Published in 2024 by Columbia University Press.
Agi Wittich
In her latest scholarly work, Flexible Yoga: Yoga’s Cultural and Political Tensions, Shameem Black insightfully probes yoga’s intricate negotiations amidst cultural appropriation debates, Hindu nationalist agendas, and global labor exploitation through an interdisciplinary framework encompassing ethnography, discourse analysis, and textual study. Utilizing a compassionate yet critical lens, Black examines yoga’s contradictory status as a practice of liberation and oppression shaped by transnational flows of neoliberal capitalism. She argues that its malleable nature enables diverse imaginative, economic, and ideological projects across contexts. This timely and accessible examination of contemporary yoga thoughtfully unpacks multifaceted identity constructions, tensions around traditional claims, and the fault lines of social justice politics permeating today’s globalized yoga spaces.
As India rises unevenly in economic clout and global standing, yoga is its cipher.”
This book meticulously explores the multifaceted identity and impact of yoga in the global landscape of the 21st century. Utilizing a comprehensive approach that encompasses analysis of fiction, legal statutes, digital media, and ethnographic data spanning various genres and nations, Black delves into the complex nature of yoga as a “flexible” phenomenon, simultaneously facilitating projects of liberation and oppression.
The employs an interdisciplinary approach, based largely in the discipline English language literature, that unveils yoga’s adaptability. The same qualities that contribute to personal healing or social empowerment also lend themselves to potentially harmful, exploitative ends. Black explores how yoga can be free, profitable, and exploitative simultaneously. Her book traces these intricate threads by highlighting yoga’s central imaginative contradictions.
Black organizes her discussion around four overarching themes: Hindu nationalism, multiculturalism, global labor, and social justice. Within the Indian context, she illustrates how the current Modi regime strategically promotes yoga to enhance soft power and economic strength, albeit infusing it with a patriarchal Hindu nationalist ideology that erases India’s diversity. Conversely, the transnational popularity of yoga enables Western states to portray themselves as appreciative of Indian culture, even as they target South Asian groups domestically.
The capitalist dimensions of modern yoga also rely on and conceal inequities in India’s tech labor market and the precarious situations faced by transnational yoga teachers. Despite the promising visions of flexible personhood and freedom associated with yoga, these ideals become entangled in structures such as racism, casteism, exploitation, and neoliberalism. Nevertheless, glimpses of yoga’s radical potential persist, as seen in feminist reinventions or solidarities across struggles for social justice.
By foregrounding Indian voices within yoga production, marketing and fiction, Black explores Hindu diasporic advocates who feel estranged by mainstream Western interpretations of their heritage while also highlighting caste and gender inequlaity that is perpetuated by some of these perspectives. Rather than oversimplifying debates over appropriation, ownership, or tradition, Black navigates the contradictions of yoga as both a liberatory practice and an oppressive discourse. Flexible Yoga challenges rigid assumptions about contemporary yoga spaces and community alignments.
Black’s prose critically yet compassionately embraces the plurality of perspectives embedded in the global circulation of ideas. Her keen observation that stories and spectacles establish where and how yoga recruits new bodies to neoliberal ideas of labor under capitalism and where and how it promotes alternative ways of thinking and feeling reflects a nuanced understanding of yoga’s ongoing negotiation across various groups. Black models sensitive academic inquiry into the fault lines of power underlying contemporary yoga globally.
Black’s lively and jargon-free prose makes Flexible Yoga suitable for diverse audiences, including yoga teachers, lifelong practitioners interested in yoga’s social meanings, and students in religious studies or transnational feminism courses. The book’s sections can also be effectively utilized in scholar-practitioner dialogue groups or teacher training programs. Given the growth of academic yoga programs, Flexible Yoga fills a significant gap by situating yoga in the context of global Indian English literature and culture.