Professor of gender studies and Asian American studies Purnima Mankekar will discuss her new book, “Unsettling India: Affect, Temporality, Transnationality" (Duke University Press), 12-1:30 p.m. on Friday, May 15 in the Young Research Library presentation room. The free talk, followed by an author signing, will also welcome UCLA anthropology professor Sherry Ortner as a respondent.
In "Unsettling India," Mankekar offers a new understanding of the affective and temporal dimensions of how India and "Indianness," as objects of knowledge production and mediation, circulate through transnational public cultures.
Based on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in New Delhi and the San Francisco Bay area, Mankekar's book tracks the sense of unsettlement experienced by her informants in both places, disrupting binary conceptions of homeland and diaspora as well as the national and transnational.
Mankekar examines Bollywood films, Hindi TV shows, advertisements and such commodities as Indian groceries as interconnected nodes in the circulation of transnational public cultures that continually reconfigure affective connections to India and what it means to be Indian both inside and outside of India. Drawing on media and cultural studies, feminist anthropology and Asian/Asian American studies, the book deploys unsettlement as an analytic to trace modes of belonging and not-belonging.
RSVP and learn more about the event here.
