Unsettling India

"Mankekar has produced a work that deserves to be read widely by scholars working on India, globalization, and consumer culture theory. She offers deep insights into the notions of Indian identity and nationhood. The book is a fascinating account and can help researchers to understand how diverse sources of data should be deployed, and synthesized with theory to produce a high-quality ethnographic work. This is an important book that should help to broaden the discussions on identity and globalization. The lucid style and the wide canvas make the book riveting." -- Rohit Varman * Consumption Markets & Cultures *
"The kind of research this book entails is challenging—filled with shifts in location and the frequent need to fill in the silences of the unspeakable. In a book about destabilizing categories, Unsettling India is difficult to classify: accessible yet challenging, theoretical as well as empirical, drawing global concerns down to the microcosm of a shopping cart. Mankekar seeins equally at home in media studies and ethnography, in Kanpur and San Jose, and while she seeks to avoid writing a text that leaves readers with a sense of a world in crisis, her well-tuned gaze at the swirling present produces an illuminating vertigo." -- Heather Hindman * Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies *
"Purnima Mankekar’s monograph, Unsettling India, is a dazzling example of the melding of ethnography and theory at its best. It is replete with detailed ethnographic vignettes, rich theoretical insights, and methodological, analytical, and conceptual innovation.... Mankekar’s work—located within and across fields of South Asian diaspora studies, globalization and transnationalism, media studies, critical racial and ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, and feminist theory—portends and provides a model for the future of anthropological research and a rethinking of the traditional ethnography."  -- Anneeth Kaur Hundle * Anthropological Quarterly *
"Unsettling India, in its masterful assemblage of materials and its theoretical sophistication, succeeds in reminding us that there is something indeed at stake in how we all choose to become global." -- Sandhya Shukla * American Anthropologist *
"The volume pays a great deal of attention to class distinctions, race perceptions, and gender roles, and to how these play out in the creation and maintenance of nationalistic affect. . . . The book is highly recommended." -- John C. Hawley * Pacific Affairs *
"Unsettling India offers a conceptually rich, ethnographically sensitive, intellectual engagement with several areas of current scholarly interest. In addition, it is an exemplary work on how to conduct politically informed grounded research that speaks to ethical concerns while advancing scholarship in important and instructive ways." -- Ramaswami Harindranath * Asian Studies Review *
"[Mankekar] builds on the work of feminist cultural geographers to show how India is a process rather than an essence, produced as meaningful through the traffic in peoples, commodities and media. . . . This book is an important contribution to theorising affect and temporality, two areas experiencing growing interest in the social sciences, and brings a very timely fresh concept to understandings of transnationalism, that of ‘unsettling.'" -- Amanda Gilbertson * South Asia *