000			02417nam a22002657a 4500
008			191031b xxu||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
020			_a9780231196239
037			_cPurchased _nPrism Books,Kadavanthra
041			_aEnglish
082			_a305.42095414 _bPOU/EM
100			_aPoulomi Saha.
245			_aEMPIRE OF TOUCH : _bwomen's political labour and the fabrication of east bengal
250			_a1
260			_aNew York _b:Columbia University Press _c2019
300			_g319
500			_a In today's world of unequal globalization, Bangladesh has drawn international attention for the spate of factory disasters that have taken the lives of numerous garment workers, mostly young women. The contemporary garment industry - and the labor organizing pushing back - draws on a long history of gendered labor division and exploitation in East Bengal, the historical antecedent of Bangladesh. Yet despite the centrality of women's labor to anticolonial protest and postcolonial state-building, historiography has struggled with what appears to be its absence from the archive. Poulomi Saha offers an innovative account of women's political labor in East Bengal over more than a century, one that suggests new ways to think about textiles and the gendered labors of their making. An Empire of Touch argues that women have articulated--in writing, in political action, in stitching--their own desires in their own terms. They produce narratives beyond women's empowerment and independence as global and national projects; they refuse critical pronouncements of their own subjugation. Saha follows the historical traces of how women have claimed their own labor, contending that their political commitments are captured in the material objects of their manufacture. Her analysis of the production of historical memory through and by the bodies of women spans British colonialism and American empire, anticolonial nationalism to neoliberal globalization, depicting East Bengal between development economics and postcolonial studies. Through a material account of text and textile, An Empire of Touch crafts a new narrative of gendered political labor under empire.
650			_aIndia-Bengal.
650			_aWomen textile workers.
650			_a Women in development.
650			_a Politics and government.
650			_a Women-Political activity.
942			_cREF
942			_2ddc
942			_2ddc
999			_c177650 _d177650