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Flexible India offers a powerful panorama of the paradoxes and transformative potential of yoga. Never reductive, Shameem Black lays bare painful contradictions in sensitive and compassionate prose. She interrogates power imbalances, cultural appropriation and the possibility of positive transformation through yoga with integrity and bravery. -- Suzanne Newcombe, author of <i>Yoga in Britain: Stretching Spirituality and Educating Yogis</i> Shameem Black invites us to reassess the idea of ‘yoga’ in the popular cultural imaginary. Her timely, thoughtful and erudite study tackles notions of cultural appropriation, social inequality and political critique, channeled through a wonderfully blended academic and creative endeavor. -- E. Dawson Varughese, Manipal Centre for Humanities Shameem Black’s Flexible India provides an important, new perspective on the complex politics of yoga in contemporary India. In a style that is lucid, incisive, and critically insightful, her analysis sheds light on how the practice of yoga, and claims to authority over its historical representation, are riven with contradictions that reinforce inequities and injustices. At the same time, yoga’s flexible multivocality animates the possibility of practice that transcends entrenched forms of exclusion, exploitation, and alienation. With deep empathy and critical reasoning Black shows how the rigidity of India’s 21st century modernity can be understood in terms that work out the tensions of nationalism and the contortions of neoliberalism. -- Joseph S. Alter, author of <i>Yoga in Modern India</i>

Flexible India offers a powerful panorama of the paradoxes and transformative potential of yoga. Never reductive, Shameem Black lays bare painful contradictions in sensitive and compassionate prose. She interrogates power imbalances, cultural appropriation and the possibility of positive transformation through yoga with integrity and bravery. -- Suzanne Newcombe, author of <i>Yoga in Britain: Stretching Spirituality and Educating Yogis</i>

Flexible India offers a powerful panorama of the paradoxes and transformative potential of yoga. Never reductive, Shameem Black lays bare painful contradictions in sensitive and compassionate prose. She interrogates power imbalances, cultural appropriation and the possibility of positive transformation through yoga with integrity and bravery. -- Suzanne Newcombe, author of <i>Yoga in Britain: Stretching Spirituality and Educating Yogis</i> Shameem Black invites us to reassess the idea of ‘yoga’ in the popular cultural imaginary. Her timely, thoughtful and erudite study tackles notions of cultural appropriation, social inequality and political critique, channeled through a wonderfully blended academic and creative endeavor. -- E. Dawson Varughese, Manipal Centre for Humanities Shameem Black’s Flexible India provides an important, new perspective on the complex politics of yoga in contemporary India. In a style that is lucid, incisive, and critically insightful, her analysis sheds light on how the practice of yoga, and claims to authority over its historical representation, are riven with contradictions that reinforce inequities and injustices. At the same time, yoga’s flexible multivocality animates the possibility of practice that transcends entrenched forms of exclusion, exploitation, and alienation. With deep empathy and critical reasoning Black shows how the rigidity of India’s 21st century modernity can be understood in terms that work out the tensions of nationalism and the contortions of neoliberalism. -- Joseph S. Alter, author of <i>Yoga in Modern India</i> Flexible India is a stirringly intimate portrait of both the beauty and vicissitudes of global yoga. Black expertly unfurls the complex ethical debates of modern yoga without relinquishing its generative possibilities for hope, imagination, and flexibility—a must read. -- Amanda Lucia, author of <i>White Utopias: The Religious Exoticism of Transformational Festivals</i> Black’s richly-textured analysis takes us on a journey across disciplines, genres and lenses, highlighting crucial questions surrounding the meaning, value and practice of yoga, all the while gloriously centering its messy multiplicity and internal contradictions. An ambitious, skillfully-written book—and a truly edifying, rewarding read. -- Farah Godrej, author of <i>Freedom Inside? Yoga and Meditation in the Carceral State</i>

Author Information

Shameem Black is associate professor in the School of Culture, History, and Language at the Australian National University. She is the author of Fiction Across Borders: Imagining the Lives of Others in Late Twentieth-Century Novels (Columbia, 2010).

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