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ERASURE OF
EURO-ASIAN: RECOVERING EARLY RADICALISM AND
FEMINISM IN SOUTH ASIA
Kumari Jayawardena
Rs.475 Hb 2009
81-88965-40-5
(All rights available)
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There is increasing interest today in the fusion of cultures and
hybridity, highlighted by the success of Barack Obama, the
President-elect of the United States, of mixed African-American
parentage.
This book, focuses on the interaction between Asia and Europe in the
wake of Portuguese, Dutch, French and British imperialism. It
emphasises the vanguard role of the Euro-Asian communities in South
Asia, the Burghers, Anglo-Indians and Eurasians, in struggles for
democratic rights, long before colonial conditions were ripe for
radical social and political change. With their utopian vision of a
future democratic society, they agitated for widespread reforms such
as worker and peasant rights, early radicalism, proto-nationalism,
secularism and gender equality. Jayawardena brings the path-breaking
efforts of these Euro-Asian pioneers from the footnotes of history
into the main text, asks why their contributions have been 'hidden
from history' and suggests that the obsession with 'purity' of race,
both in South Asia and Europe, led to erasing the importance of this
radical intelligentsia of mixed origin. |
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KUMARI
JAYAWARDENA
Kumari Jayawardena is the author of
The Rise of the Labour Movement in Ceylon;
Ethnic and Class Conflict in Sri Lanka; Feminism and Nationalism
in the Third World; The White Woman’s Other Burden;
and
Nobodies to Somebodies—the Rise of the Colonial Bourgeoisie in Sri
Lanka. She is a former Associate
Professor of Political Science at the University of Colombo,
where she now teaches in the post-graduate Women's Studies Programme.
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