In the Shadow of Minority Rights

Sagnik Dutta is Researcher at the Department of Cultural Studies, Tilburg University, and Associate Professor at Jindal Global Law School, OP Jindal Global University. They were awarded the Gates Cambridge scholarship for their doctoral studies. They work on decolonial and postcolonial theory, minority citizenship, securitisation, and data justice. Their scholarship has appeared in several prominent peer-reviewed journals.

• Acknowledgements; Introduction; Part I. Ethics: 1. Right to be righteous: constituting rights, travelling constitutions; 2. Becoming equals: gender equality as an ethical commitment; Part II. Spaces: 3. Remaking the ghetto: sites of resistance; 4. Estranged attachments: the carceral state and the everyday life of Muslim law; 5. Between the home and the world: the many publics of Muslim law; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

'Dutta's book is both valuable and timely. In an era where discussions of processes of 'decolonisation' are becoming widespread, they provide a valuable corrective: by deploying ethnographic methods, they demonstrate the way in which such processes are lived and practised rather than engaging with them in purely theoretical terms. Indeed, by examining the practical ways in which minority rights and gender are experienced and negotiated in localised settings, Dutta presents a cogent argument that abstract conceptions of rights are insufficient in making sense of complex social and cultural dynamics. The book is a wonderful entrée into a practical and experiential form of comparative political theory that presents a substantive challenge for contemporary political theory, namely, how do theorists comprehend the differences between the practice of political theory and the practices of its individual and collective subjects?' Adrian Little, University of Melbourne