Archiving the Nation-state in Feminist Praxis: A South Asian Perspective

Abstract

Postcolonial nation-states carry not merely the marks of their erstwhile political and cultural experiences of colonisation but also the ‘burdens’ of nationalism. These include a certain anxiety about their territorial and political status that refuses to engage with interrogations of the nation-state and insists upon confining thinking within a set of givens: defined boundaries, which make up what a civil rights activist called ‘cartographic nationalism,’1