This book discusses the epistemic foundation of the heuristic construct ‘vagabond’ and the convergence between the politics of itinerancy and that of dissent in the context of South Asia. It describes the fraught relationship between ‘native’ itinerant practices and techniques of governmentality which have furnished different categorizations and taxonomies of mobility. The book demonstrates the historical seismic breaks – from the Orientalist to the post-Orientalist, from the premodern to the modern, and from the colonial to the post-colonial – in the representation of the vagabond in the juridico-political imagination, in historiography and cultural articulation. For instance, the drunk European sailor, the quasi-religious mendicant, and the helpless famine refugee have all been referred to as ‘vagabonds’ in the colonial archive. This book examines the histories and conditions behind these conceptual overlaps, as well as the uncanny associations among categories that uneasily coexist and mirror each other as subsets of a vast range of phenomena, which may loosely be called ‘vagabond(age)’. This volume will be of interest to students and researchers of literature, cultural studies, colonial and post-colonial studies, history, migration studies, sociology, and South Asia studies.

Hashtag Activism Interrogated and Embodied analyzes the ways that hashtags repurpose and reclaim societal narratives, considering how these digital interactions carry over into external spaces and are embodied by both participants and spectators alike. A diverse set of contributors from a range of disciplines utilize a variety of methodologies to interrogate the lifespan and trajectories of specific hashtag campaigns, study rhetorical strategies engaged by online communities, and analyze how hashtags are employed for particular purposes. The chapters capture twenty-first-century digital activism unfolding in different social and geopolitical climates. Delving into hashtag activism in various forms (tweets, memes, and personal narratives) and spaces (Twitter, Facebook, and in-person protests), these chapters reveal how participants question and construct online and offline identities and imagined and actualized communities. They also showcase the complicated ways hashtag activism intersects with consumer, popular, and celebrity cultures. Hashtag Activism Interrogated and Embodied calls for broader inclusion in what is considered hashtag activism, such as digital fandom, how hashtags are co-opted for nefarious purposes, the effects of anti-activism, and the role of journalism and the media. It will appeal to a range of disciplines including rhetoric and composition, internet studies, communication studies, media studies, feminist studies, affect studies, cultural studies, technical communication, and sociology. Contributors: Robert Barry, André Brock, Elizabeth Buchanan, Rosemary Clark-Parsons, Gabriel I. Green, Neha Gupta, Jeffrey J. Hall, Kyesha Jennings, Morgan K. Johnson, Salma Kalim, Megan McIntyre, Sean Milligan, Avishek Ray, Sarah Riddick, Stephanie Vie, Erin B. Waggoner, Holly M. Wells, William I. Wolff You can use only one pair of em dashes in a sentence. :(

Leprosy, widely mentioned in different religious texts and ancient scriptures, is the oldest scourge of humankind. Cases of leprosy continue to be found across the world as the most crucial health problem, especially in India and Brazil. There are a few maladies that eventually turn into social disquiets, and leprosy is undoubtedly one of them. This book traces the dynamics of the interface between colonial policy on leprosy and religion, science and society in Bengal from the mid-nineteenth to the first half of the twentieth centuries. It explores how the idea of ‘degeneration’ and the ‘desolates’ shaped the colonial legality of segregating ‘lepers’ in Indian society. The author also delves into the treatments of leprosy that were often transfigured from ‘original’ English texts, written by American or British medical professionals, into Bengali. Rich in archival resources, this book is an essential read for scholars and researchers of history, Indian history, public health, social history, medical humanities, medical history and colonial history.

How is pan-nationalism different from other forms of nationalism? This book explores the diversity of pan-nationalism in both theory and practice. Drawing on Rogers Brubaker, the book introduces "pan-nationalism" as a category of practice. It shows that pan-nationalism implied transcending political frontiers, intermittently possessed a pejorative subtext, and differed from unmodified “nationalism” partly due to a retroactively applied success/failure criterion. Pan-nationalists always look across political frontiers, but do not always want a single pan-national state. The book explores the diversity of pan-nationalism through case studies and a selection of pan-national movements such as: Habsburg pan-Slavism from both the Slavic and Hungarian perspective, pan-Saxonism in Europe and North America, pan-Ethiopianism and pan-Somalism in the horn of Africa, and pan-Hinduism online. The book will be of interest to students and researchers of politics including comparative politics, various forms of nationalism and history. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Nationalism and Ethnic Politics.

The book examines the social and cultural role of selfies in India. It looks at how the selfie, unlike the photograph, which was a gesture towards an external reality, remains intimately self-referential, yet reconfigures social ordering, identity formation, agency, and spaces in curious ways. This volume approaches questions about the construction and performance of the self through the digital selfie and uses this situated, contextualized, and culturally specific phenomenon as a site to explore the themes of self-making, place-making, gender, subjectivity, and power. Highlighting the specific contexts of production, the authors examine the array of self-expressive capabilities realized in a multitude of uses of the selfie that simultaneously reconfigure the self, the space, and the world. An important study of visual social media culture, the volume will be useful for interpreting everyday media experiences and will be of interest to students and researchers of image studies, visual studies, photography studies, visual culture, media studies, culture studies, cultural anthropology, digital humanities, popular culture, sociology of technology, and South Asian studies.

This book advances an alternative critical posthumanist approach to mega-event organisation, taking into account both the new and the old crises which humanity and our planet face. Taking the delayed Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games as a case study, Tzanelli explores mega-event crisis and risk management in the era of extreme urbanisation, natural disasters, global pandemic, and technoscientific control. Using the atmospheric term ‘irradiation’ (a technology of glamour and transparency, as well as bodily penetration by harmful agents and strong affects), the book explores this epistemological statement diachronically (via Tokyo’s relationship with Western forms of domination) and synchronically (the city as a global cultural-political player but victim of climate catastrophes). It presents how the ‘Olympic enterprise’s’ ‘flattening’ of indigenous environmental place-making rhythms, and the scientisation of space and place in the Anthropocene lead to reductionisms harmful for a viable programme of planetary recovery. An experimental study of the mega-event is enacted, which considers the researcher’s analytical tools and the styles of human and non-human mobility during the mega-event as reflexive gateways to forms of posthuman flourishing. Crossing and bridging disciplinary boundaries, the book will appeal to any scholar interested in mobilities theory, event and environment studies, sociology of knowledge, and cultural globalisation.

What does it mean to be a Pakistani? Can it mean more than one thing? And what do others think it means? Ziauddin Sardar explores what makes a Pakistani, and whether it's something one wants or ought to be. Reflecting on his culture and heritage through tales of the Pakistanis in his life, A Person of Pakistani Origins is a whirlwind tour of dueling poets, Bollywood films, a bookish auntie who harbors feminist urges, and a vanishing uncle who reappears miles away. Thoughtful and generously laced with humor, this book delves deep into Pakistan's eclectic culture, and the humble insanity of everyday life for a person of Pakistani origins. Sardar richly celebrates the importance of where we come from, and of who we become.