ABSTRACT
This volume investigates how four socially constructed identities (race, gender, class and caste) can be rethought as matrices designed to accumulate various kinds of socio-economic values and to translate and transfer these values from one group to another. Essays in the anthology also attempt to compare the mechanisms deployed by various groups to consolidate identificatory investments. Drawn mainly for the fields of literary and cultural studies, the essays are grouped in four categories. Essays collected under ‘Theoretical Approaches’ scrutinize the relative value of various approaches; those collected under ‘Considerations of Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation’ examine the interaction between these three categories in formation of identities; those grouped under ‘Comparative Analysis of African-American and Dalit Writing’ provide comparative analyses of the literary productions of these two oppressed groups; and, finally, those under ‘The Persistence of Racialized Perceptions’ focus on the role of ideologically inflected perception of European colonizers and the persistence of such perception in the categorization and treatment of colonial migrants to the metropolis.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|94 pages
Theoretical Approaches
chapter 4|31 pages
What Lacan and Agamben Can Do for Subjectivity in the Age of Globalization
part II|167 pages
Considerations of Race, Gender and Sexual Orientation
chapter 6|41 pages
‘There Comes Papa’
chapter 8|20 pages
Multiple Burdens, Multiple Identities
part III|40 pages
Comparative Analysis of African–American and Dalit Writing
chapter 12|14 pages
Towards a Theoretical Proposition for the Understanding of Caste and Race
chapter 13|12 pages
Towards Reconstructing Caste, Class and Gender
part IV|82 pages
The Persistence of Racialized Perceptions