Unsettling India: Affect, Temporality, Transnationality by Purnima Mankekar

Abstract

Purnima Mankekar, Unsettling India: Affect, Temporality, Transnationality. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. 301 pp.Purnima Mankekar's monograph, Unsettling India: Affect, Temporality, Transnationality, is a dazzling example of the melding of ethnography and theory at its best. It is replete with detailed ethnographic vignettes, rich theoretical insights, and methodological, analytical, and conceptual innovation. Mankekar's project is to highlight the constitution and production of India and through the study of cultures among Indians both home (in India) and abroad (in the San Francisco Bay Area in the US). In doing so, she examines the production of India and Indianness through feminist analysis of textual and ethnographic archives of affect and temporality.I read the book-taking meticulous notes-while conducting follow-up fieldwork research in Kampala, Uganda. I often marveled at the ways in which analyses in the text spoke to the conditions and nature of the multiple South Asian diaspora communities that I was studying-as well as the of ethno-racial insecurity that circulate in postcolonial East Africa. Indeed, this work highlights both the analytical possibilities and limitations of predominant usages of diaspora in South Asian studies. It argues for the need to focus on connectivities between home and abroad diaspora populations via an analysis of cultures, as well as focusing on themes of affect and temporality in the study of diasporas and cultures. Critically, Mankekar provides the reader with a conceptual and theoretical framework for studying affect and temporality within a anthropological framework.Chapter 1 outlines the concept of as both an ethnographic and an analytic lens in the study. Mankekar noted that unsettlement occurs at two registers: at the level of subject formation, as when subjects are formed through unsettlement, and as a framework for thinking about the relationship between media, culture, and culture/ change (19). Through the selective staging of evocative ethnographic vignettes, Mankekar explores the sense of unsettlement among her informants in India and in the San Francisco Bay Area, examining how cultures enable the reconstitution of India and Indianness for these subjects. As a part of her broader political project, she deploys the notion of unsettlement, rather than diaspora, as a tool for denaturalizing the claims of the nation. This chapter, entitled Unsettlement, offers a rigorous and at times dense outline of the methodological, conceptual, theoretical, and epistemological interventions of the book. Indeed, I found it more helpful to go back to this first chapter to help grasp its arguments once I had read the analyses in the other chapters. It contains a lot of theoretical jargon that demands slow reading and needs to be unpacked by the reader in order to understand the construction of Mankekar's complex arguments.Embedded in her analysis is a re-theorization of public culture such that she conceives of public cultures in terms of and sensorial ecologies produced by the circulation of media and commodities (6). She builds on the work of Raymond Williams (1977); Benedict Anderson (1991); Charles Peirce (1958); feminist anthropologists who have studied the relationship between emotion and (such as Rosaldo 1984, Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990, Yanagisako 2002); and, in particular, Sara Ahmed's (2004) work on affective regimes in order to draw out the relationship between cultures and the that undergird processes of in/habitation, being moved, feeling attached, and feeling in or out of place (Mankekar 2015:15). Mankekar notes that transnational cultures participate in the production of phantasmic notions of India in both the homeland and the diaspora by generating a range of affects spanning nostalgia and longing, as well as disaffection, alienation, and at times antagonism (15). …