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Chaudhuri, Amit. Clearing a Space: Essays on Literature, India, and Modernity. 2008. Oxford: Peter Lang. $19.99sc. 330 pp.

Article Excerpt
Over the last thirty years or so, the phenomenon known as the "cultural turn" has palpably recast the character and comportment of research in the humanities across the Anglophone world. Amit Chaudhuri's Clearing a Space is a sustained offensive against the terms of engagement that have proliferated under the aegis of this disciplinary makeover, and which in his view has practically excluded any debate that does not draw from the new intellectual dispensation. Chaudhuri is especially exercised by the discursive elisions effected in the Indian academy's embrace of this trend through the early 1990s.

The way Chaudhuri tells it, cultural studies in India today operates either on faux or foreign premises, although he is at pains to clarify that under scrutiny here are ideological and not geographical moorings. If one tries to locate where the cultural "turn" occurred in the Anglo-American academy--a location that crucially underwrites the rationale for the "turn"--then very clearly, Chaudhuri asserts, "it took place in, and challenged, the old centers and discourses of the liberal arts and humanities. It represented ... a decisive reclamation and privileging of 'popular culture,' both as a source of value and an area of study, over the mainly 'high' cultural preoccupations of...

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