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The Scandal of the State

Women, Law, and Citizenship in Postcolonial India
  • Rajeswari Sunder Rajan
  • Edited by: Inderpal Grewal , Caren Kaplan and Robyn Wiegman
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2003
View more publications by Duke University Press
A John Hope Franklin Center Book
This book is in the series

About this book

A major postcolonial feminist theorist explores the gendered nature of citizenship and the state.

Author / Editor information

Rajeswari Sunder Rajan is Reader in English and Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Oxford. She is the author of Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture, and Postcolonialism and editor of Signposts: Gender Issues in Post-Independence India.

Reviews

The Scandal of the State is filled with Rajeswari Sunder Rajan's trademark scrupulousness and full documentation of opposing views, yet also with her characteristic wit and deep political wisdom. Her ultimate indictment of the realities of the Indian state is biting and utterly persuasive. This is a brilliant, pathbreaking book.”—Bruce Robbins, author of Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress

"Utterly specific to postcolonial India and its feminist debates, this book is also a significant contribution to general feminist theory and to the fraught question of the relationship of the postcolonial state to the ‘international civil society.’ Rajeswari Sunder Rajan uses ‘high theory’ occasionally, creatively, critically. All feminists (and, indeed, antifeminists) should read this book, if only to discover the one moment in this sober, meticulously researched, analytical text when political passion breaks through to the vision of a chilling dystopia."—Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, author of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present

“A valuable addition to the tiny but growing body of work on the sociology of Indian law. The book is a fine-grained feminist reading of postcolonial Indian citizenship, as revealed in its various failures.”

-- Kriti Kapila PoLAR

"The . . . Rajan volume-appropriate for advanced undergraduate and graduate classes as well as the specialist in Indian politics-add[s] rich case studies to the well-established field of feminist postcolonial modernity, paving the way for future works to imagine effective feminist resistance."

-- Paige Johnson Tan Perspectives on Politics


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I Women in Custody

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II Women in Law

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III Killing Women

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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
April 9, 2003
eBook ISBN:
9780822384830
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Main content:
336
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