English

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Zandy, Janet, 1945-Hands : physical labor, class, and cultural work / Janet Zandy. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-8135-3434-8 (hardcover: alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8135-3435-6 (pbk. : alk. ...

Anzia Yezierska and Agnes Smedley grew up in the United States in poverty-stricken, working-class families. Both women became famous authors and participants in social movements of the early decades of the 20th century. Yezierska's "Bread Givers" and Smedley's "Daughter of Earth", published in the 1920s, were fictionalized autobiographies that detailed their growing dissatisfaction with the traditional role of women in society. The books contain several similarities. Both Yezierska's Sara Smolinsky and Smedley's Marie Rogers left home in search of a consciousness that poverty denied them and returned home again only to witness their mothers' deaths. The death scenes depicted a maternal bonding between mothers and daughters that had not existed before because the daughters had been trying to escape the harshness of their mothers' lives. While Yezierska only touched on subjects of marriage, sex, and motherhood, Smedley wrote a polemic agains...

This book explicates long-standing literary celebrations of 'India' and 'Indian-ness' by charting a cultural history of Indianness in the Anglophone world, locating moments (in intellectual, religious and cultural history) where India and Indianness are offered up as solutions to modern moral, ethical and political questions in the 'West.' Beginning in the early 1800s, South Asians actively seek to occupy and modify spaces created by the scholarly discourses of Orientalism: the study of the East (‘Orient’) via Western (‘European’) epistemological frameworks. Tracing the varying fortunes of Orientalist scholars from the inception of British rule, this study charts the work of key Indologists in the colonial era. The rhetorical constructions of East and West deployed by both colonizer and colonized, as well as attempts to synthesize or transcend such constructions, became crucial to conceptions of the ‘modern.’ Eventually, Indian desire for political sovereignty together with the deeply racialized formations of imperialism produced a shift in the dialogic relationship between South Asia and Europe that had been initiated and sustained by orientalists. This impetus pushed scholarly discourse about India in Europe, North America and elsewhere, out of what had been a direct role in politics and theology and into high ‘Literary’ culture.