South Asian transnationalisms: cultural exchange in the Twentieth Century

South Asian Transnationalisms explores encounters in twentieth century South Asia beyond the conventional categories of center and periphery, colonizer and colonized. Considering the cultural and political exchanges between artists and intellectuals of South Asia with counterparts in the United States, continental Europe, the Caribbean, and East Asia, the contributors interrogate the relationships between identity and agency, language and space, race and empire, nation and ethnicity, and diaspora and nationality.This book deploys transnational syntaxes such as cinema, dance, and literature to

1. Introduction / Babli Sinha -- 2. Tropical longing : the quest for India in the early twentieth-century Caribbean / Lisa Outar -- 3. A productive distance from the nation : Uday Shankar and the defining of Indian modern dance / Nilanjana Bhattacharjya -- 4. Transnational resistance and fictive truths : Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, Agnes Smedley and the Indian nationalist movement / Purnima Bose -- 5. Colonial encounters between India and Indonesia / Martin Ramstedt -- 6. Empire films and the dissemination of Americanism in colonial India / Babli Sinha -- 7. The eternal return and overcoming 'Cape Fear' : science, sensation, Superman and Hindu nationalism in recent Hindi cinema / Anustup Basu -- 8. Ur-national and secular mythologies : popular culture, nationalist historiography and strategic essentialism / Rini Bhattacharya Mehta -- 9. Visual culture and violence : inventing intimacy and citizenship in recent South Asian cinema / Kavita Daiya.