Angry citizens: civic anger and the politics of curative democracy in India

This article examines the emergence of the angry citizen as a legitimate political actor in post-colonial Indian democracy. Approaching such ‘civic anger’ as a historically constituted and socio-politically embedded formation rather than as a subjectively and individually experienced feeling, I show that the rise of the angry citizen was linked to the consolidation of a distinctive politics of curative democracy in the ‘long 1970s’. The lineages of the civic anger of twenty-first century India may be traced to this older formation of curative democracy. The point here is not to offer a chronological revision of the origins of ‘new India’, but to consider the generalisable political implications of the idea of curative democracy, and to identify the distinctive forms of political agency that are associated with the call to cure, reform or renew democracy.     

Answering the Call: Virtual Migration in Indian Call Centres

This paper explores the daily, psychic journeys Indian call center agents undergo as they ‘virtually migrate’ between India and the US. A thin cable that runs half way around the globe bridges the ‘here’ and the ‘there’, connecting agents to faraway customers in real time. The new time-space relations generated by this virtual contact create conditions for these workers to undergo a global ‘migration’ from India and to America, even as their bodies remain bounded within the national homeland. To accommodate the US American workday, Indian agents often work the nightshift and sleep during the day, leaving them little time for family, friends, and cultural events. This temporal arrangement displaces them from the daily rhythms of Indian life, generating a sense of loss, longing, and nostalgia for ‘India’. Further, while agents experience a sense of distance from India, they also experience a movement toward ‘America’. Agents’ accounts suggest a feeling of living between worlds, yet their movement is decoupled from physical migration.     

Clearing the air: American Indian tribal college students' exposure to second hand smoke & attitudes towards smoke free campus policies

Objective: The purpose of this study was to examine knowledge, awareness, and support for campus smoke-free policies. Participants: 1,256 American Indian tribal college students from three tribal colleges in the Midwest and Northern Plains. Methods: Data are from an observational cross-sectional study of American Indian tribal college students, collected through a web-based survey. Results: Only 40% of tribal college students reported not being exposed to second hand smoke in the past 7 days. A majority of nonsmokers (66%) agreed or strongly agreed with having a smoke-free campus, while 34.2% of smokers also agreed or strongly agreed. Overall, more than a third (36.6%) of tribal college students were not aware of their campus smoking policies. Conclusions: Tribal campuses serving American Indian students have been much slower in adopting smoke-free campus policies. Our findings show that tribal college students would support a smoke-free campus policy.     

1933年前后英国对中国新疆政策述论

本文利用英国印度事务部档案，了1933年“东突厥斯坦伊斯兰共和国”伪政权出笼前后英国对中国新疆的政策，认为英国政府对新疆的基本政策是稳定和连贯的，其核心是支持中国对新疆的主权，尽力利用新疆地方政府遏制苏联渗透，英国并不是伪政权的幕后策划者，也非支持者。     

Diaspora and cultural heritage: the case of Indians in Canada

The present paper examines the historical and contemporary context of Indian communities in Canada from a cultural heritage perspective and analyses the processes of migration, settlement and cultural identity. It also examines the challenges of developing museum exhibits which depict the Indian diaspora in Canada. Despite its colourful history and its growing size and prominence in Canadian society, the Indian diaspora has not been the subject of much interest by Canadian museums. While recognising the necessity of working with local communities and thereby reflecting local concerns, it is submitted that any museum exhibit attempting to portray the complex set of experiences of the Indian diaspora in Canada should include some portrayal of the highly marginalised position which the Indian community faced when it first established themselves in the early 1900s. In addition to this historical focus, any attempt to portray the contemporary Indian diaspora needs to portray its growing diversity and its efforts to maintain, and in many cases modify and ‘hybridise’, cultural practices. Such a display would also have to reflect the influence of transnational forces on the contemporary Indian diaspora. Ultimately, efforts by museums to develop exhibits reflecting the Indian presence in Canada will only further the aims of its widely praised state policy of multiculturalism.     

The Columbian Patriot:

The name of Mercy Otis Warren is generally not included among those of the founders of the American republic. Yet there were few individuals of her day who were more consistently dedicated in both deeds and words to the proposition that the new nation should be founded on republican principles. She deserves a preeminent position among the active participants in the American Revolution. She was a significant force in the debates leading to the ratification of the Constitution and to the eventual adoption of the Bill of Rights. She was the only contemporary woman to write a comprehensive history of the American Revolution, and she was the only historian of the time to write from a republican viewpoint. She successfully balanced traditional femininity with principled political and intellectual activism. Her contemporary influence makes her truly a participating founder of the nation.     

GENDERED SPECTRE

The focus of this essay is gendered collective memory of the partition of the Indian sub-continent in 1947, at the time of Independence from British rule. The essay addresses the question of whether there are similarities between trauma studies that developed within a Western Freudian psychoanalytic framework and the anti-colonial theory practiced by decolonizing nations. Taking two women's texts, the essay examines how gender manifests itself within the framework of trauma and how it is played out in collective memory of partition. The texts chosen raise interesting questions about gender, trauma and the nation and provide an alternative non-Western framework through which the trauma of partition can be read. The essay points to how the category of memory and its meanings vary in their national, cultural and historical specificity.     

试论苏联乌赫塔-伯朝拉劳改营的兴衰

20年代末苏联政府决定以犯人之力开发伯朝拉边疆区的矿产资源，并为此在荒无人烟的地区建立了劳改营。经过多年的发展和几次改组，乌赫塔-伯朝拉劳改营从最初几百人的考察队发展为数万人的大型劳改一生产综合体。50年代末至60年代初，随着苏联国内政治局势的改变，劳改制度逐渐退出历史舞台，乌赫塔-伯朝拉劳改营也随之衰落，直至关闭。