Book Description:
While globalization is often credited with the eradication of ‘traditional’ constraints tied to gender and caste, in reality the opening up of the Indian economy in the 1990s has led to a decline in freedom for many female, Dalit, and lower class Indians.
This book explores the contraction of what it means to be free in post-liberalization India, examining how global capitalism has exacerbated existing inequalities based on traditional femininities and masculinities, while also creating new hierarchies.
Freedom Inc. argues that post-1990s literature and culture frequently represents and reinforces the equation of free-market capitalism with individual freedom within the new ‘idea of India.’ However, many texts often also challenge this logic by pointing to more expansive horizons of autonomy for the gendered self.
Through readings of texts as diverse as Dalit women’s life-writing, pop fiction, realist novels, self-help, regional film, and Netflix TV shows, Mangharam investigates how notions like ‘free trade,’ ‘entrepreneurship,’ and ‘self-help’ are experienced, embodied, and challenged by disadvantaged peoples, and by women differently than men. In the process, Freedom Inc. explores how different literary forms illuminate alternative and buried pathways to fuller freedoms.
Author:
Professor Mukti Mangharam (English, Rutgers-New Brunswick)
Mukti Lakhi Mangharam is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Dr. Mangharam works on world literatures and postcolonial studies, Human Rights and Literature, Comparative Modernities, and Feminism and Gender Studies. She has published widely in journals including Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, Diacritics, ELH, ARIEL, and Safundi.
Professor Mangharam’s first book is Literatures of Liberation: Non European Universalisms and Democratic Progress (Ohio State UP, 2017), which explores the role that syncretic lineages of universalisms of freedom and equality played in challenging colonial and home-grown hierarchies of caste, gender, and race in India and South Africa. The book explores the way that regional literary traditions – including oral poetry, religious verse, and folk storytelling as well as global forms such as the novel posit a notion of a shared, universal humanity through these home-grown ‘contextual universalisms.’
Discussant:
Professor Johan Mathew (History, Rutgers-New Brunswick)
Johan Mathew is Associate Professor of History and Director of the South Asian Studies Program at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Dr. Mathew is a cultural and social historian of the economy with a particular interest in illicit commerce and how it shapes modern capitalism. Geographically, he has focused on the Indian Ocean but he studies and teaches transnational and global history more generally. Before coming to Rutgers he was jointly appointed in the Departments of History and Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Jeffrey Immanuel
Jeffrey Immanuel is a PhD student in Geography at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Jeffrey’s research interests include caste, space, and nationalism.
Sweta Xess
Sweta Xess is a PhD student in Geography at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Sweta’s research interests include urban geography, critical caste studies, and gender and sexuality.
Organized by the Global Anti-Caste Thought Working Group
Sponsored by Global Asias: A School of Arts and Sciences Initiative