Remapping Knowledge: The Making of South Asian Studies in India, Europe and America (19th-20th Centuries)

It provides a genealogy of the institutionalisation and transformations occurring in South Asian studies across Europe, India and the United States. Three specific points are addressed in the essays: the cognitive construction of South Asia in the American university system; the exploration of relations between national identities and respective traditions of research on South Asia in Great Britain and the United States throughout the 20th century; and a reflection on ‘Subaltern studies’, an Indian series born under the auspices of radical social history, which has now become a major entry point into postmodernist ideas.

Contents

South Asia, “Made in the USA” : Cultural Transfers, Universities and the Intellectual Diaspora
By Jackie Assayag

Nations, Diaspora and Area Studies: South Asia, from Great Britain to the United State
By Véronique Bénéï

Subaltern Studies as Post-Colonial Critique of Modernity
By Jacques Pouchepadass

Jackie Assayag is an anthropologist and a Professor of Research at the CNRS affiliated at the Maison Française, Oxford (UK).

Véronique Bénéï is an anthropologist and a Senior Research Fellow at the CNRS, affiliated to the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie des Institutions et des Organisations Sociales (LAIOS), Paris, and teaches at the Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics (LSE).