A brilliant provocation in the debate about female political subjectivity in the Global South<i>, An Empire of Touch </i>is an important and timely book. Going beyond the typical focus on women’s empowerment and independence, it demonstrates how women in East Bengal through their symbolic and material labor produce the terms of their own political self-conception. Saha’s deft and sophisticated readings of the material particulars of women’s labor reveal a relational politics of the self that expands what and who count as political.

- Mrinalini Sinha, author of <i>Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire</i>,

Saha has given us a thought-provoking, incisive, elegant, and necessary work wherein she recasts and regenerates postcolonial criticism. This book is well written, beautifully researched, creative, and politically vital.

- Erin Manning, author of <i>Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty</i>,

Saha proposes that the diaphanous nature first of muslin and then of other fabrics constitutes neither a simple product with exchange value nor an ephemeral or affective form of labor we have come to associate with certain kinds of women’s work. Forms of touch are woven into the fabric of colonial and postcolonial exchange. And they carry a spectral quality. Rather like the visor effect in Derrida’s reading of Hamlet in <i>Specters of Marx</i>, fabric casts a shadow on abstracted beings moving through history teleologically, and weaves a different affect.

- Ranjana Khanna, author of <i>Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation, 1830 to the Present</i>,