This book revisits approaches to South Asian feminist politics through the lens of shared historical memories and their social spatialisation. The author looks at borderlands, socialist visions of internationalism, cultures of travel, theatre history, artist-activist performances, and connected histories of discrete geo-political formations. Locating the book’s spatial context in Bengal—for its long tradition of militant movements and its historical cross-border connections—Sinha Roy attempts to release the spatial into South Asian feminism and historicise the space and place of Bengal in a dynamic relationship with time. She argues that in addition to plotting a temporally progressive chronological story of gender, violence and love in the inert space of Bengal (bracketed by national and international borders), the practices of spatialisation play an active role as temporal emplotment, in organising and prioritising the major place-based arguments.

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MALLARIKA SINHA ROY is an assistant professor at the Centre for Women’s Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She is a recipient of the Erasmus Fellowship, University of Cologne, and a post-doctoral fellowship from the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation. She has been co-principal investigator in the University Grants Commission project ‘Traces of the Global: Displacement, Memory, Cultural Citizenship 2014-19’ and a British Academy project, ‘Cultures of the Left’. She has many publications to her credit, including Gender and Radical Politics in India: Magic Moments of Naxalbari (1967-1975), Utpal Dutt and Political Theatre in Postcolonial India (2024), and she is co-editor with Papori Bora, Vijaya Rao and Shambhavi Prakash, of Displacement and Citizenship: Histories and Memories of Exclusion (2020). She has published in many peer-reviewed journals and has contributed chapters to various books.