"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"--
Series Statement
Cambridge imperial and post-colonial studies series
Uniform Title
Cambridge imperial and post-colonial studies series.
Introduction: Contagion and Cultural Politics of Hygiene -- Hygiene, Colonialism, and Affective Histories -- Objects, Affect, and Hygiene -- Methods and Sources -- Outline of Chapters -- Alimentary Anxieties : Affect in Food and Hunger -- Histories of Food and the Body -- Food Adulteration, Embodiment and the Politics of Anxiety -- Famine's Bodies -- Body, Hygiene, and Affective Politics of Gandhi's Swaraj -- Body, Affect, and Gandhi -- Gandhi's Fasts -- Race and Gandhi's Politics of Hygiene -- Medicine as Contagion -- Imagining the Social Body : Competing Moralities of Care and Contagion -- Locating Women's Writings on Care in Early 20th Century India -- Memorable Objects : Childhood, Memory, and Care in Shukhalata Rao's Writings -- Memorable Spaces : Suffering and Education of Care in Priyabala Gupta's Memoir -- Traveling Memories : Wandering and Care in Purnasashi Debi's Autobiography -- Affective Remedies : Advertisements and Cultural Politics of Hygiene -- Enchantments of Empire and Nation -- Advertising, Consumer Culture, and Empire -- Advertisements and Pluralist Medical Marketplace -- Advertising Beauty, Womanhood, and Domesticity -- Contagion of Advertisements.