Time Warps
Silent and Evasive Pasts in Indian Politics and Religion
Ashis Nandy, one of India’s foremost public intellectuals, contends in this book that India’s political and cultural élites have been trying to impose a secular ideology on their country. This ideology makes little sense to most Indians, who have their own religious and cultural lives, their own diverse pasts, and their own principles of tolerance and hospitality.
Religious extremists have exploited this tension by offering packaged forms of ancient faiths, with ready-made theories of violence and hatred. The resulting clash has fragmented Indians’ views of their precolonial past as well as their increasingly globalized present. In a country with deep roots in legendary pasts, some of these pasts have been made “silent” or “evasive” in the service of modern ideological agendas. They are no longer as easily drawn upon to oppose the forces of intolerance and hatred.
Most of the essays survey the ways in which India’s colonial secularism has produced some of the conditions for the current rise of Hindu nationalism. He shows how both religious nationalists and secular modernists have employed the colonial state’s ideology-producing power to blend the “religious” and “secular” domains. In the process, the indigenous traditions battling sectarianism and religious extremism have been marginalized. Nandy argues that it is possible to reclaim India’s rich, multicultural pasts and alternative forms of cosmopolitanism in order to rescue a truly multicultural present.
Frankenstein
Penetrating the Secrets of Nature
Frankenstein: Penetrating the Secrets of Nature accompanies a traveling exhibit of the same name. This lavishly illustrated volume begins by highlighting Shelley's novel and the context in which she conceived it. It next focuses on the redefinition of the Frankenstein myth in popular culture. Here, the fate of the monster becomes a moral lesson illustrating the punishment for ambitious scientists who seek to usurp the place of God by creating life. The final section examines the continuing power of the Frankenstein story to articulate present-day concerns raised by new developments in biomedicine such as cloning and xenografting (the use of animal organs in human bodies), and the role scientists and citizens play in determining acceptable limits of scientific and medical advances.
Missions for Science
U.S. Technology and Medicine in America's African World
When I Look into the Mirror and See You
Women, Terror, and Resistance
A Guide to Bird Finding in New Jersey
Backroads, New Jersey
Driving at the Speed of Life
Shaded Lives
African American Women and Television
In Shaded Lives, Beretta Smith-Shomade sets out to dissect images of the African American woman in television from the 1980s. She calls their depiction "binaristic," or split. African American women, although an essential part of television programming today, are still presented as distorted and deviant. By closely examining the television texts of African-American women in comedy, music video, television news and talk shows (Oprah Winfrey is highlighted), Smith-Shomade shows how these voices are represented, what forces may be at work in influencing these images, and what alternate ways of viewing might be available.