confronting feminicide; propose legal, political, and social routes for redressing injustices; and track alternative remedies generated by the communities affected by gender-based violence. In a photo essay portraying the justice movement in Chihuahua, relatives of disappeared and murdered women bear witness to feminicide and demand accountability. Contributors: Pascha Bueno-Hansen, Adriana Carmona López, Ana Carcedo Cabañas, Jennifer Casey, Lucha Castro Rodríguez , Angélica Cházaro, Rebecca Coplan, Héctor Domínguez-Ruvalcaba, Marta Fontenla, Alma Gomez Caballero, Christina Iturralde, Marcela Lagarde y de los Ríos, Julia Estela Monárrez Fragoso, Hilda Morales Trujillo, Mercedes Olivera, Patricia Ravelo Blancas, Katherine Ruhl, Montserrat Sagot, Rita Laura Segato, Alicia Schmidt Camacho, William Paul Simmons, Deborah M. Weissman, Melissa W. Wright

This book views domesticity through multiple frames and surveys the rhetoric and practices of domestication in contemporary cultures. It also examines the consequences and costs of homemaking in various geographic and textual locations.

This reference offers reliable knowledge about women's diverse faith practices throughout history and prehistory, and across cultures. Across the span of human history, women have participated in world-building and life-sustaining cultural creativity, making enormous contributions to religion and spirituality. In the contemporary period, women have achieved greater equality, with more educational opportunities, female role models in public life, and opportunities for religious expression than ever before. Contemporaneously with this increased visibility, women are actively and energetically engaging with religion for themselves and for their communities. Drawing on the expertise of a range of scholars, this reference chronicles the religious experiences of women across time and cultures. The book includes sections on major religions as well as on spirituality, African religions, prehistoric religions, and other broad topics. Each section begins with an introduction, followed by reference entries on specialized subjects along with excerpts from primary source documents. The entries provide numerous suggestions for further reading, and the book closes with a detailed bibliography.

Maggie Nelson provides the first extended consideration of the roles played by women in and around the New York School of poets, from the 1950s to the present, and offers unprecedented analyses of the work of Barbara Guest, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Eileen Myles, and abstract painter Joan Mitchell as well as a reconsideration of the work of many male New York School writers and artists from a feminist perspective.

Why Tibetan monks are setting themselves on fire Since the 2008 uprising, nearly 150 Tibetan monks have set fire to themselves in protest at the Chinese occupation of their country. Most have died from their injuries. Author Tsering Woeser is a prominent voice of the Tibetan movement, and one of the few Tibetan authors to write in Chinese. Her stirring acts of resistance have led to her house arrest, where she remains under close surveillance to this day. Tibet On Fire is her account of the oppression Tibetans face and the ideals driving those who resist, both the self-immolators and other Tibetans like herself. With a cover image designed by Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei, Tibet on Fire is angry and cogent: a clarion call for the world to take action.

The author, a historian of repute, confronts important issues of Indian history in this classic work. He raises such questions as “Was there an Aryan Invasion of India in the past?”, “Is the caste system a bane or a boon?”, “Did Indian women enjoy equal rights in ancient times?”, “Was Democracy an alien concept to Vedic Indians?”, “Why Buddhism became extinct in the country of its origin?”, “What is India’s lasting contribution to the field of Science, Mathematics, Astronomy, Medicine, Chemistry, Metallurgy, etc.?”, “Was Indian Culture greatly impacted by foreign religions?”, “How did India influence its neighbouring Eastern and Western countries?”, “Is Sanskrit only an off-shoot of the Indo-European Languages Group?”, “What was the scale of the social, economic and political implosion detonated by two centuries of British Colonial Rule?”. The author has answered the above vexing questions based on an intensive study of Archaeology, Epigraphy, Numismatics, original records in different languages and the travelogues of foreign visitors.(Translator’s Note).