Overview

In ""The Nation's Tortured Body"" Brian Keith Axel explores the formation of the Sikh diaspora and, in so doing, offers a powerful inquiry into conditions of peoplehood, colonialism and postcoloniality. Demonstrating a new direction for historical anthropology, he focuses on the position of violence between 1849 and 1998 in the emergence of a transnational fight for Khalistan (an independent Sikh state). Axel argues that, rather than the homeland creating the diaspora, it has been the diaspora, or histories of displacement, that have created particular kinds of places - homelands. Based on ethnographies and archival research conducted by Axel at several sites in India, England and the United States, the text delineates a theoretical trajectory for thinking about the proliferation of diaspora studies and area studies in America and England. After discussing this trajectory in relation to the colonial and postcolonial movement of Sikhs, Axel analyzes the production and circulation of images of Sikhs around the world, beginning with visual representations of Maharaja Duleep Singh, the last ruler of Punjab, who died in 1893. He argues that imagery of particular male Sikh bodies has situated - at different times and in different ways - points of mediation between various populations of Sikhs around the world. Most crucially, he describes the torture of Sikhs by Indian police between 1983 and the present and discusses the images of tortured Sikh bodies that have been circulating on the Internet since 1996. Finally, he returns to questions of the homeland, reflecting on what the issues discussed in ""The Nation's Tortured Body"" might mean for the ongoing fight for Khalistan. Specialists in anthropology, history, cultural studies, disapora studies and Sikh studies should find much of interest in this work.

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9780822326076

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Reviews

Axel poses new questions regarding regarding the relation between the diaspora and the nation - state. Focusing on the representations of bodies and cultures in cyberspace, academia, cartography, and colonial portraiture, his is the first work to use recent cultural studies and cultural anthropology approaches to intervene in transnational studies. - Inderpal Grewal, San Francisco State University Historical Anthropology at its best, The Nation's Tortured Body explores the history and politics of the Sikhs in a complex, and contested, transnational context. Axel's book evocatively charts the ways in which the crossing and marking of boundaries have shaped the foundational identities of a diasporic community, providing a graphic illustration of the multiple meanings of the idea of 'homeland' in our contemporary postcolonial world. - Nicholas B. Dirks, Columbia University ... makes an important and timely contribution to the masculinity and embodiment literature, and will provide a useful resource for those interested in issues of Sikhism and diaspora. --ENVIRONMENT AND PLANNING D: SOCIETY AND SPACE, 21

Author Information

Brian Keith Axel is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Swarthmore College. He is the editor of From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and Its Futures, also published by Duke University Press.

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