Election campaigns, political events, and national celebration days in Malawi usually feature groups of women who dance and perform songs of praise for politicians and political parties. These lively performances help to attract and energize throngs of prospective voters. However, as Lisa Gilman explains, “praise performing” is one of the only ways that women are allowed to participate in a male-dominated political system.
Although political performances by women are not unique to Malawi, the case in Malawi is complicated by the fact that until 1994 all Malawianwomen were required to perform on behalf of the long-reigning political party and its self-declared “President for Life,” Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda+. This is the first book to examine the present-day situation, where issues of gender, economics and politics collide in surprising ways. Along with its solid grounding in the relevant literature, The Dance of Politics draws strength from Gilman’s first-hand observations and her interviews with a range of participants in the political process, from dancers to politicians.
The Rigveda is the oldest Indian and one of the oldest Indo-European texts. It is a collection of 1,028 hymns addressed to the gods, composed in highly poetic and notoriously difficult Archaic Sanskrit. Medieval Indian commentaries and especially the modern Western scholarship of the past 150 years have increasingly shed more light on its poetry, religion, and ritual as well as on its contemporary meaning.
The Rigveda has been translated in scholarly fashion only once during the twentieth century, and that was into German in 1951 by K. F. Geldner and published in three separate volumes of Harvard Oriental Studies, numbers 33, 34, and 35. Renou's French and Elizarenkova's Russian translations closely follow Geldner's. Geldner's volumes have long been out of print; they are reprinted here in one useful reference volume.
What is colonialism and what is a colonial state? Ranajit Guha points out that the colonial state in South Asia was fundamentally different from the metropolitan bourgeois state which sired it. The metropolitan state was hegemonic in character, and its claim to dominance was based on a power relation in which persuasion outweighed coercion. Conversely, the colonial state was non-hegemonic, and in its structure of dominance coercion was paramount. Indeed, the originality of the South Asian colonial state lay precisely in this difference: a historical paradox, it was an autocracy set up and sustained in the East by the foremost democracy of the Western world. It was not possible for that non-hegemonic state to assimilate the civil society of the colonized to itself. Thus the colonial state, as Guha defines it in this closely argued work, was a paradox--a dominance without hegemony.
Dominance without Hegemony had a nationalist aspect as well. This arose from a structural split between the elite and subaltern domains of politics, and the consequent failure of the Indian bourgeoisie to integrate vast areas of the life and consciousness of the people into an alternative hegemony. That predicament is discussed in terms of the nationalist project of anticipating power by mobilizing the masses and producing an alternative historiography. In both endeavors the elite claimed to speak for the people constituted as a nation and sought to challenge the pretensions of an alien regime to represent the colonized. A rivalry between an aspirant to power and its incumbent, this was in essence a contest for hegemony.
What do India’s millennials want and how are they transforming one of the youngest, most populous nations in the world?
More than half of India is under the age of twenty-five, but India’s millennials are nothing like their counterparts in the West. In a country that is increasingly characterized by ambition and crushing limitations, this is a generation that cannot—and will not—be defined on anything but their own terms. They are wealth-chasers, hucksters, and fame-hunters, desperate to escape their narrow prospects. They are the dreamers.
Award-winning journalist Snigdha Poonam traveled through the small towns of northern India to investigate the phenomenon that is India’s Generation Y. From dubious entrepreneurs to political aspirants, from starstruck strivers to masterly swindlers, these are the clickbaiters who create viral content for Facebook and the internet scammers who stalk you at home, but they are also defiant student union leaders determined to transform campus life. Poonam made her way—on carts and buses, in cars and trucks—through India’s badlands to uncover a theater of toxic masculinity, a spirited brew of ambition, and a hunger for change that is bound to drive the future of the country.
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