Elevate Difference

Reviews tagged South Asia

Son Preference: Sex Selection, Gender and Culture in South Asia

Son Preference is one of the most compelling insights into the issue of sex selection I have read. Written through a scholarly yet personal lens, the author takes reader through the narrative and complexities of culture and gender in South Asia.

Desigirls

Sometimes you stumble upon really small, obscure films that leave such an impact that you just want as many people to see it as possible. Desigirls by Ishita Srivastava is one such film. Filmed as a graduate thesis project at New York University, this twenty-minute documentary explores a refreshingly new topic—the South Asian lesbian community in New York City. I had the opportunity to watch the film and speak to the director afterward.

Family, Gender, and Law in a Globalizing Middle East and South Asia

Family, Gender, and Law in a Globalizing Middle East and South Asia makes available twelve essays that were presented, in earlier forms, at the 2004 symposium of the same title, which took place at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The essays, edited by Kenneth M. Cuno and Manisha Desai, include analysis of eleven nation-states from Morocco to Bangladesh.

Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction

There is no use in burying the head of an ostrich in censorship and imagining the enemy knows nothing of what we are doing. — S.C. Lind Censorship in South Asia dissects the history and socio-political dynamics of censorship in India, which have been transcribed into the public culture of the South Asian society over the years.

Tea and Other Ayama Na Tales

When it comes selecting books to read, as in life, I often find myself treading the same well-worn territory over and over again. If left to my own devices, I tend to gravitate toward memoirs written by the famous and not-so-famous. I have drawn imaginary lines in my mind around certain genres of books that I assume are just not my cup of tea: science fiction, fantasy, and fictional tales of people who live in countries that don’t exist are some of the categories that I eschew.

Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms

Much like restorative criminology, the new transnationalism is not a single-variant explanation of the world. Grewal destroys that line of thought when she shows cultural imperialism through the lens of feminism, class, and much more. While the basis of her argument is that becoming "American" is evidence of a hegemonic culture, what really brings this argument salience is the expansion she does of the implications regarding it.