Unsettling India: Affect, Temporality, Transnationality
Purnima Mankekar is Professor in the Departments of Gender Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India and coeditor of Media, Erotics, and Transnational Asia, both also published by Duke University Press.
Affective Objects: India Shopping in the San Francisco Bay Area
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Published:January 2015
This chapter focuses on grocery stores in the San Francisco Bay Area that sell “Indian” commodities. These stores are fraught social spaces that enable customers, owners, and community members to emplace themselves along a sedimented landscape shaped by race, class, gender, and ethnicity: unlike the idealized and placeless NRIs constructed by Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, customers navigate a complex social terrain. These stores also formed a crucial node in the production of sense memories and sensuous knowledges that enabled the simultaneous reification and unsettlement of India and Indianness and, thereby, participated in the construction of India as an archive of...
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