Unsettling Utopia
The Making and Unmaking of French India
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Columbia University Press
Published:5th Aug '21
Should be back in stock very soon
After India achieved independence from the British in 1947, there remained five scattered territories governed by the French imperial state. It was not until 1962 that France fully relinquished control. Once decolonization took hold across the subcontinent, Western-led ashrams and utopian communities remained in and around the former French territory of Pondicherry—most notably the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and the Auroville experimental township, which continue to thrive and draw tourists today.
Unsettling Utopia presents a new account of the history of twentieth-century French India to show how colonial projects persisted beyond formal decolonization. Through the experience of the French territories, Jessica Namakkal recasts the relationships among colonization, settlement, postcolonial sovereignty, utopianism, and liberation, considering questions of borders, exile, violence, and citizenship from the margins. She demonstrates how state-sponsored decolonization—the bureaucratic process of transferring governance from an imperial state to a postcolonial state—rarely aligned with local desires. Namakkal examines the colonial histories of the Aurobindo Ashram and Auroville, arguing that their continued success shows how decolonization paradoxically opened new spaces of settlement, perpetuating imperial power. Challenging conventional markers of the boundaries of the colonial era as well as nationalist narratives, Unsettling Utopia sheds new light on the legacies of colonialism and offers bold thinking on what decolonization might yet mean.
Exploring the decolonization of French India, Namakkal's lucid and innovative book brings together the history of state-led decolonization and the creation of utopias to reveal how both projects relied on regimes of labor, erasure, and territorial expansion that had much in common with the colonizing project. Engaging, ambitious, and deeply researched, Unsettling Utopia brings new and important insights to our understanding of the temporal boundaries of colonialism and decolonization. -- Danna Agmon, author of A Colonial Affair: Commerce, Conversion, and Scandal in French India
Jessica Namakkal’s excellent book reveals hidden layers of Pondicherry’s feigned decolonization and ongoing recolonization. This tour de force is the kind of book you don't want to finish; it keeps you right on the edge of your seat, avidly turning the pages for more. -- Ari Gautier, author of Le Thinnai
Unsettling Utopia is a fascinating book on the postcolonial history of French India as well as a provocative analysis of the structural relationships among colonial settlement, utopian thinking, and the incompleteness of decolonization. Namakkal’s immense effort to engage the far-flung transnational archives of French India inform this important book and the revealing light it sheds on the messy history of French imperialism in southern India and its spatial, social, and spiritual afterlives. -- Tariq Jazeel, author of Sacred Modernity: Nature, Environment, and the Postcolonial Geographies of Sri Lankan Nationhood
This is by far and away the most scholarly, yet readable, account of the long twentieth century in Pondicherry/Puducherry. . . . This excellent book deserves to be read widely by historians, sociologists, geographers, political scientists and more. * H-Soz-Kult *
By looking through the lens of minor histories, Unsettling Utopia is able to uncover and challenge the mythmaking exercises of former colonisers, the blind spots of the anticolonial nationalist movement, and the complicities of the postcolonial nation-state. * Himal Southasian *
Namakkal's book helped me examine my own experiences anew in the context of Pondicherry's colonial history. I heartily recommend this book to readers keen on understanding how the past continues into the present. * Hindustan Times *
Nuanced, rich, [with] extensive detail...this is by far and away the most scholarly, yet readable, account of the long twentieth century in Pondicherry/Puducherry. -- Andy Davies * H-Soz-Kult *
ISBN: 9780231197694
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
328 pages