This collection of essays covers a broad range of disciplines to produce
a work that rethinks relationships and divisions in gender, geography,
class relations, culture, and much more to create a true 'politics of
the possible.' Broadly emphasizing forms, ideologies, and class
relations, Sangari's essays crisscross and cohere around several themes:
the politics of social location and the connection between local,
metropolitan and colonial geographies as they bear on debates about the
nature of knowledge; the transnational and regional production of
ideologies such as altruism under the aegis of colonialism; ways of
theorizing women's labor, literacy, and consent to patriarchal
arrangements and dominant ideologies. Sangari's analysis of Indian
English and the relationships between 'literature' and the nonliterary
change, the way we consider the divisions between the metropolitan and
the subcontinental. In her discussion of capitalism and colonialism, her
egalitarian feminist viewpoint opens up and questions issues of cultural
autonomy and hybridity. She also critiques the impact of race, caste,
class, religion, and misogyny on patriarchal ideology and its effect on
women. The 'politics of the possible' mapped by these essays presents
itself in several areas: as a more sensitive feminist historiography; as
the social potential for secular activity in seemingly impossible
situations; in the historical possibilities that were offered by
situations not doomed to inevitable outcomes; and as the elements of
resistance produced by the contradictions of different structures of
oppression.
