Book Review: South Asian women in the diaspora

difference chart locations of decay and possibility on and beyond the racial body. Environmental pollution, land claim struggles, skulls, disease=health, nationalism, intimacy, tourism, genetics and violences demonstrate the consequences of skin–blood essentialisms and the limitations of their attendant geographies which include nationalist projects, outer-national ‘crusades’ for Western democracy, territorialization, border security, racial-sexual segregations. For example: ideologies of blood – znation-community-purity naturalize social and spatial hierarchies, thus reinforcing expendable geographies and subjects; the scale of the racial body is inscribed with natural blood-histories – risky bodies ‘carry’ risky genes; biotechnologies simultaneously – destabilize and stabilize nature-places and racialization. While the political and theoretical positions of the essays vary, it is the twofold spatialization of new humanism and racial genealogies (alternative conceptualizations and historicizations of humanness) that demonstrate the ways in which nature, and the natural, are infused with all sorts of geographical politics. This is the uniqueness of the text: it does not simply replicate or describe analyses of race and place, anti-racism or racial injustice; rather it seeks to undo blood-essentialisms by exploring the seeming naturalness, or transparency, of geography and its inhabitants. What I mean by this is that the authors take seriously the role played by nature in determining spatial zallegiances, desires and rifts, and the ways in which ideological ‘naturalisms’ are invoked in situated contexts. By refusing to complement one side of racial essence debates (as resistant or emancipatory), each essay imagines the possibilities advanced by ongoing struggles which are never resolved: what kind of politics, articulations and geographies, then, are forged through social struggle? The arguments do not only seek to ‘denature’ race and nature and their commonsensical truths. They also hinge on recognizing how essences are lived and constructed through alterity and the work and the workings of subaltern political subjects. It is the work and workings of political subjects – taken up differently in each chapter and ranging from environmental activism to dog breeding and native geographies, spanning the USA, Guatemala, South Africa, Germany, Indonesia – that create innovative theoretical and everyday sites of opposition. The text offers not simply maps of difference, but locations where difference, and struggle are wrought with the demands of natural, commonsensical, sometimes violent truths.