A textured ethnography of the gendered political economy of mobility across postcolonial borderlands in South Asia.
A Thousand Tiny Cuts (University of California Press, 2023) chronicles the slow transformation of a connected region into national borderlands. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in northern Bangladesh and eastern India, Sahana Ghosh shows the foundational place of gender and sexuality in the making and management of threat in relation to mobility. Rather than focusing solely on border fences and border crossings, she demonstrates that bordering reorders relations of value.
The cost of militarization across this ostensibly "friendly" border is devaluation—of agrarian land and crops, of borderland youth undesirable as brides and grooms in their respective national hinterlands, of regional infrastructures now disconnected, and of social and physical geographies disordered by surveillance.
Through a textured ethnography of the gendered political economy of mobility across postcolonial borderlands in South Asia, this book challenges our understandings of the violence of bordering, migration and citizenship, and transnational inequalities, with important political stakes for borders and security regimes in South Asia and beyond.
With author Sahana Ghosh and discussants Navtej Purewal (SOAS) and Priyanka Basu (UCL).
This event is supported by the UCL Centre for the Study of South Asia and the Indian Ocean World (CSSA), which promotes research and teaching related to the geographical region of South Asia and its intersections with the wider world, including the South Asian diaspora.
About the Speaker
Dr Sahana Ghosh
Assistant Professor of Anthropology at National University of Singapore
Sahana Ghosh is a social anthropologist, broadly interested in forms and experiences of inequality produced through the intersection of mobility, militarism, and gender in our contemporary world. Her first book A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security Across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands (University of California Press 2023, Yoda Press 2024) and academic and public writing center on borders and borderlands, gender and citizenship, and migration regimes in South Asia. She is at currently researching the gendered labors of soldiering in India and the transnational governance of labor migration through the prism of Bangladesh.
More about Dr Sahana Ghosh