Description:
Enclaves along the India-Bangladesh border have posed conceptual and pragmatic challenges to both states since Partition in 1947. These pieces of India inside of Bangladesh, and vice versa, are spaces in which national security, belonging, and control are shown in sharp relief. Through ethnographic and historical analysis, Jason Cons argues that these spaces are key locations for rethinking the production of territory in South Asia today. Sensitive Space examines the ways that these areas mark a range of anxieties over territory, land, and national survival and lead us to consider why certain places emerge as contentious, and often violent, spaces at the margins of nation and state.
Offering lessons for the study of enclaves, lines of control, restricted areas, gray spaces, and other geographic anomalies, Sensitive Space develops frameworks for understanding the persistent confusions of land, community, and belonging in border zones. It further provides ways to think past the categories of sovereignty and identity to reimagine territory in South Asia and beyond.
Brief description: Kalyanakrishnan "Shivi" Sivaramakrishnan is Dinakar Singh Professor of India and South Asia Studies, professor of anthropology, professor of forestry and environmental studies, and codirector of the Program in Agrarian Studies, Yale University.
Review Quotes:
"A distinctive and imaginative account of the peculiar and often mystified enclaves or 'fragmented territories' on the border between India and Bangladesh. . . . Cons offers a rich and nuanced ethnography of multiple dimensions of everyday struggles, contestations, and opportunities in Dahagram. . . . Sensitive Space opens new conceptual avenues for analyses on the Indo-Bangladeshi border as well as border studies more generally."
--Prithvi Hirani "Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography"