A carefully crafted selection of essays from international experts, this book explores the effect of colonial architecture and space on the societies involved – both the colonizer and the colonized. Focusing on British India and Ceylon, the essays explore the discursive tensions between the various different scales and dimensions of such 'empire-building' practices and constructions. Providing a thorough exploration of these tensions, Colonial Modernities challenges the traditional literature on the architecture and infrastructure of the former European empires, not least that of the British Indian 'Raj'. Illustrated with seventy-five halftone images, it is a fascinating and thoroughly grounded exposition of the societal impact of colonial architecture and engineering.

Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities considers the ways in which modernity was constructed, in all its incompleteness, through colonialism. Using a variety of archival resources and equally diverse methodologies, the authors trace modernity's unstable foundations in the slippages and ruptures of colonial gender and sexual politics. As a whole, the essays illustrate that modern colonial regimes are never self-evidently hegemonic, but are always in process - subject to disruption and contest - and never finally accomplished; and are therefore unfinished business.

Presenting cutting-edge scholarship dedicated to exploring the emergence and articulation of modernity in colonial South Asia, this book builds upon and extends recent insights into the constitutive and multiple projects of colonial modernity. Eschewing the fashionable binaries of resistance and collaboration, the contributors seek to re-conceptualize modernity as a local and transitive practice of cultural conjunction. Whether through a close reading of Anglo-Indian poetry, Urdu rhyming dictionaries, Persian Bible translations, Jain court records, or Bengali polemical literature, the contributors interpret South Asian modernity as emerging from localized, partial and continuously negotiated efforts among a variety of South Asian and European elites. Surveying a range of individuals, regions, and movements, this book supports reflection on the ways traditional scholars and other colonial agents actively appropriated and re-purposed elements of European knowledge, colonial administration, ruling ideology, and material technologies. The book conjures a trans-colonial and trans-national context in which ideas of history, religion, language, science, and nation are defined across disparate religious, ethnic, and linguistic boundaries. Providing new insights into the negotiation and re-interpretation of Western knowledge and modernity, this book is of interest to students and scholars of South Asian Studies, as well as of intellectual and colonial history, comparative literature, and religious studies.

Un becoming Modern: Colonialism, Modernity, Colonial Modernities explores the vital impact of the colonial pasts of India, Mexico, China, and even the United States on the processes through which these countries have become modern. The collection is unique as it brings together a range of disciplines and perspectives. The topics discussed include the Zapatista movement in southern Mexico, the image of the South in recent African-American literature, the theories of Andre Gunder Frank about the early modernization of Asian countries, and the contradictions of the colonial state in India.

A look at how the 1931 International Colonial Exposition in Paris created hybrids of French and colonial culture.

The subject of medicalisation of childbirth in colonial India has so far been identified with three major themes: the attempt to reform or ‘sanitise’ the site of birthing practices, establishing lying-in hospitals and replacing traditional birth attendants with trained midwives and qualified female doctors. This book, part of the series The Social History of Health and Medicine in South Asia, looks at the interactions between childbirth and midwifery practices and colonial modernities. Taking eastern India as a case study and related research from other areas, with hard empirical data from local government bodies, municipal corporations and district boards, it goes beyond the conventional narrative to show how the late nineteenth-century initiatives to reform birthing practices were essentially a modernist response of the western-educated colonised middle class to the colonial critique of Indian sociocultural codes. It provides a perceptive historical analysis of how institutionalisation of midwifery was shaped by the debates on the women’s question, nationalism and colonial public health policies, all intersecting in the interwar years. The study traces the beginning of medicalisation of childbirth, the professionalisation of obstetrics, the agency of male doctors, inclusion of midwifery as an academic subject in medical colleges and consequences of maternal care and infant welfare. This book will greatly interest scholars and researchers in history, social medicine, public policy, gender studies and South Asian studies.

Urban Modernities reconsiders Japanese colonialism in Korea and Taiwan through a relational study of modernist literature and urban aesthetics from the late colonial period. By charting intra-Asian and transregional circulations of writers, ideas, and texts, it reevaluates the dominant narrative in current scholarship that presents Korea and Taiwan as having vastly different responses to and experiences of Japanese colonialism. By comparing representations of various colonial spaces ranging from the nation, the streets, department stores, and print spaces to underscore the shared experiences of the quotidian and the poetic, Jina E. Kim shows how the culture of urban modernity enlivened networks of connections between the colonies and destabilized the metropole-colony relationship, thus also contributing to the broader formation of global modernism.