Collection Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series

Présentation éditeur :

« Can there be an affective history of hygiene ? Is it possible to read into the narrative of modern hygiene active and animated tropes of emotion, affect, and feeling ? New microbes, novel pandemics, and their global movements that have forcefully reinstated the efficacy of hygiene have also reinvigorated global academic interest in the genealogies of hygienic practices. Cultural Politics of Hygiene in Bengal/India, 1890-1940 analyzes one such genealogy of hygiene in the context of late colonial Bengal. It argues that the meaning and role of hygiene in India were catalyzed on the crossroads of colonial governance, anticolonial struggles, cultural nationalism, and early 20th century social feminism. Affect, feeling, and sentiment were, however, no less important in the production of knowledge and practices of hygiene. Hygiene as a modern discourse, as shown in this book, not only produced emotions, sentiments, and feelings but was also constituted through them. »

Srirupa Prasad is Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies and Sociology at University of Missouri, USA. She previously taught at University of Madison-Wisconsin, USA, in the Department of Medical History and Bioethics.

Table of Contents

Introduction : Contagion and Cultural Politics of Hygiene

1. Alimentary Anxieties : Affect in Food and Hunger
2. Body, Hygiene, and Affective Politics of Gandhi’s Swaraj
3. Imagining the Social Body : Competing Moralities of Care and Contagion
4. Affective Remedies : Advertisements and Cultural Politics of Hygiene