BOOK REVIEWS GUIDELINE

We intend to curate the Book Section of Usawa, guided by the overarching gender-sensitive, feminist framework, which underpins the magazine’s politics.

This does not imply that we will only focus on books with feminist concerns, or espousing a feminist politics. This also does not imply that we will only focus on books which foreground the complexity of doing gender and its manifold interplays with other axis of identities, such as race, class, and caste. Hence, the list of books shared hereafter merely reflect our inclinations, and are suggestive, rather than prescriptive.

Further, though both of the above caveats will be high on our priority, our underpinning vision will be to highlight the ‘struggles and dialogues’ under progress in the field of popular culture, and how a particular text manifests, responds, expands, critiques, or adds to, these struggles and dialogues. We understand that the question of power (in the Foucauldian sense) is ontologically embedded within both these terms, ‘struggle’, and ‘dialogue’. While reviewers are free to engage with a book as they see fit, what we would be most interested to know and showcase is how power struggles – related to gender, caste, class, race (among others) – are enacted, played out, and even resolved within a text. For instance, we would be intrigued to know how Tanuj Solanki’s reworking of the thematic (and political) troupe of the ‘Dalit masculine body’ in his recent novel, Manji’s Mayhem (2022), challenges popular perceptions of caste and class. Likewise, we look forward to a critique of the role that ‘the family’ plays in the formation of queer subjectivities in Neel Patel’s Tell Me How to Be (2022).

Conversely, we would be intrigued by how certain texts engage with, critique, or provide insights, about the extrinsic, broader field of Culture. For instance, can Nivedita Menon’s arguments in her book, Seeing like a Feminist (2012), be employed as a counter-argument to Post-feminism (as defined by Angela McRobbie). Likewise, what does Anthony Joseph’s recent TS Eliot Prize-winning book, Sonnets for Albert (2022), which is essentially about a son’s relationship with his father who was largely absent during the former’s growing up years, have to say about the ongoing crisis in masculinity, and its inter-generational residues.

Given that a lot of the issues we want to talk about and cover are of a perennial nature, we have drawn a subsection, called, Perennial. The books listed within this subsection go beyond the caveat of having been published in the last 1-2 years. Rather, these are of the timeless variety, drawn with a two-fold intention. Firstly, we would like/want to foreground these texts in popular imagination. Secondly, we would love to showcase how reviewers respond to, or have been affected by these texts, thus foregrounding their perennial relevance. Particularly regarding the books in this section, but also similar books depending on the reviewer’s choice, we would be interested to receive 1000-1500 word, free-flowing essays/ reviews, about how these books have affected you, or have shaped critical discourses in popular culture, according to you.

For Fiction/ Poetry and Non-Fiction books (Section 1 & 2), we would be happy to receive 1000-1500 word, insightful reviews and commentaries.