The Postcolonial Moment in South and Southeast Asia [Hardcover]

By exploring themes of fragility, mobility and turmoil, anxieties and agency, and pedagogy, this book shows how colonialism shaped postcolonial projects in South and Southeast Asia including India, Pakistan, Burma, and Indonesia. Its chapters unearth the contingency and contention that accompanied the establishment of nation-states and their claim to be decolonized heirs.

The book places key postcolonial moments - a struggle for citizenship, anxious constitution making, mass education and land reform - against the aftermath of the Second World War and within a global framework, relating them to the global transformation in political geography from empire to nation. The chapters analyse how futures and ideals envisioned by anticolonial activists were made reality, whilst others were discarded. Drawing on the expertise of eminent contributors,The Postcolonial Moment in South and Southeast Asiarepresents the most ground-breaking research on the region.

Introduction

Fragility
1. False Truth : Decolonization, Disillusionment and Hope in the 1950s -Rotem Halperin Geva (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel)
2. The Enemy Within: Communism and the new Pakistani State -Kamran Asdar Ali (University of Texas, USA)
3. Contested Meanings of Post-colonialism and Independence in Burma -Mandy Sadan (School of Oriental and African Studies, UK)
4. The Marginal State: Practicing Islamic Statehood in Independent Indonesia -Chiara Formichi (Cornell University, USA)

Mobility and Turmoil
5. Taming of the Custodian: Evacuee Property Law and Economic Life in the Indian Republic -Rohit De (Yale University, USA)
6. Struggles for Citizenship around the Bay of Bengal -Sunil Amrith (Harvard University, USA)
7. Genealogies of Return: Postwar, Tamil Culture and the Bay of Bengal -Bhavani Raman (University of Toronto, Canada)

Anxiety and Agency
8. Anxious Constitutls