Unsettling India: Affect, Temporality, Transnationality by Purnima Mankekar (review)

Purnima Mankekar’s monograph, Unsettling India: Affect, Temporality, Transnationality, is a dazzling example of the melding of ethnography and theory at its best. It is replete with detailed ethnographic vignettes, rich theoretical insights, and methodological, analytical, and conceptual innovation. Mankekar’s project is to highlight the constitution and production of India and “Indianness” through the study of transnational public cultures among Indians both “home” (in India) and “abroad” (in the San Francisco Bay Area in the US). In doing so, she examines the production of India and Indianness through feminist analysis of textual and ethnographic archives of affect and temporality.

I read the book—taking meticulous notes—while conducting follow-up fieldwork research in Kampala, Uganda. I often marveled at the ways in which analyses in the text spoke to the conditions and nature of the multiple South Asian diaspora communities that I was studying—as well as the regimes of ethno-racial insecurity that circulate in postcolonial East Africa. Indeed, this work highlights both the analytical possibilities and limitations of predominant usages of diaspora in South Asian studies. It argues for the need to focus on transnational connectivities between “home” and “abroad” diaspora populations via an analysis of public cultures, as well as focusing on themes of affect and temporality in the study of diasporas and public cultures. Critically, Mankekar provides the reader with a conceptual and theoretical framework for studying affect and temporality within a transnational anthropological framework.

Chapter 1 outlines the concept of “unsettlement” as both an ethnographic and an analytic lens in the study. Mankekar noted that unsettlement “occurs at two registers: at the level of subject formation, as when subjects are formed through unsettlement, and as a framework for thinking about the relationship between media, public culture, and culture/culture change” (19). Through the “selective staging” of evocative ethnographic vignettes, Mankekar explores the sense of unsettlement among her informants in India and in the San Francisco Bay Area, examining how public cultures enable the reconstitution of India and Indianness for these subjects. As a part of her broader political project, she deploys the notion of unsettlement, rather than diaspora, as a tool for denaturalizing the claims of the nation. This chapter, entitled “Unsettlement,” offers a rigorous and at times dense outline of the methodological, conceptual, theoretical, and epistemological interventions of the book. Indeed, I found it more helpful to go back to this first chapter to help grasp its arguments once I had read the analyses in the other chapters. It contains a lot of theoretical jargon that demands slow reading and needs to be unpacked by the reader in order to understand the construction of Mankekar’s complex arguments.

Embedded in her analysis is a re-theorization of “public culture” such that she conceives of “public cultures in terms of affective and sensorial ecologies produced by the circulation of media and commodities” (6). She builds on the work of Raymond Williams (1977); Benedict Anderson (1991); Charles Peirce (1958); feminist anthropologists who have studied the relationship between emotion and culture (such as Rosaldo 1984, Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990, Yanagisako 2002); and, in particular, Sara Ahmed’s (2004) work on “affective regimes” in order to “draw out the relationship between transnational public cultures and the affective regimes that undergird processes of in/habitation, being moved, feeling attached, and feeling in or out of place” (Mankekar 2015:15). Mankekar notes that “transnational public cultures participate in the production of phantasmic notions of India in both the homeland and the diaspora by generating a range of affects spanning nostalgia and longing, as well as disaffection, alienation, and at times antagonism” (15). She then draws out the ways in which affect and affectivity are inherently temporal processes—she theorizes the mutual imbrication of affect and temporality by ethnographically studying the “temporality of affect” and “affectivity of temporality” in relation to subject formation. In doing so, she arrives at alternative notions of agency that “resist dichotomies of resistance versus compliance,” but are about the “ethical dimensions of affect”—how...