Radhika Mongia
Biographic Data
| ID | 1317765 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Radhika Mongia |
| GIVEN NAMES | Radhika |
| FAMILY NAME | Mongia |
| SIGNATURE | MONGIA R |
| AFFILIATIONS | York University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 82 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1969 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Mobilizing Documents
This co‐authored essay builds on a growing anthropological literature that engages critically and creatively with idealized official and popular ideas about documents of/in migration regimes. Documents are often championed as a common and unquestionable good in transnational migration but they are intrinsically tied to inequalities and exclusions. As such they can be the source of hope for migrants, but are frequently also the source of violence,…
Colonialism and the “Right to Exclude”
A discussion of the state's “right to exclude” requires that we have at our disposal unambiguous understandings of what constitutes the state, who constitute its subjects/citizens, and who constitute aliens. 1 This, however, is not the case. In fact, the reverse is more true: particular notions of the state, of subjects/citizens, and of aliens are the outcome of (among other things) practices of migration regulation. This essay interrogates two u…
Theorizing Local Migration Law and Governance
In many regions around the world, the governance of migration increasingly involves local authorities and actors. This edited volume introduces theoretical contributions that, departing from the 'local turn' in migration studies, highlight the distinct role that legal processes, debates, and instruments play in driving this development. Drawing on historical and contemporary case studies, it demonstrates how paying closer analytical attention to …
The visual records and visual legacies of slavery
How did visual techniques serve to facilitate slave regimes? How can an attention to the visual record enhance our understanding of slavery? In what ways does this record survive in our contemporary visual economy? This essay considers these questions through an analysis of Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery: A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World by Dale Tomich et al. and of the contested practice of "p…
Rethinking Decolonization
With the issue of migration at its core, Nandita Sharma's Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants (2020) seeks to address large, profound questions: What characterizes the extreme levels of inequality and immiseration across the globe? How are such inequalities produced and sustained, within and across nation-states? Why were national liberation movements/Third World nationalisms unable to deliver on the promise…
On Learning Lessons from the Past
The Komagata Maru as Event
Indian Migration and Empire
How did states come to monopolize control over migration? What do the processes that produced this monopoly tell us about the modern state? In Indian Migration and Empire Radhika Mongia provocatively argues that the formation of colonial migration regulations was dependent upon, accompanied by, and generative of profound changes in normative conceptions of the modern state. Focused on state regulation of colonial Indian migration between 1834 and…
Global Ethnography 2.0
Reflecting on formulating a fresh agenda for comparative study, Harry Haroo-tunian (2005) has argued that analyses in the humanities and interpretative social sciences are increasingly marked by a privileging of spatial categories with an accompanying decline in addressing questions of temporality. For Harootunian, the dominance of a range of static, space-specific categories— such as culture, civilization, modernity, nation, center and periphery…
Historicizing State Sovereignty
The overarching argument of this paper is not a new one; others have made it in various forms. The argument suggests, in Bernard Cohn's simple formulation, that metropole and colony should be treated in a unified field of analysis. Reconstituting the analytical frame in the manner Cohn suggests has a range of implications not only for the study of colonialism but also, and perhaps more importantly, for understanding current geopolitical conjunctu…
Gender and the Historiography of Gandhian Satyagraha in South Africa
Impartial regimes of truth
This essay is concerned. with one of the most mundane, routine, yet significant practices of modern society: the inquiry. Approaching the inquiry as, simultaneously, a mechanism for the evaluation and adjudication of truth, and as a method of information collection and compilation, the paper argues that the inquiry is a key apparatus for the production of a regime of truth governed. by the liberal notion of ‘impartiality’. In making this argument…
Race, Nationality, Mobility
Research Article| September 01 1999 Race, Nationality, Mobility: A History of the Passport Radhika Viyas Mongia Radhika Viyas Mongia Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (1999) 11 (3): 527–555. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-11-3-527 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Radhika Viyas Mongia; Race, Nationality, Mobility: A History of the Passport. P…
Melancholy Order
Book Review
Race, Nationality, Mobility
Research Article| September 01 1999 Race, Nationality, Mobility: A History of the Passport Radhika Viyas Mongia Radhika Viyas Mongia Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (1999) 11 (3): 527–555. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-11-3-527 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Radhika Viyas Mongia; Race, Nationality, Mobility: A History of the Passport. P…
Historicizing State Sovereignty
The overarching argument of this paper is not a new one; others have made it in various forms. The argument suggests, in Bernard Cohn's simple formulation, that metropole and colony should be treated in a unified field of analysis. Reconstituting the analytical frame in the manner Cohn suggests has a range of implications not only for the study of colonialism but also, and perhaps more importantly, for understanding current geopolitical conjunctu…
Gender and the Historiography of Gandhian Satyagraha in South Africa
Impartial regimes of truth
This essay is concerned. with one of the most mundane, routine, yet significant practices of modern society: the inquiry. Approaching the inquiry as, simultaneously, a mechanism for the evaluation and adjudication of truth, and as a method of information collection and compilation, the paper argues that the inquiry is a key apparatus for the production of a regime of truth governed. by the liberal notion of ‘impartiality’. In making this argument…
The visual records and visual legacies of slavery
How did visual techniques serve to facilitate slave regimes? How can an attention to the visual record enhance our understanding of slavery? In what ways does this record survive in our contemporary visual economy? This essay considers these questions through an analysis of Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery: A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World by Dale Tomich et al. and of the contested practice of "p…
On Learning Lessons from the Past
Melancholy Order
Book Review
Race, Nationality, Mobility
Research Article| September 01 1999 Race, Nationality, Mobility: A History of the Passport Radhika Viyas Mongia Radhika Viyas Mongia Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (1999) 11 (3): 527–555. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-11-3-527 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Radhika Viyas Mongia; Race, Nationality, Mobility: A History of the Passport. P…
Impartial regimes of truth
This essay is concerned. with one of the most mundane, routine, yet significant practices of modern society: the inquiry. Approaching the inquiry as, simultaneously, a mechanism for the evaluation and adjudication of truth, and as a method of information collection and compilation, the paper argues that the inquiry is a key apparatus for the production of a regime of truth governed. by the liberal notion of ‘impartiality’. In making this argument…
Gender and the Historiography of Gandhian Satyagraha in South Africa
Historicizing State Sovereignty
The overarching argument of this paper is not a new one; others have made it in various forms. The argument suggests, in Bernard Cohn's simple formulation, that metropole and colony should be treated in a unified field of analysis. Reconstituting the analytical frame in the manner Cohn suggests has a range of implications not only for the study of colonialism but also, and perhaps more importantly, for understanding current geopolitical conjunctu…
Global Ethnography 2.0
Reflecting on formulating a fresh agenda for comparative study, Harry Haroo-tunian (2005) has argued that analyses in the humanities and interpretative social sciences are increasingly marked by a privileging of spatial categories with an accompanying decline in addressing questions of temporality. For Harootunian, the dominance of a range of static, space-specific categories— such as culture, civilization, modernity, nation, center and periphery…
Indian Migration and Empire
How did states come to monopolize control over migration? What do the processes that produced this monopoly tell us about the modern state? In Indian Migration and Empire Radhika Mongia provocatively argues that the formation of colonial migration regulations was dependent upon, accompanied by, and generative of profound changes in normative conceptions of the modern state. Focused on state regulation of colonial Indian migration between 1834 and…
The Komagata Maru as Event
Rethinking Decolonization
With the issue of migration at its core, Nandita Sharma's Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants (2020) seeks to address large, profound questions: What characterizes the extreme levels of inequality and immiseration across the globe? How are such inequalities produced and sustained, within and across nation-states? Why were national liberation movements/Third World nationalisms unable to deliver on the promise…
On Learning Lessons from the Past
Theorizing Local Migration Law and Governance
In many regions around the world, the governance of migration increasingly involves local authorities and actors. This edited volume introduces theoretical contributions that, departing from the 'local turn' in migration studies, highlight the distinct role that legal processes, debates, and instruments play in driving this development. Drawing on historical and contemporary case studies, it demonstrates how paying closer analytical attention to …
The visual records and visual legacies of slavery
How did visual techniques serve to facilitate slave regimes? How can an attention to the visual record enhance our understanding of slavery? In what ways does this record survive in our contemporary visual economy? This essay considers these questions through an analysis of Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery: A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World by Dale Tomich et al. and of the contested practice of "p…
Colonialism and the “Right to Exclude”
A discussion of the state's “right to exclude” requires that we have at our disposal unambiguous understandings of what constitutes the state, who constitute its subjects/citizens, and who constitute aliens. 1 This, however, is not the case. In fact, the reverse is more true: particular notions of the state, of subjects/citizens, and of aliens are the outcome of (among other things) practices of migration regulation. This essay interrogates two u…
Mobilizing Documents
This co‐authored essay builds on a growing anthropological literature that engages critically and creatively with idealized official and popular ideas about documents of/in migration regimes. Documents are often championed as a common and unquestionable good in transnational migration but they are intrinsically tied to inequalities and exclusions. As such they can be the source of hope for migrants, but are frequently also the source of violence,…
Political science (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity (4 works) · History (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (3 works) · Colonialism (3 works) · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics (3 works)