This book is scheduled to be released in October 2024 and is now available to pre-order.
‘Bodies beyond Binaries’ advances the historiographical debate around the body in colonial and postcolonial Asia. Opening new research avenues that go beyond the binaries that have sometimes permeated previous scholarly contributions, this book explores not just the direct colonial encounter, but also wider global interconnections and flows involved in the making of knowledge, cultural constructions, and ‘techniques’ of the body.
Throughout the volume, critical concepts such as gender, sexuality, race, class, caste, and religion intersect and dialogue with supposedly binary categories of corporeality such as ruled and unruly, emotional and trained, mobile and confined, and respectable and deviant. Problematised and transcended, these categories reveal their ambiguous and malleable nature.
Bringing together a range of contributions from established and emerging scholars working on different Asian regional and transregional foci, ‘Bodies beyond Binaries’ offers insights that are not simply relevant across Asia and within colonial settings, but also question Western-centric and culturally essentialist perspectives on the history of the body.
Kate Imy is a screenwriter and historian at Texas Woman’s University and author of ‘Faithful Fighters: Identity and Power in the British Indian Army’, which won the NACBS Stansky Prize and the American Historical Association’s Pacific Coast Branch Book Award. Her second book, ‘Losing Hearts and Minds: Race, War, and Empire in Singapore and Malaya, 1915-1960’ is forthcoming with Stanford University Press. She has received the AHA’S Bernadotte Schmitt Grant, a Lee Kong Chian Fellowship from the National University of Singapore and Stanford University, a Fulbright fellowship in India, and a fellowship from the Institute of Historical Research (UK).
Teresa Segura-Garcia is a Tenure-track Professor of Modern South Asian History at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. She holds a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge. She has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, with an ICAS:MP fellowship by the M. S. Merian – R. Tagore International Centre of Advanced Studies. Her recent publications include the edited volume ‘Unexpected Voices in Imperial Parliaments’ (Bloomsbury, 2021) and a chapter on the Indian princely states in the ‘Routledge Handbook of the History of Colonialism in South Asia’ (edited by Harald Fischer-Tiné and Maria Framke, 2021).
Elena Valdameri is Senior Researcher at the Professorship for the History of the Modern World, ETH Zurich. She is the author of ‘Indian Liberalism between Nation and Empire. The Political Life of Gopal Krishna Gokhale’ (Routledge, 2022). She works on the history of modern South Asia, with specific interest and expertise in the history of political thought, the anticolonial movement, the politics of the body and citizenship. Her current project examines the role of physical education and outdoor activities for girls and women in late colonial and early independent India as a part of broader modernizing projects that focused on the body as a site of political intervention and used it to convey norms and values of ‘good’ citizenship.
Erica Wald is a Senior Lecturer in modern history at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research focuses on the social, cultural and military history of colonial India. She is the author of ‘Vice in the Barracks: Medicine, the Military and the Making of Colonial India’ (2014). Her current project, ‘Everyday Empire: Social Life, Spare Time and Rule in Colonial India’ is an exploration of the intersections of social life and colonial rule. She is the co-editor of the British Journal for Military History.
