Modern but not Western

Makeshift Migrants and Law Gender, Belonging, and Postcolonial Anxieties By Ratna Kapur Price: £65.00 ISBN: 978-0-415-59629-9 Imprint: Routledge India Pages: 256 pages

This book unmasks the cultural and gender stereotypes that inform the legal regulation of the migrant. It critiques the postcolonial perspective on how belonging and non-belonging are determined by the sexual, cultural, and familial norms on which law is based as well as the historical backdrop of the colonial encounter, which differentiated overtly between the legitimate and illegitimate subject.

The complexities and layering of the migrant’s existence are seen, in the book, to be obscured by the apparatus of the law. The author elaborates on how law can both advance and impede the rights of the migrant subject and how legal interventions are constructed around frameworks rooted in the boundaries of difference, protection of the sovereignty of the nation-state, and the myth of the all-embracing liberal subject. This produces the ‘Other’ and reinforces essentialised assumptions about gender and cultural difference.

The author foregrounds the perspective of the subaltern migrant subject, exposing the deeper issues implicated in the debates over migration and the rights claims of migrants, primarily in the context of women and religious minorities in India.

Erotic Justice Law and the New Politics of Postcolonialism By Ratna Kapur

The essays in Erotic Justice address the ways in which law has been implicated in contemporary debates dealing with sexuality, culture and `different' subjects - including women, sexual minorities, Muslims and the transnational migrant. Law is analyzed as a discursive terrain, where these different... 

Erotic justice: law and the new politics of postcolonialism - Page 46 - Ratna Kapur - 2005 - 219 pages - Preview

The Hindu Right has begun to place an emphasis on Indian society being 'modern but not Western', responding to the material and historical shifts of the late 20th and early 21st centuries in India. Hindutva is today being redefined to ...