Sahana Ghosh "A Thousand Tiny Cuts" Book Launch

 

A Thousand Tiny Cuts (University of California Press, 2023/Yoda Press 2024) chronicles the slow transformation of a connected region into national borderlands. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in northern Bangladesh and eastern India, 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.

 

 

Sahana Ghosh is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. She uses ethnography and feminist research methods to study the intersection of mobility, militarism, and gender in our contemporary world. Her work on borders and borderlands, gendered labor, and migration and national security regimes in South Asia has been widely published: in academic journals such as American Anthropologist, Social Text, Current Anthropology, Gender, Place & Culture, in a book A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security Across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands (University of California Press 2023 / Yoda Press 2024), and in a number of platforms for a general audience. She is currently at work on a historical ethnography of the work and worth of soldiering in postcolonial India and a collaborative study of labor migration agreements across Asia.