Böcker av Tara Atluri

People who live in South Asian cities re-shape politics and actualize constitutional rights, in parks, on playgrounds, and in city streets. Each chapter in this book discusses feminist, Transgender, and queer movements in urban India and Pakistan. The author has interviewed those who are part of a generation of unabashedly courageous, intersectional feminists who are living and working in South Asia and share their first-hand stories. These activists stage protests and artistic interventions in a time period of legal reforms regarding queer rights, public debates regarding sex, the rise of urbanization, and growing forms of Internet literacy and accessibility. Concrete Women is a rumination on the distances between life and death, between unremitting violence and the possibility of justice.

Theodor Adorno once remarked that, "...every work of art is an uncommitted crime." This book is a tribute to political artists who deviate from the mainstream and create art that engages with questions of societal oppression, survival, and resistance. It draws on interviews with transnational artists whose work is representative of emerging trends in art, visual culture, and political aesthetics. Uncommitted Crimes reflects on a new generation of artists whose creative praxis, sensibilities, influences, and frames of reference derive from multiple national, religious, and cultural genealogies, and an ambivalent relationship to Western and European nationalisms. Courageously, these racialized, Indigenous, and migrant artists straddle the divides of many categories of identity in regards to gender, sexuality, and 'race.' Their art challenges the silently imbibed worship of whiteness, heteronormative patriarchies, and colonial settler ideologies of "home." These exceptional cultural producers enter into uncomfortable dialogues, creatively. Inspired by their visionary praxis, this book is an uncommitted crime, attempting to smuggle arresting artistic ideas into a site of intellectual imagi/nation. Artists whose works are explored in this book include: Andil Gosine, Syrus Marcus Ware, Elisha Lim; Amita Zamaan and Helen Lee; Shirin Fathi; Kara Springer; Rajni Perera; Joshua Vettivelu; Brendan Fernandes; Kerry Potts and Rebecca Belmore; The Mass Arrival Collective (Farrah Miranda, Graciela Flores Mendez, Tings Chak, Vino Shanmuganathan, and Nadia Saad). The book contains 65 pages of artwork.

Drawing on interviews done in the Indian subcontinent, this book suggests that while colonial violence haunts postcolonial sexualities, anti-colonial resistance also remains, echoing in the streets like the chorus of an old song ~ A-za-di-.