Who Is an Alien? - by Kumkum Sangari (Hardcover)

About the Book

The questions Gandhi asked about imperial nations and how free nations should be made remain at the core of casteist, racist, patriarchal, and sectarian regimes. This book examines Gandhi's struggle with the burden of colonial historiography, legal systems, and scriptural texts in the attempt to confront colonial oppression and social exclusion.

Book Synopsis

Alternative visions of our plural pasts are evacuated and erased, while strategies of labor import, discrimination, racialization, internal colonization, uncertain citizenship, border control, surveillance, ghettoization, the cordoning of land and resources for the few, morph and arc across the long twentieth century. The questions Gandhi asked about imperial nations and how free nations should be made remain unfinished questions at the core of casteist, racist, patriarchal and sectarian regimes.

This book examines Gandhi's struggle with the burden of received colonial historiography, legal systems, scriptural texts, racialized and patriarchal vocabulary in the attempt to confront colonial oppression and social exclusion. The openings and impasses, thresholds and limits, successes and failures are equally instructive when read as a series of resolved and unresolved contradictions.

About the Author

Kumkum Sangari is the William F. Vilas Professor of English and the Humanities in the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.