• DOI:10.1177/147447400501200113
• Corpus ID: 144472509

Book Review: The companion species manifesto: dogs, people, and significant otherness

@article{Nast2005BookRT,
  title={Book Review: The companion species manifesto: dogs, people, and significant otherness},
  author={Heidi J. Nast},
  journal={Cultural Geographies},
  year={2005},
  volume={12},
  pages={118 - 120}
}

• Heidi J. Nast
• Published 1 January 2005
• Art
• Cultural Geographies

It is an essential read, and offers a challenge for all geographers engaged with these literatures. The text is a stark reminder of the continuing acceptability of an Orientalist lens through which ethnographies and academic literatures are received, produced and reproduced. South Asian women in the diaspora is a collection written by South Asian women within the academy who theorize from a position of being producers and subjects of research within the institutions of knowledge production. This collection offers a critical review of the nature of the racial politics within the academy, and an insight into the sociology of knowledge production from the perspective of the South Asian academic. Here, the heterogeneity of South Asian women’s academic interventions are explored, and thus challenge the usually reductive frame of subjective knowledges. The first key theme within the text is the objectification, essentialism and limitation of intellectual agency afforded to South Asian women, reflecting the dynamics of race and the reductive dynamism within academic process. The second theme is the means through which stereotypes of South Asian women’s embodied identities are purveyed in familiar iconographic forms. Nayanika Mookerjee examines the aestheticization of the raped woman as being incorporated within masculinist constructions of Bangladeshi nationalism, communicated through icons of nature and landscape. Bakirathi Mani also reviews the form of the South Asian body, within work on South Asian fashions in the West, as being one located in a cultural and homogenizing intellectual cul-de-sac. The third theme of the book is concerned with grounded approaches to South Asian spatial, identity, and participatory politics. In this section Rani Kwale records South Asian lesbian activism, which challenges the heterosexual matrix which structures spatial politics within society. Samina Zahir extends this concern with participatory practices in the context of community arts; here she examines the continued burden of representation played out within the political landscapes of community arts projects This burden is expressed effectively by the editors in their development and promotion of a productive dialogue with social theory and practice within and outside the academy. Here, the gaze of those Othered is returned, and a variety of new lenses of academic enquiry are borne through new research trajectories and epistemological challenges.