Trans-Status Subjects: Gender in the Globalization of South and Southeast Asia (review)

A "deep historical process" orientation in understanding and analyzing the nature, effects, and politics of globalization has become an integral part of disciplines such as history, anthropology, cultural studies, and critical geography.¹ The anthology of essays edited by Sonita Sarker and Esha Niyogi De is an important contribution to this strand of debates. It looks at the longue durée of globalization through a variety of disciplinary prisms and traces globalization's long colonial-modernist genealogy. Trans-Status Subjects explores the cultures of globalization, the dense world of its authors and agents, and the complex strategies through which these actors encounter global modernity. The articles in this book also critically engage with the concept of time and its ever-renewing ideological tools that constantly attempt to appropriate identities and knowledges; they are about people and places as they reassert themselves against the onslaughts of time.

A collection of essays by social historians, critical geographers, literary and cultural critics, and anthropologists, Trans-Status Subjects brings together a pertinent, timely, and intellectually provocative set of discussions on how identities minoritized through gender, race/ethnicity, or class participate in globalization. Avoiding either a staunch one-sided critique of globalization or its romanticization, the essays in this book have taken up the project of looking at the interstices and locating the practices of marginalized social actors (mostly women) in their varied roles as the negotiators and challengers of global forms of colonial and neocolonial ideologies. What is remarkable about this volume is its exploration of the "dialectical-middle" ground, where identities already defined as "subaltern" by a number of dominant ideologies (from colonial modernity to transnational global capitalism) themselves limit these very ideologies in and through strategies from within and without. As Sarker and Niyogi De state in introducing their project, "Our essays investigate both the consequences and ethics of globalization. They show that the negotiations enacted through mobilities in globalization produce unconcluded dialectics of power and resistance, bringing old and new oppressions, yet also opportunities to challenge them through informal and formalized claims to citizenship" (2). The volume's essays analyze the practices authored by subjects (both women and men) as the products of this process, who "reclaim and redefine (re-mark) the territories assigned to regional, national, and individual identities, thereby producing new histories with diverse agendas" (2).

Trans-Status Subjects, while exploring identities, subjectivities, and their political possibilities, focuses on a particular geo-politico-cultural terrain: South and Southeast Asia. The most important analytic purpose this geographic selection serves is to explore a region that, despite its differences, has been united by a colonial past, and by more contemporary neocolonial, neoliberal, patriarchal, nationalist as well as transnational, nondemocratic orthodoxies. More specifically, the authors define this geopolitical unity as based on the attempts of both colonial and neocolonial powers (masculinist, indigenous, and foreign) to erase the lived dimensions of "material places" (natural environments, family habitats, bodies) in order to make them empty spaces or vessels for the hegemonic flows of capital, knowledge, and validation of certain kinds of histories. Through a description of a mélange of actors, who constantly try to rematerialize these spaces back into places, the authors convincingly argue that struggles over agency and subjectivity have been, and will always be, waged in and through contestations and reclaiming of places in history (i.e., in time). Such places, according to Sarker and Niyogi De, are the sites in and through which "subjugated agents" appropriate memories of past histories and experiences to create and participate in forward-looking, liberatory ideologies.

What is challenging and refreshingly novel about this volume is the relationship forged between "trans-status subjectivity" and the "placetime" axis as a ground for possibilities of social change. While "status" signifies...