The NLS Public Lecture Series | Book Discussion: ‘A Thousand Tiny Cuts – Mobility and Security across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands’
Old Academic Block (OAB) 202, NLSIU
Monday, May 6, 2024, 5:00 pm
This event is open to the public.
In our upcoming public lecture on May 6, 2024, NLSIU will host a book discussion with Sahana Ghosh, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. The discussion is on her book titled ‘A Thousand Tiny Cuts – Mobility and Security across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands’. The event will take place from 5 pm – 6.30 pm. NLS faculty member Dr. Atreyee Majumder will be the discussant.
About the speaker
Sahana Ghosh uses ethnography and feminist research methods to study the forms and experiences of inequality produced through the intersection of mobility, militarism, and gender in our contemporary world. Her first book A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security Across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands (University of California Press 2023), and her academic and public writing, center on borders and borderlands, gendered labor, and migration and national security regimes in South Asia.
About the book
A Thousand Tiny Cuts chronicles the slow transformation of a connected region into national borderlands. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in northern Bangladesh and eastern India, it shows the foundational place of gender and sexuality in the making and management of threat in relation to mobility. Rather than focusing solely on border fences and border crossings, the book argues that bordering reorders relations of value. The cost of militarization across this ostensibly “friendly” border is devaluation—of agrarian land and crops, of borderland youth undesirable as brides and grooms in their respective national hinterlands, of regional infrastructures now disconnected, and of social and physical geographies disordered by surveillance. This ethnography of the gendered political economy of mobility illuminates the violence of bordering, migration and citizenship, and transnational inequalities, with important political stakes for borders and security regimes in South Asia and beyond.