REGARDING IRELAND IN A POST-COLONIAL FRAME

This essay considers the applicability of postcolonial theory to Irish culture and history. It develops the concept of multiple rhythms or temporalities of social struggle for which only that of nationalism is determined punctually by the struggle for the state. The domination of Irish historiography by state-oriented narratives occludes the histories and the formal or organizational aspects of other forms of social movement, such that the postcolonial project is directed simultaneously towards the mapping of such alternative movements and to the critique of statist historiographies, whether imperialist, nationalist or ‘revisionist’. Where postcolonial theory has tended to emphasize the ‘hybrid’ nature of colonial cultures, this essay prefers to focus on the productive interface between the incommensurable social and cultural formations of colonial modernity and colonized non-modernity. At this interface emerge continually both new subaltern social formations and practices, which cannot be understood as ‘traditional’ and new forms of colonial state institution that are summoned into being by anti-colonial practices, for which the model of an advanced state coming to bear on a backward population is clearly inadequate. The essay draws from the history of agrarian movements in Ireland and banditry in the Philippines and from contemporary techniques of state surveillance and resistance to it in Northern Ireland.     

Is the subaltern resilient? Notes on agency and neoliberal subjects

ABSTRACT

This essay engages the question of where Gayatri Spivak’s understanding of subalternity is to be located today, and it does so by first establishing a brief genealogy of thinking the outside of modern, capitalist economic and cultural modes of production. This genealogy reaches back to the classic Marxist figure of the lumpenproletariat, moves through its postcolonial reappropriation by Fanon as well as Gramsci’s original articulation of the subaltern, and arrives at Subaltern Studies’ re-articulation of Gramsci’s notion of the subaltern as well as Spivak’s critical dialogue with Subaltern Studies. This first part of the essay lays the ground for an argument that pertains to the relation between subalternity, agency, resistance, and resilience, within a context of neoliberalism in which agency is particularly salient as a way of accounting for the world. The discussion on subalternity and agency builds on Spivak’s critical engagement with the task of ‘giving voice’, as well as on Saba Mahmood’s work on the conceptual entanglement of agency and resistance. This leads me to the central argument that we may be witnessing a shift in the conceptualization of agency, which is particularly salient to a contemporary understanding of subalternity and the shift that the ‘new subaltern’ [Spivak, G., 2012. The new subaltern: a silent interview. In: V. Chaturvedi, ed. Mapping subaltern studies and the postcolonial. London: Verso] indicates: in current neoliberal times, it is perhaps less agency-as-resistance that informs an understanding of the subaltern’s agency, but rather agency-as-resilience. The essay concludes with a critique of resilience.     

Who's Afraid of Third Wave Feminism?

This article addresses some issues related to the question of the ‘third wave’ within contemporary British feminism, situating British debates within an international context. My argument is that existing accounts of third wave feminism treat it either in terms of what the term means to the author, or it is treated as a coherent and easily recognizable movement or set of positions within contemporary feminism. By contrast, I adopt an approach drawn from poststructuralist discourse theory which emphasizes the diverse and overlapping ways in which the notion of a ‘third wave’ is appropriated by academics and activists alike. From this theoretical base, I trace two different conceptions of the ‘third wave’ – one referring to a poststructuralist and postcolonial critique of the second wave – and another referring to a specific generational cohort of young feminists. I argue that the latter conception has become dominant in the contemporary British context and to a lesser extent elsewhere. The second half of the article develops a critique of the ‘generational paradigm’ of third wave feminism, drawing on interviews with activists and postcolonial academic perspectives.     

The wageless life of the subaltern

ABSTRACT

One of the most striking legacies of the Subaltern Studies project has been the innovative methodologies and archives that it has mobilized to articulate the singular position of the subaltern outside the hegemonic terms of representation. Yet in its sweeping classification of non-hegemonic social groups and classes, Subaltern Studies has often tended to elide the precise economic determinants that define the subaltern as a class, and thereby foreclose the forms of agency that are available to people who occupy such singular positions of radical alterity that cannot be identified in hegemonic terms. Spivak’s deconstructive rethinking of the labour theory of value enables us to consider how the body of the gendered subaltern performs an important economic function in the contemporary global economy. But to what extent can such a theory account for the economic conditions of people dwelling in the slums and shantytowns of postcolonial cities, or what Michael Denning has aptly called the wageless life of the global poor? And how might we begin to address the gendered dynamics of wageless life? Through a reading of Abderrahmane Sissako’s film Bamako (2006), this essay considers how the film’s juxtaposition of a fictional courtroom narrative in which the World Bank is put on trial and the everyday lives of characters who populate the courtyard in which the courtroom is situated raise questions about the limitations of the law and civil society to alter the socio-economic conditions of wageless life. With reference to Gayatri Spivak’s reflections on the relationship between the subaltern and the economic policies of global financial institutions the essay suggests that the narrative structure and mise-en-scène of Bamako offer a means of addressing the global economic conditions as well as the power relations that circumscribe the agency and voice of the subaltern.     

Negotiating Solidarity: Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People and the ‘NGO-ization’ of Postcolonial Narrative

This essay examines the relationship between transnational non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and postcolonial disasters as represented in literature. After the 1990s expansion of humanitarian organizations, a wide array of NGO-related literature emerges, including depictions of aid workers in fiction as well as humanitarian-authored narratives. While these texts contain a capacity for self-critique typically lacking in transnational NGO campaign materials, they remain mired in a ‘bureaucratic imagination’, sequestered from supposed beneficiaries. Alongside this literary development is an increasing pressure on postcolonial fiction to align with narrowly defined NGO missions, or what might be called an ‘NGO-ization of postcolonial narrative’. This essay interprets Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People as a vociferous refutation of such humanitarian pressure. Sinha stages the interaction between subaltern survivor and humanitarian benefactor not in terms of heroic salvation or radical rejection but as a conditional and negotiated solidarity. Disaster thus creates an opportunity to reimagine the subaltern-humanitarian relationship.     

Political Economy,Social Movements and State Power: A Marxian Perspective on Two Decades of Resistance to the Narmada Dam Projects*

Abstract In this article, I put forward a Marxian analysis of the conflict over dam-building on the Narmada River in central and western India, which seeks to bring out how in this specific conflict it is possible to discern the workings of the master change processes that have moulded the Indian trajectory of postcolonial capitalist development. I start by showing how the concrete case of dispossession in the Narmada Valley is expressive of how the development strategies that defined the postcolonial nation-building project have been moulded in such a way as to create a de facto transfer of productive resources to the country's dominant proprietary classes. I then move on to argue that these features of the political economy of India's postcolonial development project can be understood as the sediment of struggles between social movements from above and below in the decades immediately prior to Independence. Arguing that the postcolonial development project has unravelled, I outline the fundamentals of an analysis of the characteristics of social movements from below in the conflictual field of force which is emerging in its wake. Finally, I draw on the trajectory of resistance to dam-building on the Narmada to articulate a series of reflections on the nature of state power in India and the possibilities that might exist for the state to function as an enabling space for the struggles of subaltern social groups.     

AN ALTERNATIVE METACRITIQUE OF POSTCOLONIAL CULTURAL STUDIES FROM A CULTURAL SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

This paper examines some of the current metacritical perspectives to postcolonial cultural studies, and discusses an alternative cultural contextualist perspective through the case of Hong Kong cultural studies. I first demarcate between contextualist and non-contextualist metacritical perspectives as well as between political-economic and cultural-contextualist ones. Then I identify major metacritiques that are currently made against postcolonial studies, and by showing how they may be applicable to Hong Kong cultural studies, I suggest ways to re-interpret these metacritiques from a cultural sociological perspective. I shall highlight important structural characteristics of Hong Kong cultural studies, and analyse them in terms of a cultural sociology of the postcolonial intellectual field. Ultimately, I argue that the problems associated with this postcolonial intellectual field appear to originate from the hierarchical global cultural context.     

The necessity of an attention to Eurocentrism and colonial technologies: an addition to critical mental health literature

Critical perspectives in mental health and the highly influential contributions of those who identify with and/or ally with the psychiatric-survivor, consumer-survivor, ex-patient, or mad movements have provoked an appreciation of the many exposed epistemological, methodological, and ethical issues that (re)produce violence within biomedical psychiatry. What is often left uninterrogated is the reliance on a Eurocentric conceptualization of history within articulations of struggle and when attending to the political and social contexts of critique. The effect of this enduring Eurocentrism is often an inattention to the complicit influences of colonial and imperial projects on the practices and technologies of dehumanization, taxonomization, and the establishment of human hierarchies to rationalize violence through the implementation of racial and eugenic rationale. The imperative of this attention to Eurocentrism is suggested from a synthesis of contributions from critical mental health, postcolonial, and critical race literature.     

Anti‐Racism in Movement: Afro‐Brazilian Afoxé and Contemporary Black Brazilian Struggles for Equality

This paper examines the Afro‐Brazilian afoxé as a form of cultural struggle that critically contests narratives and practices that reproduce racial inequality in contemporary Brazil. Through their afoxé in the interior of São Paulo, the Orùnmilá Cultural Center mobilizes Afro‐Brazilian knowledge and cultural practices to challenge culturalist treatments of Afro‐Brazilian “difference” in the management and representation of carnaval. I explore how such treatments reflect broader state‐orchestrated attempts to undermine black anti‐racism and the implementation of substantive policies to address racial inequality in various spheres, including education and culture. The afoxé and the Orùnmilá Center's broader work constitute an important, contemporary means through which black organizations in Brazil make visible and vocal public claims for representation and self‐determination. Such work pushes policy‐makers and academics to reinterpret the terms of black inclusion vis‐à‐vis subaltern or “other” cultures, historical experiences, perspectives, and participation in societal transformation.     

Decolonizing Sociology Through Collaboration,Co-Learning and Action: A Case for Participatory Action Research1

Despite important efforts by postcolonial scholars to “decolonize” sociology, this endeavor remains limited by the scaffolding of empirical research, or the institutionalized practices and beliefs embedded within data collection and researchers' relationship to research subjects. In its current form, this scaffolding excludes “subaltern” voices from critiquing and extending sociological theory, deriving benefits from the study, or informing social actions that stem from the research. This limits the field's understanding of the multi-faceted impacts of colonialism and retrenches inequalities between scholars and participants. Participatory Action Research (PAR) offers an alternative, decolonial infrastructure. PAR acknowledges the value of knowledge from the periphery and calls for (1) the participation of marginalized research populations in each step of the research process; (2) co-learning between researchers and participants; and (3) collaborative social action that centers the needs of marginalized research populations. Drawing on a case study of PAR in Rio de Janeiro, I demonstrate how PAR allows sociologists, in partnership with historically colonized groups, to decolonize sociology not only in theory, but in the concrete practices of empirical research.     

Invisible Women in History and Global Studies: Reflections from an Archival Research Project

This article questions the continuing invisibility of the significant scale of the involvement of women in historical movements/moments. The focus is on Mahatma Gandhi-led Civil Disobedience movement (1930–1933), which was a historic turning point enabling the political involvement of masses of women in South Asia. Using an individual narrative, multi-archival research, and secondary literature survey, this article contends that the thriving subaltern and feminist historical traditions have had limited impact on historical ‘gender mainstreaming’. Furthermore, the paper argues that revealing the diverse nature and the substantial scale of women's involvement in social/political change is important for two reasons: firstly, it contributes to a fuller understanding of history and, secondly, because historical research is essential for contemporary policy-making. Reclaiming the role of ordinary women in disparate history writing traditions thus can be a tool to understand and counter persistent gender inequality, in South Asia and in the larger global community.     

Rethinking development theory: Insights from East Asia and Latin America

Development theory dealing with the highly industrialized countries of East Asia and Latin America has foundered in terms of its ability to generalize. The theories and concepts often are biased because they are derived from a selective and uneven reading of evidence from the two regions. This paper outlines the perceptions and misconceptions of a variety of theoretical perspectives on development, and then presents cross-regional evidence from East Asia and Latin America that suggests the need for a reformulation and synthesis of some of these earlier approaches. This theoretical synthesis focuses on three related themes: (1) the declining significance of industrialization; (2) the position of core and peripheral capital in commodity chains and export/marketing networks, which are becoming key units of analysis in the contemporary global manufacturing system; and (3) a new framework for differentiating the roles of the newly industrializing countries in the world economy.     

Capitalism as a social movement: the corporate and neoliberal reconstructions of the American political economy in the twentieth century

This paper examines the ways in which social movements based among leading capitalists have remade the US political economy. In the first part we examine the period from the late 1880s through the 1920s, sketching the emergence of a hegemonic movement that accomplished the re-embedding of capitalist social relations during the corporate reconstruction of American capitalism. In the second, we examine the disembedding of capitalist relations during the contemporary neoliberal era. The paper makes three major arguments. First, capitalists not just subaltern groups resort to collective action outside of institutional channels of authority and power. Second, during organic crises the movements of capitalists will join with movements of subaltern groups to create hegemonic projects, whose disparate supporters are articulated by discourses. Third, the concept of ‘social movement’ itself should be understood as a constituent part of a larger social formation and not sealed off from features of capitalism and the state. Indeed, hegemonic social movements have reconstructed the larger landscape that social movement theory normally takes for granted as a background. In applying this approach to the contested topic of neoliberalism, we argue that it was not primarily a class-based coup, a policy, ideology, or culture shift but a discourse that united elements of the left and the right as well as a ‘historic bloc’ with homes in both major parties. During both periods subaltern groups played an important role in the hegemonic movements that created corporate capitalism and later neoliberalism.     

Making worlds: epistemological, ontological and political dimensions of technoscience

This paper outlines some of the new epistemological and ontological assumptions of contemporary technoscience thereby reframing the question of an epochal break. Important aspects are the question of a new techno-rationality, but also the constitution of a ‘New World Order Inc.’, with its new ‘politics of life itself’, the reconfiguration of categories such as race, class and gender in technoscience, as well as the amalgamation of everyday life, technoscience and culture. Given the difficulties of ‘proving’ a new episteme (or even epoch), I change perspective by reflecting on the epistemological vantage point from which the interpretation of technoscience as a new episteme or epoch becomes (im)plausible—confronting traditional approaches of philosophy and history of science and technology assessment (TA) with interventional approaches, such as postcolonial and feminist cultural studies of technoscience.     

Renewable energy transition under multiple colonialisms: passive revolution,fascism redux and utopian praxes

ABSTRACT

This essay outlines intermedia theory’s contribution to the emerging multiple colonialisms framework and argues that a socio-ecological reproduction feminist approach to the multiple colonialisms problematic is critically necessary for thinking through the contradictions of renewable energy transition. A multiple colonialisms framework needs to be a kind of utopian theorizing, I argue, just as any feminist renewable energy transition seeking to realize energy democracy and energy justice must create a utopian collective praxis that regenerates common-being and reproduces common wealth. Drawing on research on a network of petroleum-free subaltern feminist agricultural cooperatives in Medak, India, and on the creativity of their media practices, this article examines the social contradictions of energy democracy and just transition politics in a conjuncture defined by green passive revolution and fascism redux. The essay proposes the concepts of ‘subaltern counter-environments’ and ‘molecular media’ to decolonize energy democracy and just transition discourse and to articulate the importance of an autonomous domain of subaltern politics for a degrowth strategy of regenerative delinking through and against the state. Molecular media created by the Feminist Energy Futures research collaboration at the University of Alberta seek to regenerate the bias of time in our contemporary intermedia ecology where the bias of spectacularized and colonized space is otherwise dominant so that regenerative delinking strategies can endure social contradictions they embody through subaltern counter-environments they can create.     

Empirical and analytical subaltern space? Ashrams,brothels and trafficking in colonial Delhi

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I engage with Gayatri Spivak’s writings on the figure of the subaltern, focusing on a recurrent tension in her writings, and in readings of them. The tension is between two seemingly contradictory definitions of the subaltern. One, more empirical definition, has featured in Spivak’s writings for over 25 years and identifies the subaltern as the non-elite, the immobile or the figure beyond the reach of the state. Against this more empirical definition comes the famous analytical definition of the subaltern as he or she who ‘cannot speak’, being defined by their inaccessibility in the archive, as broadly conceived. This paper will argue that these two interconnected definitions have their respective forms of space, which demand different methodologies. I will suggest that an over-emphasis on the analytical definition has led to an over-cautious approach to subaltern spaces, neglecting the compulsion to attempt to find and say something about subaltern spaces, as Spivak insists. The paper demonstrates this approach through the examination of a report into the abuse of women in some of Delhi’s ashrams in the 1930s, so as to suggest how we can use studies of empirically archived subaltern space to think about the analytically subaltern spaces that must always be beyond exploration.     

What About a Sociology of Ethnicity in France? A Foucaldian Reading of Racial Violence

In 1995, the publication of “Theories of ethnicity” by Philippe Poutignat and Jocelyne Streiff-Fenart pointed out the new interest of French sociology for this theme. Since that time, the number of research about ethnicity has been gradually increasing. Yet, certain questions remain unsettled. In France, sociology of ethnicity does not constitute a full-fledged field. In parallel, ethnicity works are still inspired by Anglo-Saxon research. Eventually, contrary to what happened in the United States, sociologists did not draw on the Foucaldian library to nourish close and relevant fields such as subaltern or postcolonial studies. On the basis of a research regarding the immigration policy and the racial violence perpetrated against North African migrants in France during the 1970s, this article adopts a critical perspective with the aim to restore the failed dialogue in France between the Foucaldian analysis of State racism and the study of ethnicity.     

Inside Out: Postcolonial Subjectivities and Everyday Life Online

What gets overlooked amid the hype surrounding the Internet/world-wide web is that these are a newer communicative means and medium for people to gather from all over the place, not only to meet each other but also to discuss a wide range of issues. Discussion Forums and News Groups are important and long-standing examples of these sorts of non-commercial online interactions. This article argues that this sort of onlineness constitutes emergent (cyber)spatial practices of everyday life. These entail complex gender-power relations that encompass struggles for ownership and control of ICTs, on the one hand, and the intimate, public and political nature of online discussions visà-vis lived lives offline on the other hand. One way of seeing these dynamics at work in everyday life online is when women from non-western diasporas talk about their personal-public lives and changing sociocultural obligations on Internet discussion forums. Such discussions provide newer, electronically mediated (re)articulations of the 'public-private' problematic and a (re)articulation of how the 'personal is political'. In so doing they recall feminist and postcolonial critiques of the androcentric and eurocentric nature of the public-private dichotomy itself. The article explores the intersection between these critiques, the practice of everyday life for postcolonial diasporas and the advent of the Internet/world-wide web. Through the reconstruction of someof these open andintimate online discussions between older andyounger women from the Samoan and Tongan diasporas, the article argues that postcolonial everyday uses of the Internet/www are challenging assumptions about what constitutes access, ownership and control of ICTs. These have implications for equitable research and development of ICTs in terms of the practice of everyday life online and offline and the future of public cyberspace(s) in a neo-liberal world order.     

Embodying the breach: (In)securitization and ethnographic engagement in the US

In this commentary, the author offers three related perspectives regarding (in)securitization: first, an overview of ongoing discussions taking place among US‐based ethnographers of colour about the effects of surveillance on ethnography; second, an example of the impact that (in)securitization may have on the researcher/researched relationship in contemporary ethnographic research; and third, an extension of Garfinkel’s notion of the “breach” within the current sociopolitical context. Throughout this essay, the author calls for a greater sense of connection to and solidarity with those “vulnerable subjects” that we engage with ethnographically.     

Cruel Pessimism and Waiting for Belonging: Towards a Global Political Economy of Affect

Recent theorizations of affect have focused largely on Western historical, political and aesthetic contexts to distinguish between affect and emotion. Notably, these interventions offer new imaginaries to reinvigorate analysis of politics in the face of shrinking possibilities. However, much of this literature views affect as autonomous from emotion, while overlooking the political history of development and the differentiated relation to affect under colonial capitalism in other historical contexts. This paper studies subaltern engagement in activist performance in India to address these issues. It thinks through Lauren Berlant's account of the aesthetic genre and affective structure of cruel optimism, and her focus on historical contexts where people have recently lost the vision of a good life. By contrast, focusing on the historical present of those born into a pervasive and intractable sense of marginality and insecurity, I ask: what is the subject's relation to affect and activism in contexts where the loss of vision of a good life is not new under neoliberalism, but rather, reworks long-standing violence and inclusion/exclusion of colonial capitalism and nation-state histories. I argue that it is useful to understand Berlant's ‘materialist context for affect theory’ in light of uneven global histories of colonialism, development and neoliberalism. The affective experience of time is different across different spaces. As such, this paper contributes a global materialist context for affect theory, by focusing on activist theatre by a tribe called Chhara, designated ‘born criminals’ by British colonial law – a status legally denotified in 1952, but that is practically still effective in postcolonial India. Competing affective structures – sentimental optimism, cruel pessimism, betrayal and ordinary regard – shape and are shaped by Chhara negotiations with branded criminality. Ultimately, for the postcolonial subject, surviving in the neoliberal present involves vacillating among competing affective structures, only some of which generate sustained political critique.