In Unsettling India, Purnima 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 tracks the sense of unsettlement experienced by her informants in both places, disrupting binary conceptions of homeland and diaspora, and the national and transnational. She 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 within the country and outside. Drawing on media and cultural studies, feminist anthropology, and Asian/Asian American studies, this book deploys unsettlement as an analytic to trace modes of belonging and not-belonging.
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1. Unsettlement
- 2. Moving Images: Reconceptualizing Indianness in Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge
- 3. Affective Objects: India Shopping in the San Francisco Bay Area
- 4. Transnational Hindi Television and the Unsettlement of Indianness
- 5. Global India and the Production of Moral Subjects
- 6. Aspirational India: Impersonation, Mobility, and Emplacement
- Coda. Unsettling Nations
- Notes
- References
- Index