Book Review

Articles

• Review of Bailey’s The Architecture of Empire | Rachael Maxon
  1 February 2025

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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  The Architecture of Empire: France in India and Southeast Asia, 1664-1962
  by Gauvin A. Bailey
  McGill-Queen’s University Press
  2022. 488 pp.
  (cloth), ISBN 978-0-228-01142-2
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  Reviewed by Rachael Maxon (University of Iowa)
  Bailey

• Review of ‘The Right Wing Mirror of Critical Theory by Larry Alan Busk | Matt McManus
  11 May 2024

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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  The Right Wing Mirror of Critical Theory:
  Studies of Schmitt, Oakeshott, Strauss and Rand
  by Larry Alan Busk Rowman and Littlefield 2023. 276 pp. hb ISBN 9781666929638
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  Reviewed by Matt McManus
  For many decades now, anti-foundationalism has been a very popular position on the academic left. Influenced by an array of post-structuralist and post-modern thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida and Gayatri Spivak, many have argued (…)

• The Looming Shadow of the 1866 Famine in Orissa | Suranjita Ray
  29 April 2023, by Suranjita Ray

  A Haunting Tragedy Gender, Caste and Class in the 1866 Famine of Orissa by Bidyut Mohanty ascertains understanding famine as a process to comprehend who starved during the famine and why. The book engages the reader in understanding the Orissa Famine in 1866 that had its worst impact on the poor, in particular the agricultural labourers, weavers, salt workers and fisher folks, invariably belonging to the lower castes who were marginalised and deprived. The growing consciousness of the (…)

• Arcimovich on Ayers and Alves and Leal and Hjartarson, ’Globalizing the Avant-Garde’
  23 August 2025

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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  Globalizing the Avant-Garde
  David Ayers, Margarida Brito Alves, Joana Cunha, Benedikt Hjartarson, eds.
  Walter de Gruyter
  2025. 499 pp.
  (cloth), ISBN 9783111317533
  ISBN-10 : ?3111317536
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  Reviewed by Tania Arcimovich (Erfurt University)
  Globalizing the Avant-Garde, edited by David Ayers, Margarida Brito Alves, Joana Cunha Leal, and Benedikt Hjartarson, continues the European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies series, (…)

• AMU: Institution of Learning or Intellectual Ghetto? | M.R. Narayan Swamy
  22 February 2025, by M R Narayan Swamy

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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  AMU: Institution of Learning or Identity
  by Anil Maheshwari and Arjun Maheshwari
  Ink/Occam
  Pages: xvii + 431; Price: Rs 899
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  Anil Maheshwari, the lead author I know, is as secular an Indian as one can be. The book recognises, and rightly so, how the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) has come under repeated and unfair attacks from the Hindu Right because of its Islamic character. The authors are against the Modi government

• Review of Solomon’s Lifelines: The Traffic of Trauma | Saurav K. Rai
  27 September 2025

  BOOK REVIEW
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  Lifelines:
  The Traffic of Trauma
  by Harris Solomon
  Duke University Press
  2022. xiv + 286 pp.
  (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4780-1621-2; $27.95
  (paper), ISBN 978-1-4780-1885-8.
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  Reviewed by Saurav K. Rai (Gandhi Smriti)
  Cultural theorist and media expert Ravi Sundaram, centering his analysis on Delhi in the 1990s against the backdrop of rising instances of car accidents as private car ownership proliferated, argued that contemporary India is suffused with (…)

• Review of Christopher Dole, Living On: Psychiatry and the Future of Disaster in Turkey | Andrew J. Bielecki
  15 November 2025

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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  Living On: Psychiatry and the Future of Disaster in Turkey
  by Christopher Dole
  Stanford University Press
  2025. 312 pp.
  (cloth), ISBN 978-1-5036-4177-8
  (paper), ISBN 978-1-5036-4251-5
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  Reviewed by Andrew J. Bielecki (Columbia University)
  What does it mean to live through the end of your world? Across the world, humanity has endured one natural disaster after another, some with truly apocalyptic manifestations. Even (…)

• Scanning P.C. Joshi’s Biography | Daya Varma
  18 April 2009, by Daya Varma

  Review Article
  The following review article has been sent to the Mainstream editor on April 6 with a note from the reviewer that reads:
  “I am submitting a review of Gargi Chakravartty’s P.C. Joshi: A Biography for favour of publication in Mainstream weekly. Not living in India, I was able to get the book only a while ago. Nevertheless I feel reviews of this important book reflecting different experiences and perspectives do not get dated. I hope Mainstream will be generous enough to (…)

• Review: State Absence as Presence: Service Delivery in Postcolonial Nigeria | Ruth Carlitz
  10 February 2023

  Reviewed by Ruth Carlitz (University of Amsterdam)
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  Every Household Its Own Government: Improvised Infrastructure, Entrepreneurial Citizens, and the State in Nigeria by Daniel Jordan Smith
  Princeton: Princeton University Press
  2022. 232 pp. (e-book), ISBN 978-0-691-22991-1 (paper), ISBN 978-0-691-22989-8
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  The Nigerian expression Daniel Jordan Smith employs as the main title of his insightful 2022 book, Every Household Its Own Government: Improvised Infrastructure, (…)

• Bhavuk’s Review of Nehru’s India by Aditya Mukherjee
  7 December 2024

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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  Nehru’s India: Past, Present and Future
  by Aditya Mukherjee
  Vintage Books
  Penguin (25 November 2024)
  Hardcover: 208 pages
  ISBN-10 : 0143471953
  ISBN-13 : 978-0143471950
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  Reviewed by Bhavuk
  An Appraisal of Nehru In Our Times
  Seeing the 14th of November pass uneventfully, one felt dejected that Nehru was not being discussed at such a crucial time for Indian democracy. Aditya Mukherjee’s book Nehru’s India: Past, (…)