This book gives a detailed political analysis of nationbuilding processes and how these are closely linked to statebuilding and to issues of war crime, gender and sexuality, and marginalization of minority groups. With a focus on the Indian subcontinent, the author demonstrates how the state itself is involved in the construction of a gendered identity, and how control of women and their sexuality is central to the nationbuilding project. She applies a critical feminist approach to two major conflicts in the Indian subcontinent – the Partition of India in 1947 and the Liberation War of Bangladesh in 1971 – and offers suggestions for addressing historical injustices and war crimes in the context of modern Bangladesh. Addressing how the social and political elites were able to construct and legitimize a history of the state that ignored these issues, the author suggests a critical re-examination of the national narrative of the creation of Bangladesh which takes into account the rise of Islamic rights and their alleged involvement in war crimes. Looking at the impact that notions of nation-state and nationalism have on women from a critical feminist perspective, the book will be an important addition to the literature on gender studies, international relations and South Asian politics.

This volume foregrounds some of the unknown or lesser-known incidents of xenophobia and genocide from India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, South Africa, and Rwanda. It critically analyses the cultural and structural contexts triggering these various forms of genocides and xenophobia, and situates them within modern histories of violence and human tribulations. The book discusses various non-Western case studies, which include the communal violence incited by anti-CAA protests in Delhi; the expulsion and displacement of Kashmiri Pandits; xenophobic attitudes against illegal immigrants in Assam; genocide in Sylhet during the Liberation War of Bangladesh; the 1994 genocide in Rwanda; and incidences of human rights violations across the world. A comprehensive and transdisciplinary text, the book will be useful for students and researchers of human geography, sociology, political science, social work, anthropology, colonialism and postcolonialism, nationalism, imperialism, human rights, and history.

The genocides of modern history–Rwanda, Armenia, Guatemala, the Holocaust, and countless others–and their effects have been well documented, but how do the experiences of female victims and perpetrators differ from those of men? In Women and Genocide, human rights advocates and scholars come together to argue that the memory of trauma is gendered and that women's voices and perspectives are key to our understanding of the dynamics that emerge in the context of genocidal violence. The contributors of this volume examine how women consistently are targets for the sexualized violence that serves as an instrument of ethnic cleansing, how female perpetrators take advantage of the new power structures, and how women are involved in the struggle for justice in post-genocidal contexts. By placing women at center stage, Women and Genocide helps us to better understand the nexus existing between misogyny and violence in societies where genocide erupts.

This book offers the first substantial critical examination of men and masculinities in relation to political crises in South Asian literatures and cultures. It employs political crisis as a frame to analyze how South Asian men and masculinities have been shaped by critical historical events, events which have redrawn maps and remapped or unmapped bodies with different effects. These include colonialism, anti-colonialism, state formations, civil wars, religious conflicts, and migration. Political crisis functions as a framing device to offer nuances and clarifications to the assumed visibility of male bodies and male activities during political crisis. The focus on masculinities in historical moments of crisis divests masculinity of its naturalization and calls for a heterogeneous conceptualization of the everyday practices and experiences of ‘being a man.’ Written by scholars from a variety of theoretical perspectives and disciplinary approaches, and drawing on a range of written and visual texts, this book contributes to this recent rethinking of South Asian literary and cultural history by engaging masculinity as a historicized category of analysis that accommodates an understanding of history as differentiated encounters among bodies, cultures, and nations. This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.

The Sexual Violence and Impunity in South Asia research project (coordinated by Zubaan and supported by the International Development Research Centre) brings together, for the first time in the South Asian region, a vast body of research on this important, and yet silenced, subject. Six country volumes (one each on Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and two on India, as well as two standalone volumes) comprising over 50 research papers and two book-length studies, detail the histories of sexual violence and look at the systemic, institutional, societal, individual and community structures that work together to ensure that impunity for perpetrators is more or less inbuilt. As many of the authors argue, the very nature and conditions of sexual violence in the South Asian region lend themselves to a silencing process, or, at a minimum, a reluctance to address it head on, something that may at least partially explain why accountability for sexual violence remains such a distant horizon. This volume focuses on Bangladesh, a nation born in 1971, in a birth that was as marked by bloodshed as it was by sexual violence. The history of widespread sexual violence, and incidents of sexual slavery, as well as the absence of accountability for the perpetrators, is by now well known. The essays here address the structural dynamics of impunity at the individual and societal levels, looking not only at the conditions that go into its creation, but also the elements that fuel it. They ask what helps it to become so embedded and point to its human, global and national costs. Together they explore the ways in which the women's movement and feminist practice have worked to demand accountability and recognition for the victims and survivors of sexual violence, challenging the impunities embedded in the patriarchal structures of Bangladeshi society. In doing so, they bear witness to the continuing efforts of women's groups in Bangladesh to give this crucial issue the attention that it deserves, for without that, justice for victims and survivors will remain elusive.

In the past century, South Asia underwent fundamental cultural, social, and political changes as many countries progressed from colonial dominations through nationalist movements to independence. These transformations have been intricately bound up with the spatiality of social life in the region, drawing further attention to the significance of social spaces within transformative politics and identity formations. Gender, Place, and Identity of South Asian Women studies contemporary literature of South Asian women with a focus on gender, place, and identity. It contributes to the debate on gender identity and equality, spatial and social justice, women empowerment, marginalization, and anti-discrimination measures. Covering topics such as partition memory narrative, spatial mobility, and diasporic women’s lives, this book is an essential resource for students and educators of higher education, researchers, activists, government officials, business leaders, academicians, feminist organizations, sociologists, and researchers.

In South Asia massive anticolonial movements in the twentieth century created nation-states and reset national borders, forming the basis for emerging film cultures. Following the upheaval of the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 and the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, new national cinemas promoted and reinforced prevailing hierarches of identity and belonging. At the same time, industrial and independent cinemas contributed to remarkably porous and hybrid film cultures, reflecting the intertwining of South Asian histories and their reciprocal cultural influences. This cross-fertilization within South Asian cultural production continues today. South Asian Filmscapes excavates these complex politics and poetics of bordered identity and crossings through selected histories of cinema in South Asia. Several essays reveal ways in which fixed notions of national identity have been destabilized by the cross-border mobility of filmed arts and practitioners, while others interrogate how filmic politics intersects with discourses of nationalism, sexuality and gender, religion, and language. Together, they offer a fluid approach to the multiple histories and encounters that conjure “South Asia” as a geographic and political entity in the region and globally through a cinematic imagination.