{"title":"Durba Mitra","description":"\u003cp\u003eDurba Mitra offers a thought-provoking exploration of historical narratives with a focus on the intimate and often overlooked aspects of society. Her works, such as \u003cem\u003eIndian Sex Life\u003c\/em\u003e, delve into the complexities of cultural and social history, challenging conventional perspectives.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eReaders interested in the nuances of history and military contexts will find her writing both insightful and evocative. Through meticulous research and engaging prose, Mitra illuminates the connections between personal experiences and broader historical forces.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"indian-sex-life-by-durba-mitra-9780691196343","title":"Indian Sex Life","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHow British authorities and Indian intellectuals developed ideas about deviant female sexuality to control and organise modern society in India.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eDuring the colonial period in India, European scholars, British officials, and elite Indian intellectuals—philologists, administrators, doctors, ethnologists, sociologists, and social critics—deployed ideas about sexuality to understand modern Indian society. In \u003cem\u003eIndian Sex Life\u003c\/em\u003e, Durba Mitra shows how deviant female sexuality, particularly the concept of the prostitute, became foundational to this knowledge project and became the primary way to think and write about Indian society.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eBringing together vast archival materials from diverse disciplines, Mitra reveals that deviant female sexuality was critical to debates about social progress and exclusion, caste domination, marriage, widowhood and inheritance, women's performance, the trafficking of girls, abortion and infanticide, industrial and domestic labour, indentured servitude, and ideologies about the dangers of Muslim sexuality. British authorities and Indian intellectuals used the concept of the prostitute to argue for the dramatic reorganisation of modern Indian society around Hindu monogamy.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eMitra demonstrates how the intellectual history of modern social thought is based in a dangerous civilisational logic built on the control and erasure of women's sexuality. This logic continues to hold sway in present-day South Asia and the postcolonial world.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eReframing the prostitute as a concept, \u003cem\u003eIndian Sex Life\u003c\/em\u003e overturns long-established notions of how to write the history of modern social thought in colonial India, and opens up new approaches for the global history of sexuality.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"NewSouth Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46849316258028,"sku":"9780691196343","price":232.0,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/1950573482434.jpg?v=1759039253"},{"product_id":"the-future-that-was-by-durba-mitra-9780691233604","title":"The Future That Was","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eHow Third World women seized the means of knowledge production to fight against rising authoritarianism and imagine a future freer than our present.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eBeginning in the 1970s, women of the decolonising world offered new visions of liberation that centred the ideas and lives of women. Galvanised by International Women’s Year in 1975 and the UN’s Decade of Women, Third World women developed novel ideas of equality and self-determination, building a new internationalism in opposition to neocolonialism and postcolonial authoritarianism. In \u003ci\u003eThe Future That Was\u003c\/i\u003e, feminist historian Durba Mitra offers a pathbreaking account of how these women wrote Third World feminism into being, catalysing a momentous expansion of knowledge about women, gender, and sexuality that transformed emancipatory politics across the globe.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eMitra shows how women from former colonies in South Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and beyond envisioned a radically just world – and did so by insisting that research on the world’s women lay at the heart of debates about global inequality, development, and human rights. Women gathered at international conferences, wrote reports on the dangers facing women, and took to the streets in protest, building a world of knowledge that contested the devastating effects of patriarchy and colonialism. Yet, despite hundreds of laws, institutions, and publications created through the efforts of these women, the future they imagined was never fully realised. \u003ci\u003eThe Future That Was\u003c\/i\u003e transforms the story of decolonisation and its aftermath through the history and ideas of women. By excavating these vital pasts, Mitra shows how we might envision a future of our own that is freer than the present.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Hachette Aotearoa New Zealand","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":67712234356972,"sku":"9780691233604","price":69.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/9780691233604-the-future-that-was-1.jpg?v=1791852833"}],"url":"https:\/\/bookhero.pro\/collections\/durba-mitra.oembed","provider":"Book Hero","version":"1.0","type":"link"}