Sensitive Space: Fragmented Territory at the India-Bangladesh Border

by Jason Cons, K. Sivaramakrishnan (Editor), Padma Kaimal (Editor), Anand A. Yang (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780295806549
Publisher:	University of Washington Press
Publication date:	04/01/2016
Series:	Global South Asia
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	2 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jason Cons is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin.

Table of Contents

Preface: Transformations, Exchanges, and Sensitive Space vii

Acknowledgments xi

Abbreviations and Key Terms xv

Part 1 Entering Sensitive Space

Introduction: The Fragments and Their Nation(s) 5

1 Territorial Anxieties: Uncertain Land, Unstable Territory, and Unsettled Rule at the Border 24

Part 2 Sensitive Histories

2 Amplified Territory: Transforming the Enclaves from "Border Problems" into "Sensitive Spaces" 45

3 Histories of Belonging(s): Negotiating Dahagram's Political Community 68

4 Contesting Boundaries, Claiming Territory: Counter-Narratives of Belonging, Identity, and Power 88

Part 3 Life and Rule in a Sensitive Place

5 Territorial Corrosion: Boundary Surveys, Symbolic Developments, and Border Management in Sensitive Space 109

6 Contingent Terrain: Conjuncture, Movement, and Agrarian Change in Dahagram 132

Conclusion: Whither Sensitive Space? 149

Notes 159

Bibliography 177

Index 189

What People are Saying About This

Johan Lindquist

"Sensitive Space deals with compelling and unusual empirical material, and the author situates this in relation to broader academic debates, particularly related to nation, state, and territory."

Arild Engelsen Ruud

"A solid, in-depth study of a strange border region, what such a sensitive space does to the people living there, and the manner in which this region has become part of the national psyche of both India and Bangladesh."

Reece Jones

"Jason Cons illuminates the fraught politics behind one of the longest and strangest territorial disputes in history. An original, insightful, and remarkable book that is destined to become the definitive statement on the subject."

Editorial Reviews

"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."

Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography - Prithvi Hirani

"Cons . . . allows his rich ethnographic material to reveal the complexities of postcolonial sovereignty, insecurity, and precarity. The result is a highly readable, theoretically acute, and sharply insightful work."

Journal of Asian Studies - Sankaran Krishna

"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

"Cons . . . allows his rich ethnographic material to reveal the complexities of postcolonial sovereignty, insecurity, and precarity. The result is a highly readable, theoretically acute, and sharply insightful work."—Sankaran Krishna, Journal of Asian Studies

From the Publisher