Author Archives: Middle Ground Journal

The Streets where the Dragons Dance: The Street Life of Calcutta’s Chinatowns

“The trials and tribulations surrounding the evolution and erosion of the Chinese streets of Calcutta have hardly received importance in the popular historical narrative of the city, irrespective of the sustained curiosity regarding the lives of the Chinatowns. A street’s role in constructing a spatial identity often separates a locality from another, but it certainly serves as an arena where interaction, adaptation, and formulation of a syncretic identity take place.”

Read more

Review of Outcaste Bombay by Juned Shaikh

“Outcaste Bombay is successful in broadening the scope of histories from below by expanding its enquiry into the worlds of the lumpen-proletariat, the petty bourgeois shop keepers, and the sex workers. It offers a glimpse of Bombay as it is lived, reshaped, and appro¬priated by its Dalit inhabitants, and makes a great contribution to the bourgeoning scholarship on Dalit labor and Bombay city.”

Read more

Review Essay of Two Books on Burma and Military History

The 1945 Burma Campaign and the Transformation of the British Indian Army. Raymond A. Callahan and Daniel Marston. Kansas University Press, 2021. ISBN: 9780700630417.   A War of Empires: Japan, India, Burma & Britain, 1941-45. Robert Lyman. Oxford: Osprey, 2021. ISBN: 9781472847140. Reviewed by George Wilton, independent scholar, Member of British Commission for Military History, Managing Editor of British Journal for

Read more

Review of Colonial Transactions by Florence Bernault

“Colonial Transactions expands our knowledge and refines our understanding of the two themes that stand at its center – witchcraft and colonialism. The book historicizes witchcraft, arguing that history can enhance our understanding of the obsessions and modes of power of modern witchcraft in Africa. It brings closer the allegedly contradictory ideas of the European colonizers and the colonized Africans and discusses them in the same realm.”

Read more

Review of Colonialism in Global Perspective by Kris Manjapra

Colonialism in Global Perspective. Kris Manjapra. Cambridge University Press, 2020. ISBN-13: 9781108441360. Reviewed by Joseph Snyder, Southeast Missouri State University Edited by Julie Tanaka © 2022 The Middle Ground Journal (ISSN: 2155-1103) Number 23, Spring 2022. http://TheMiddleGroundJournal.org See Submission Guidelines page for the journal’s not-for-profit educational open-access policy.

Read more
« Older Entries