Tracking Modernity: India’s Railway and the Culture of Mobility
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.66 (989 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0816665613 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 272 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2017-07-08 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Ace75 said An important work of cultural criticism. "Tracking Modernity" is a breath of fresh air in cultural criticism. The author has clearly assimilated the lessons of cultural studies, colonial discourse analysis, and historiography, and produced an insightful reading of the history of the railway and its representations in India from the colonial period to the present. But Aguiar is not content to repeat familiar t. "A portrayal of the railway in selected fiction, nonfiction and movies" according to Bill Hough. The University of Minnesota Press has released an academic social/cultural history of India focusing on perceptions of the Indian railways in which author Marian Aguiar, an associate professor in Literature and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon University, interprets modernity through the legacy of this transformative technology. She does this by reviewing the portra
Historically grounded, theoretically sophisticated, and clearly articulated, Tracking Modernity takes us on a journey through the Indian landscape as it changes from colonial depictions, to postcolonial destinations constantly underlining the violence and terror that the train conjures for the Indian imagination alongside its endless capacity for restless movement." —Sangeeta Ray, University of Maryland. "In Tracking Modernity, Marian Aguiar demonstrates a compelling grasp of the complex discourses around and about India’s railway and its imbrication in the contested discourses of modernity, mobility, and migration. Aguiar offers both a panoramic and a
From Mohandas Gandhi’s nineteenth-century tour in a third-class compartment to the recent cinematic shenanigans of Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited, the railway has been one of India’s most potent emblems of modern life. Aguiar charts this powerful image into the postcolonial period, showing how the culture of mobility exposes this symbol of reason as surprisingly dynamic and productive. Looking in turn at the partition of India, labor relations, rituals of travel, works of literature and film, visual culture, and the Mumbai train bombings of 2006, Aguiar finds incongruities she terms “counternarratives of modernity” to signify how they work both with and against the dominant rhetoric. Revealing railways as a microcosm of tensions within Indian culture, Aguiar demonstrates how their representations have challenged prevailing ideas of modernity.. In the first in-depth analysis of representations of the Indian railway, Marian Aguiar interprets modernity through the legacy of this transformative technology.Since the colonial period in India, the railway has been idealized as a rational utopia—a moving box in which racial and class differences might be ama