Richa Nagar Bücher

Experts often assume that the poor, hungry, rural, and/or precarious need external interventions. They frequently fail to recognize how the same people create politics and knowledge by living and honing their own dynamic visions. How might scholars and teachers working in the Global North ethically participate in producing knowledge in ways that connect across different meanings of struggle, hunger, hope, and the good life?Informed by over twenty years of experiences in India and the United States, Hungry Translations bridges these divides with a fresh approach to academic theorizing. Through in-depth reflections on her collaborations with activists, theatre artists, writers, and students, Richa Nagar discusses the ongoing work of building embodied alliances among those who occupy different locations in predominant hierarchies. She argues that such alliances can sensitively engage difference through a kind of full-bodied immersion and translation that refuses comfortable closures or transparent renderings of meanings. While the shared and unending labor of politics makes perfect translation--or retelling--impossible, hungry translations strive to make our knowledges more humble, more tentative, and more alive to the creativity of struggle.

In Muddying the Waters, Richa Nagar uses stories, encounters, and anecdotes as well as methodological reflections, to grapple with the complexity of working through solidarities, responsibility, and ethics while involved in politically engaged scholarship. Experiences that range from the streets of Dar es Salaaam to farms and development offices in North India inform discussion of the labor and politics of co-authorship, translation and genre blending in research and writing that cross multiple--and often difficult--borders, Nagar links the implicit assumptions, issues, and questions involved with scholarship and political action, and explores the epistemological risks and possibilities of creative research that brings these into intimate dialogue. Daringly self-conscious, Muddying the Waters reveals a politically engaged research and writer working to become "radically vulnerable," and on the ways a focus on such radical vulnerability could allow a re-imagining of collaboration that opens new avenues to collective dreaming and laboring across sociopolitical, geographical, linguistic, and institutional borders.