[Linganth] Publication of Barney Bate's Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern

[Constantine Nakassis]

Dear Colleagues,

I am happy to announce that Bernard Bate's posthumous book, *Protestant
Textuality and the Tamil Modern *is now published as a paperback (available
here: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=33334) and as a free, open-access
epub or pdf (downloadable here:
https://www.sup.org/openebook/9781503628663/).

*Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern *is a study of the emergence of
oratory and ethnolinguistic consciousness in Tamil-speaking South India
over the last three centuries. Supplementing narrative with thorough
archival work, the book begins with Protestant missionaries' introduction
of the sermonic genre and takes the reader through its local
vernacularization. What originally began as a format of religious speech
became an essential political infrastructure used to galvanize support for
new social imaginaries, from Indian independence to Tamil nationalism. This
historical ethnography marries linguistic anthropology to performance
studies and political history, illuminating new geographies of belonging in
the modern era.

"A brilliant demonstration of how speech genres can shape history,
Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern traces the emergence of
political oratory in South India, calling new publics into being and
driving the rise of the Tamil modern. Bernard Bate's new book is a
foundational, richly documented contribution to the study of comparative
modernities, South Asian history, and political anthropology, securing his
legacy as a worthy heir to Weber and Durkheim in the elucidation of modern
social and political formations."
—Richard Bauman, Indiana University, Bloomington

"This book—assembled by a remarkable group of his colleagues—is a tribute
to Bate's monumental effort to place Tamil oratory in its civilizational,
genealogical, and comparative context. Bate's argument about Protestant
sermonizing as the key to the birth of the modern political subject in
Tamil country is a major breakthrough in the study of the linkage of modern
politics to poetics and religious oratory."
—Arjun Appadurai, New York University

--------------------------------
Constantine V. Nakassis
Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology,
Associate Faculty in the Departments of Cinema and Media Studies and
Comparative Human Development, The University of Chicago
Chair, Committee on Southern Asian Studies (COSAS), The University of
Chicago
email: cnakassi at uchicago.edu

https://anthropology.uchicago.edu/people/faculty/constantine-v-nakassis
http://nakassis.com/constantine
http://chicagotamilforum.uchicago.edu
https://southasia.uchicago.edu/

<http://chicagotamilforum.uchicago.edu>
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