An intimate and imperial feminism: Meliscent Shephard and the regulation of prostitution in colonial India

This paper seeks to construct an antinostalgic portrait of an imperial feminist. As the representative of the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene (AMSH) in India between 1928 and 1947, Meliscent Shephard was an embodiment not only of the feminist urge to challenge patriarchal gender relations, but also of the imperialist urge to classify and fathom the world through a series of racist typologies. Despite an earlier belief that blame for the exploitation of prostitutes lay with the colonial state and economy, she later fell back on explanations based on notions of Indian society and religion. Operating in a period of heightened anticolonial nationalism, these latter views thwarted any hope of her forging successful connections with emergent Indian social reform groups. This failure to cultivate intimate relations with Indian colleagues marks a failure at the level of national and racial politics. Shephard did, however, cultivate an intimate relationship with correspondents at the AMSH in London, while her experiences of the sexual geographies of Indian cities provided a form of intimate interaction that would inspire her mission to close down tolerated brothels. As such, this paper marks an empirical engagement with the intimate frontiers at which the affective grid of colonial politics was marked out

The accession of Junagadh, 1947–48: Colonial sovereignty, state violence and post-independence India

This paper is in closed access.By revisiting the events from July 1947 to February 1948 that comprised the accession of the princely state of Junagadh to India, this article gives an insight into the newly independent Dominion’s ‘mobilisation of violence’ in re-fashioning its sovereignty and authority. In doing so, it adds to the growing historical literature on state formation in India that argues that multiple crises of the period 1947–49—post-partition violence in Punjab and Delhi, rebellion, accession and war in Kashmir and the so-called ‘police-action’ in Hyderabad—far from being aberrations to the emerging Indian nation-state were, instead, affairs through which its new sovereignty evolved. The mobilisation of Indian defence forces in the lead up to the accession of Junagadh in November 1947 and the management of violence directed at Junagadh’s Muslims afterwards are yet another instance of the forcible incorporation of Indian princely states and Indian Muslims into the reconstructed post-colonial state. Present in this matrix were also the ‘sub-states’ within Junagadh and the attendant questions of their autonomy, an instrumentalist alarmism about popular will and unrest and a hastily conducted referendum. These aspects of this contested accession have remained overshadowed in the historical record and are here revised to provide an alternative narrative

Different Transitions into Working Motherhood: Discourses of Asian, Hispanic, and African American Women

Little is known about how diverse women perceive, talk about, and enact their transitions into working motherhood in ways that reflect (and are shaped by) their social identities. While we do not mean to imply that these 16 Asian, Hispanic, and African American women are representative of the variety of women who self-categorize themselves in these particular identity groups, we do want to display the ways in which their discourses about their transitions are suggestive of different constructions within and across their ethnic categories. As such, their discourse conveys their struggles over and the interplay among mainstream United States and diverse cultural values in work and family considerations as well as their family structures of support