Flexible India: Yoga's cultural and political tensions
Shameem Black travels into unexpected realms of popular culture in English from India, its diaspora, and the West to explore and critique yoga as an exercise in cultural power
| Summary: | Shameem Black travels into unexpected realms of popular culture in English from India, its diaspora, and the West to explore and critique yoga as an exercise in cultural power "Yoga has offered the Indian state unprecedented opportunities for global, media-savvy political performance. It has promoted yoga tourism; staged mass yoga practices and Indian officials have proposed yoga as a national solution to a range of social problems, from reducing rape to curing cancer. But, as yoga has gone global, the cultural meanings of yoga have spiraled far and wide. In Flexible India, Shameem Black investigates a new boom in popular fiction, digital media, political spectacle, and soft power strategies from India and beyond its borders to understand who are the beneficiaries of the yoga boom, and what are its consequences. From Modi's embrace of yoga to solidify Hindu nationalism to the Indian diasporic art of Chiraag Bhakta in #WhitePeopleDoingYoga, Black develops an account of how yoga's imaginative power supports diverse political ends. While many cultural practices in today's India exemplify "culture wars" between liberal and conservative agendas, Flexible India argues that visions of yoga offer a "culture peace" that conceals, without resolving, such tensions in India. At the same time, yoga can also be imagined in ways that offer critical new tools for exposing hierarchical structures of power and race. Interweaving cultural and literary analysis, concepts from yoga traditions, and the author's own reflections, Flexible India offers a multidimensional perspective on yoga and its uses in India and its diasporic communities"-- |
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| Item Description: | Includes bibliographical references and index |
| ISBN: | 023120602X |