Podcasts about Subaltern Studies

In this conversation at the Review of Democracy, Marius Turda – author of the new book În Căutarea Românului Perfect. Specific național, degenerare rasială și selecție socială în România modernă (In Search of the Perfect Romanian. National Specificity, Racial Degeneration, and Social Selection in Modern Romania) – discusses the intersection between eugenics and racism in Romanian nation-building; presents the main historical moments that influenced the evolution of eugenics and racism; and analyzes the influence of interwar debates around eugenics and racism on socialist and post-socialist Romania. Adrian Matus: Most of your scholarship is addressed at reading publics in English and you use academic concepts that are familiar in that language. Your new book adds such academic concepts to the Romanian intellectual discourse to shed light on the coexistence of racism, anti-Semitism, and eugenics. What motivated you to want to write such a book? Were there any special historiographical or conceptual challenges, or maybe even limitations, when writing the book in Romanian and for a Romanian audience? If so, how did you try to tackle them? Marius Turda: If you really want to understand the present, you need to go back to the past. But one should go back to the past in a way that allows the past to speak for itself rather than reinvent it. A lot of good books about Romania that are very interesting theoretically speaking and very provocative conceptually speaking are written from the point of view of adopting a terminology or a methodology which worked in Colonial Studies, Subaltern Studies, Decoloniality and so on, and then try to use this conceptual work to see how it applies to Romania. My strategy, on the contrary, was, first and foremost to tell the story. I want to revive the past through the work of a historian and through the tools historians have at their disposal. Then, the reader can actually encounter what happens and encounter an idea or a concept or an explanation for a social phenomenon through the actual reading rather than through my eyes. I very much hope that there will be a conversation and theoretical debate after this book is published and disseminated about racism and about eugenics. We still do not have a history of Romanian racism. We still do not have a history of the eugenic movements in Romania. Of course, there is the German eugenic movement, the Romanian eugenic movement, and then the Hungarian eugenic movement, but the research on the Romanian one has never been done. An intense theoretical debate about certain crucial moments from the past can only happen once the past is known rather than reinvented. You might remember the conversation the historian Lucian Boia and others had about mythologizing of the past. Now, I could have done something similar to what Lucian Boia did. I could have written a book about Romanian eugenics, biopolitics and racism, demythologizing it as something that is bad,  or something that was alien to Romanians. The outcome would have been completely different because then people would have said that you basically replace one historiographic construction with another. My strategy may be considered very unorthodox because obviously, people did expect me to use a lot of the terminology that I have acquired through my work, to use that kind of English-speaking terminology that is familiar to everyone who is educated in English-speaking universities and to apply that to the Romanian context.  I did not do that in order to see whether there is a fertile ground for a conversation whilst people know exactly how diverse this phenomenon was, how complex it was, and how much it really shaped the debate on national character and national specificity in interwar Romania. If that is the case, then we could have a meta-debate or a meta-theoretical conversation about what it all means. People could come and say this is very descriptive and positivistic. Apart from the introduction, the book does not have any secondary sources. It has 1000 footnotes – and all of them reference primary sources.  Every argument I put would have required 5 to 10 secondary sources – just imagine how the book would have looked like then. My strategy could backfire. People could ask why I did not offer more theoretical background to the book rather than just present this argument in its simplicity. Prior to this, apart from one or two people who knew something about eugenics, I could not have a conversation about what I cover in this book because no one has actually put this historical material together. What would be the point to discuss, for example about disability without having an example of how it was understood in interwar Romania? In the book, I provide the example of  someone who murdered her son and killed herself in a hotel in Bucharest because her son had disability and people were throwing stones at him on the street. In parallel, there were discussions in the Parliament whether to introduce eugenic laws and have premarital certificates, so people with certain diseases would not have children. Through such examples, we can have a talk about what it meant at the time. This is in many ways very pedagogical and didactic. We are in a culture in Romania where these topics have not been discussed properly but there is a big jump in terms of the theoretical argument. Particularly now, there are an amazing group of younger people across the board – from sociologists to political scientists and historians – who are very attuned to debates abroad and they are very keen to integrate into that conversation and integrate the Romanian case study in that global debate about various issues. Ultimately, this can only be done if this new generation actually knows what exactly happened. Otherwise, they end up constructing as much as they deconstruct – they construct via deconstructing because what they say is basically another construction. The general public finds it very hard to follow a debate which is highly theoretical, particularly when it comes to topics such as fighting racism in Romania, combatting xenophobia, or tolerance. The person on the street will not accept any of that unless you come and show what happens. Not just the Holocaust. Not just the deportation and the pogroms, but the very strong streak within Romanian culture that really reach very deeply in the Romanian population: the idea that we have to define ourselves not just in terms of language or religion, but also in terms of blood and race. Every single country has done it – Romanians are no different than Hungarians, Croats,  Bulgarians or the English. It is not about being in a very  unique position in Europe. We imitated and copied, we followed and emulated so many Western models. The entire Romanian historiography and literature is rich with examples of how the Romanian revolutionaries of 1848 imitated the French revolutionaries. And as much as they adopted the idea of patriotism from French political discourse, they also adopted the discourse about race from that political tradition. It does not take that much historical inquiry to put it all together, but it has not been done. Hopefully mine is one step forward, one attempt to really bring the conversation towards some very key moments in the history of Romania and in the intellectual history of Romania, which in a way allows us to re-read in a different key the period between the 1880s and the 1950s and at the same time to shed some light on longue durée phenomena in Romanian culture leading to the present day, particularly with respect to anti-Semitism, racism, eugenic feelings and eugenic behavior towards people with disability, and how the Romanian state behaves as it continues to adopt eugenic language. MA: A core argument of the book is that being a Romanian was constructed via culture but that the idea also acquired a marked biopolitical component in the 20th century. So what did it mean to be Romanian at various times? What main justifications were used to exclude those who were not considered part of the national project? MT: I tried to offer some answers to this question in the book by looking at how, for example anthropology, sociology or demography were used to define ‘Romanianness'.  Before the 19th century, an entire tradition already existed in the form of the Enlightenment Transylvanian school that defined the Romanian as someone who spoke Romanian, lived for generations on the territory that is today Romania, and was a descendant from either the autochthonous population or from the synthesis created between Romans and the Dacians. There were many ways in which historians of the Enlightenment were already formulating a definition of Romanian identity. In the 1880s however, with the creation of Romanian state, a number of very important novel elements came into the picture. The Romanian would need to be a citizen of the new Romanian state - so a definition of the idea of citizenship was required. The Jews were not Romanians by blood, but could they become, civically speaking, Romanian citizens? That was a big debate. At the time, citizenship came to acquire, as was the case in other countries too, a very powerful meaning, because it could give one the quality of being a Romanian. The First World War and the creation of Greater Romania then intensified the whole conversation about who is Romanian, how can one define Romanian (because of the number of ethnic minorities in the country - not only the Jews, but also the Hungarians and Germans). The Romanians were constantly confronted with a need to redefine their national identity; first in the 1880s, regarding the Jews, then again in the early 1900s, and then particularly in the 1920s regarding the other ethnic minorities. There was always the idea that if an individual is Romanian citizen, that is enough.  But then, there was always lurking in the backs of some minds that this attitude might be ruinous, that it might actually delegitimize the Romanian national project and lead to a catastrophe. Some would tell you that Emil Cioran[i] is one of those who came up with one of the best questions summarizing the dilemma of Romanianness: “How could you be or how could one be a Romanian?”  I think there is another important question that was asked at the time that actually encapsulates this debate and gives a good answer. This is a question asked by Nae Ionescu[ii], who asked it in the context of the debate he had with the Romanian Catholics. For him, Romanian Catholics could follow the laws, pay their taxes, or in other words, be model citizens, as many Jews, Germans, and Roma were. But, he says, you could be good Romanians, but the essential question remains,  “are you Romanian?”  To me, this is extraordinary. You could see the same tendency in the debate he had with Mihail Sebastian, where the question was precisely not how much Sebastian would try to become Romanian. Nae Ionescu considered Sebastian only as a Jew from Brăila. This is the question that we need to go back to and try to understand when we are looking at the complexity of the Romanian national project. These were Romanian citizens, but were they Romanians because of their inherent ‘Romanianness', not acquired via political decision.  I read this particular article by Nae Ionescu when I was in my 20s and it took me so long to understand what exactly he meant by the question: ”You are good Romanians, but are you truly Romanians?”. It was only after I studied the entire arsenal of arguments put forward by Romanian anthropologists, physicians and eugenicists for really trying to find that essence, that palpable thing, that I understood what he was referring to. In Europe, centuries worth of effort have been spent by anti-Semites and others obsessed with the idea that if we can find the perfect Aryan and really identify it, that will solve all of our problems. It was the same with Romanian figures I am discussing. They really tried to say that it was not enough to really go to the top of the mountains and claim, like Lucian Blaga[iii] that “eternity was born in the village”. They wanted to go into the villages and find a peasant that actually looked like a piece of unchanging history when you looked at him: the way he had his beard, the way he peered into the distance, the way he presented his persona – in other words, they wanted to know about everything that concerned him that could actually be touched and felt. The physicality of the nation had to be identified. In this context, they could define what Romanian was: ideally not only a Christian, but an Orthodox Christian, in other words part of the national church, but also someone who did not have any Roma or Jewish blood, ideally for three or four generations, if not more. If they had some German blood that was not considered too bad, because that was thought as belonging to a superior nation. Ironically, some of the most radical of these Romanians were not of Romanian origin. It is  the same as everywhere: most fanatics, are those who are never able to overcome what they call the ‘stigma' or ‘shame' of having impure blood. The quest for the perfect Romanian, as I call it, was something that really drove the conversation about national specificity. Very few people were able to actually really pinpoint how this idea of identity changes - because it does change. I am not saying, for example, that a debate about economic arguments, social conditions or the cultural debates about national imitation are not important, but they could also be understood much better if they are put in conversation, or if  they are put together in dialogue with this almost biological obsession people had about finding that real Romanian that poets write about and philosophers muse about. AM: Who were the scientists that formulated these racial and eugenic arguments about the Romanian nation in the interwar period? MT: There were many, some of them quite prominent: important psychiatrists like Gheorghe Marinescu[iv], important physicians like Gheorghe Banu[v], Iuliu Moldovan[vi], demographers like Sabin Manuilă[vii], as well as sociologists, poets, literary critics and genealogists. As I show in the book, it is very interesting that there was a so-called ‘scientific' literature on race and racism,  both supporting it and arguing against it. The

Ajay Skaria - University of Minnesota, speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 1 May 2023. The figures of the neighbor and friend are ubiquitous in Gandhi's writings. While he himself assumes he is only reaffirming old figures, something truly radical happens in his writings (as in those of his sharpest critic, Ambedkar). Both write at a time when a modern commandment, so to speak, exemplified in the categorical imperative, is displacing the Biblical and other analogous commandments. It is in order to criticize this new commandment that both affirm instead old commandments around neighbor and friend. But in their very questioning, they also borrow from the new commandment a key element—the injunction to equality. By doing so, they inaugurate a new politics—a politics that could be described as democratic neighborliness or political friendship. This talk will trace the conceptual prehistory of this new politics. Ajay Skaria is Professor in the Department of History and Institute for Global Studies at the University of Minnesota. Since the 2000s, his research interests have included twentieth century Indian intellectual history, modern caste politics, and postcolonial theory. In addition to articles in these fields, he is the author of Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers and Wildness in Western India (1999) and Unconditional Equality: Gandhi's Religion of Resistance (2016). He was a member of the Subaltern Studies editorial collective, and coedited Subaltern Studies Vol XII: Muslims, Dalits and the Fabrications of History (2005).

Stefano Visentin"Schiavitù"Biennale Democraziahttps://biennaledemocrazia.itBiennale Democrazia Giovedì 23 marzo, ore 21:00Circolo dei Lettori, Via Bogino, TorinoStefano Visentinintroduce Alessandro Tuccillo letture di Matteo FedericiLa schiavitù accompagna la storia umana sin dalle origini. Nella prima età moderna, però, il fenomeno muta. Si lega in modo strettissimo, da un lato, al colonialismo; e dall'altro, più in generale, al rapido sviluppo della civilizzazione europea e occidentale. A uno sguardo di lunga durata, che parta dal XVI secolo e arrivi ai nostri giorni, la schiavitù appare tutt'altro che un retaggio del passato: si rivela invece una struttura socio-economica decisiva. Fondamentale per un sistema economico capace di sfruttare a proprio vantaggio le differenze sociali ed economiche nella forza lavoro, a livello mondiale.prenota il tuo postohttps://www.vivaticket.com/it/ticket/schiavitu/203158Stefano Visentin è professore associato di Storia delle dottrine politiche presso il Dipartimento di Economia Società e Politiche (Desp) dell'Università di Urbino “Carlo Bo”, e docente di Storia delle dottrine politiche e di Pensiero politico della globalizzazione presso la Scuola di Scienze politiche e sociali.I suoi principali ambiti di ricerca riguardano: il pensiero politico di Spinoza (con particolare attenzione al concetto di democrazia); il repubblicanesimo olandese tra la fine del XVI e il XVII secolo; il pensiero di Machiavelli e la sua ricezione nella riflessione politica contemporanea; il tema della servitù volontaria in Etienne de la Boétie e oltre; il dibattito contemporaneo sulla crisi della democrazia; gli studi postcoloniali e l'opera di Frantz Fanon; il dibattito sul populismo; il pensiero politico di Carl Marx.E' autore di una monografia (La libertà necessaria. Teoria e pratica della democrazia in Spinoza, Pisa 2001) e di numerosi articoli su Machiavelli, Spinoza e il pensiero politico olandese, nonché coeditore degli atti dei convegni internazionali Spinoza. Individuo e moltitudine (Cesena 2007), Spinoza: lapotenza del comune (Hildeseim 2012) e Machiavelli: tempo e conflitto (Milano 2012). Ha inoltre curato la traduzione italiana del De haereticis di Sébastien Castellion (La persecuzione degli eretici, Torino 1997), ed è stato editore del volume XXX, numero 58 (2018) della rivista “Scienza & Politica”, dedicatoal tema Le libertà dei moderni, e del volume 8, anno V (2020) della rivista “Consecutio Rerum” intitolato “People have the power”. Potenza, limiti e contraddizioni di un concetto moderno.Tra le pubblicazioni più recenti si segnalano: Distendere il marxismo. L'eredità di Frantz Fanon nei Subaltern Studies, in Genealogie della modernità, a cura di C. Conelli ed E. Meo, Milano 2017; Populismo como contrapoder. El final de la democracia liberal y la política de los gobernados, in Pueblos, derechos y estados: ensayos entre Europa y América Latina, eds. D. A. Fernández Peychaux, D. Scalzo, Buenos Aires 2018. La critica dei soggetti collettivi tra l'Ideologia tedesca e il 18 Brumaio, in Marx: la produzione del soggetto, a cura di L. Basso, M. Basso, F. Raimondi e S. Visentin, Roma 2018; ‘Non Defuit Materia: Freedom and Necessity in Spinoza's Democratic Theory', in Materialism and Politics, ed. By B. Bianchi, E. Filion-Donato, M. Miguel, and A. Yuva, Berlin 2021; Oltre l'enigma della servitù volontaria. Desiderio, assoggettamento e libertà nel pensiero politico della prima modernità, “Filosofia politica”, 1, aprile 2022IL POSTO DELLE PAROLEascoltare fa pensarehttps://ilpostodelleparole.itQuesto show fa parte del network Spreaker Prime. Se sei interessato a fare pubblicità in questo podcast, contattaci su https://www.spreaker.com/show/1487855/advertisement

Nissim Mannathukkaren's book Communism, Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Theory: The Left in South India (Routledge Chapman & Hall, 2021) is a thematic history of the communist movement in Kerala, the first major region (in terms of population) in the world to democratically elect a communist government. It analyzes the nature of the transformation brought about by the communist movement in Kerala, and what its implications could be for other postcolonial societies. The volume engages with the key theoretical concepts in postcolonial theory and Subaltern Studies, and contributes to the debate between Marxism and postcolonial theory, especially its recent articulations. The volume presents a fresh empirical engagement with theoretical critiques of Subaltern Studies and postcolonial theory, in the context of their decades-long scholarship in India. It discusses important thematic moments in Kerala's communist history which include — the processes by which it established its hegemony, its cultural interventions, the institution of land reforms and workers' rights, and the democratic decentralization project, and, ultimately, communism's incomplete national-popular and its massive failures with regard to the caste question. A significant contribution to scholarship on democracy and modernity in the Global South, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of politics, specifically political theory, democracy and political participation, political sociology, development studies, postcolonial theory, Subaltern Studies, Global South Studies, and South Asia Studies. Irene Promodh is a PhD student in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Nissim Mannathukkaren's book Communism, Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Theory: The Left in South India (Routledge Chapman & Hall, 2021) is a thematic history of the communist movement in Kerala, the first major region (in terms of population) in the world to democratically elect a communist government. It analyzes the nature of the transformation brought about by the communist movement in Kerala, and what its implications could be for other postcolonial societies. The volume engages with the key theoretical concepts in postcolonial theory and Subaltern Studies, and contributes to the debate between Marxism and postcolonial theory, especially its recent articulations. The volume presents a fresh empirical engagement with theoretical critiques of Subaltern Studies and postcolonial theory, in the context of their decades-long scholarship in India. It discusses important thematic moments in Kerala's communist history which include — the processes by which it established its hegemony, its cultural interventions, the institution of land reforms and workers' rights, and the democratic decentralization project, and, ultimately, communism's incomplete national-popular and its massive failures with regard to the caste question. A significant contribution to scholarship on democracy and modernity in the Global South, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of politics, specifically political theory, democracy and political participation, political sociology, development studies, postcolonial theory, Subaltern Studies, Global South Studies, and South Asia Studies. Irene Promodh is a PhD student in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Nissim Mannathukkaren's book Communism, Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Theory: The Left in South India (Routledge Chapman & Hall, 2021) is a thematic history of the communist movement in Kerala, the first major region (in terms of population) in the world to democratically elect a communist government. It analyzes the nature of the transformation brought about by the communist movement in Kerala, and what its implications could be for other postcolonial societies. The volume engages with the key theoretical concepts in postcolonial theory and Subaltern Studies, and contributes to the debate between Marxism and postcolonial theory, especially its recent articulations. The volume presents a fresh empirical engagement with theoretical critiques of Subaltern Studies and postcolonial theory, in the context of their decades-long scholarship in India. It discusses important thematic moments in Kerala's communist history which include — the processes by which it established its hegemony, its cultural interventions, the institution of land reforms and workers' rights, and the democratic decentralization project, and, ultimately, communism's incomplete national-popular and its massive failures with regard to the caste question. A significant contribution to scholarship on democracy and modernity in the Global South, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of politics, specifically political theory, democracy and political participation, political sociology, development studies, postcolonial theory, Subaltern Studies, Global South Studies, and South Asia Studies. Irene Promodh is a PhD student in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Nissim Mannathukkaren's book Communism, Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Theory: The Left in South India (Routledge Chapman & Hall, 2021) is a thematic history of the communist movement in Kerala, the first major region (in terms of population) in the world to democratically elect a communist government. It analyzes the nature of the transformation brought about by the communist movement in Kerala, and what its implications could be for other postcolonial societies. The volume engages with the key theoretical concepts in postcolonial theory and Subaltern Studies, and contributes to the debate between Marxism and postcolonial theory, especially its recent articulations. The volume presents a fresh empirical engagement with theoretical critiques of Subaltern Studies and postcolonial theory, in the context of their decades-long scholarship in India. It discusses important thematic moments in Kerala's communist history which include — the processes by which it established its hegemony, its cultural interventions, the institution of land reforms and workers' rights, and the democratic decentralization project, and, ultimately, communism's incomplete national-popular and its massive failures with regard to the caste question. A significant contribution to scholarship on democracy and modernity in the Global South, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of politics, specifically political theory, democracy and political participation, political sociology, development studies, postcolonial theory, Subaltern Studies, Global South Studies, and South Asia Studies. Irene Promodh is a PhD student in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Nissim Mannathukkaren's book Communism, Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Theory: The Left in South India (Routledge Chapman & Hall, 2021) is a thematic history of the communist movement in Kerala, the first major region (in terms of population) in the world to democratically elect a communist government. It analyzes the nature of the transformation brought about by the communist movement in Kerala, and what its implications could be for other postcolonial societies. The volume engages with the key theoretical concepts in postcolonial theory and Subaltern Studies, and contributes to the debate between Marxism and postcolonial theory, especially its recent articulations. The volume presents a fresh empirical engagement with theoretical critiques of Subaltern Studies and postcolonial theory, in the context of their decades-long scholarship in India. It discusses important thematic moments in Kerala's communist history which include — the processes by which it established its hegemony, its cultural interventions, the institution of land reforms and workers' rights, and the democratic decentralization project, and, ultimately, communism's incomplete national-popular and its massive failures with regard to the caste question. A significant contribution to scholarship on democracy and modernity in the Global South, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of politics, specifically political theory, democracy and political participation, political sociology, development studies, postcolonial theory, Subaltern Studies, Global South Studies, and South Asia Studies. Irene Promodh is a PhD student in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Nissim Mannathukkaren's book Communism, Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Theory: The Left in South India (Routledge Chapman & Hall, 2021) is a thematic history of the communist movement in Kerala, the first major region (in terms of population) in the world to democratically elect a communist government. It analyzes the nature of the transformation brought about by the communist movement in Kerala, and what its implications could be for other postcolonial societies. The volume engages with the key theoretical concepts in postcolonial theory and Subaltern Studies, and contributes to the debate between Marxism and postcolonial theory, especially its recent articulations. The volume presents a fresh empirical engagement with theoretical critiques of Subaltern Studies and postcolonial theory, in the context of their decades-long scholarship in India. It discusses important thematic moments in Kerala's communist history which include — the processes by which it established its hegemony, its cultural interventions, the institution of land reforms and workers' rights, and the democratic decentralization project, and, ultimately, communism's incomplete national-popular and its massive failures with regard to the caste question. A significant contribution to scholarship on democracy and modernity in the Global South, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of politics, specifically political theory, democracy and political participation, political sociology, development studies, postcolonial theory, Subaltern Studies, Global South Studies, and South Asia Studies. Irene Promodh is a PhD student in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Aishwarya Khale reads her poem "The Paintings of Lonely People at a Lively Party" and discusses completing her Masters in Postcolonial Writing and Subaltern Studies, starting to write creatively at age 23, and satire.  Learn more about the poet Sadaat Hasan Manto here. The Telescope Podcast uses free sounds from freesound.org. This episode uses Taste of an Ache by sumosalesman.

durée : 00:05:29 - Le Tour du monde des idées - par : Brice Couturier - Les subaltern ou post-colonial studies, en train d’être importées dans nos universités, font l'objet de critiques aux Etats-Unis. Un certain nombre d'écrivains leur reprochent, au prétexte de défendre des causes morales, de ne sélectionner que des œuvres qui correspondent à leur agenda politique.

durée : 00:05:29 - Le Tour du monde des idées - par : Brice Couturier - Les subaltern ou post-colonial studies, en train d’être importées dans nos universités, font l'objet de critiques aux Etats-Unis. Un certain nombre d'écrivains leur reprochent, au prétexte de défendre des causes morales, de ne sélectionner que des œuvres qui correspondent à leur agenda politique.

Lecture

This is the second session of J. Beverley’s Masterclass organised by the Centre for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies (CILAVS) during Birkbeck’s Arts Week, May 2017. John Beverley is Distinguished Professor of Hispanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. That the conjunction of postcolonial struggle and structuralism in the 1960s produces a kind of earthquake in academic knowledge and institutions, particularly in the domain of what the French call the human sciences. The shock effect of that earthquake may be named for sake of convenience "theory," and the disciplinary outcome of theory “studies" (cultural, postcolonial, queer, women's, Africana, Atlantic, global, global Pacific, etc.). The core issue is the relation of culture and politics, or to use Raymond Williams' term "cultural materialism". As the revolutionary vanguardist political formations of the 1960s, epitomized by the armed struggle in Latin America, collapse or are defeated, theory and studies nourish and in turn are nourished by new forms of politics, based on the principle of multicultural hegemonic articulation. One compelling form of this possibility are the new governments of the so-called Pink Tide in that emerged in Latin America in the first decade of the new century, which incorporated into their strategy elements of both poststructuralist and postcolonial thinking. However, the tremors of the earthquake of "theory" have subsided. The politics of theory are resisted from both the right--in the form of a kind of "left neo-conservatism"-- and the left--in the form of deconstructive or libertarian ultraleftism. New theories of cultural agency emerge, often with a Deleuzian inspiration or provenance. (e.g. Hardt and Negri on the "multitude," "affect" theory. "posthegemony") and new, less overtly political forms of "studies" (media, visual culture, digital humanities, neo-philology etc., etc.). In this second session, we will look at two of the major products of the politics of theory in the academy. In the 1980s and 1990s, Cultural Studies and Subaltern Studies (a subset of postcolonial studies). We will see that both involve a critique of academic knowledge from the position of "excluded," and the basis for a new kind of politics of the left, based in the social movements. However, both in turn are re-institutionalized in the academy, in a kind of paradoxically syntonic coincidence with neoliberal globalization (especially the case in cultural studies). For more information - bbk.ac.uk/cilavs/audio-visual-resources

Uday Chandra speaks at the South Asia Seminar Two decades ago, the historical anthropologist K. Sivaramakrishnan noted with a sense of irony that "elites assuming the task of building a national culture and providing it with a liberatory/progressive history have turned to modes of knowledge and reconstruction produced in the colonial period". This paper builds on this ironic comment to understand and critique Subaltern Studies' rediscovery of the "primitive" tribal subject in the forests of Middle India. Seeking to turn away from colonial, nationalist, and Marxist historiographic traditions, Uday Chandra argues, the Subalternists' quest for the quintessential subaltern ended when it encountered an erstwhile favourite of colonial ethnology, namely, the tribal or aboriginal subject. Once merely an anthropological curiosity, this quintessential subaltern figure came to be reworked in the 1980s and 1990s as the anti-colonial rebel par excellence with his own impenetrable lifeworld and habits that stood in opposition to the modern state and capitalism. The old colonial tropes of irreducible cultural difference, underwritten by a paternalistic ideology of "primitivism," now re-emerged, most notably in the writings of Ranajit Guha, as the basis of a new historiographic and theoretical turn in postcolonial India. The rediscovered primitive of the radical historian’s imagination could do what the Subalternist demanded: revel, riot, and rebel. Much like Alexis de Tocqueville's reflections on the Kabyles of mid-nineteenth century Algeria or his British Indian counterparts’ concerns over vanishing tribes in a predominantly caste-based society, the radical postcolonial historian thus came to rely on the dramaturgy of tragedy to re-tell adivasi pasts. To show what such Subalternist historiography leaves out and why, the author turns to Ranajit Guha's evocative description of the Santal Hul of 1855. For Guha, as for his colonial predecessors, the Hul represented the outburst of the irrational savage, entirely at odds with the workings of the modern world. Yet, as this paper will show, colonial records clearly document, on the one hand, the Santals’ well-established grievances against moneylenders, their petitions and appeals to the local state, and, on the other hand, the influence of Christian missionaries in the rebels' articulation of "millennarian" ideas. Reflecting on the problems inherent in Guha’s historical methods and turning afresh to the same colonial archive, an altogether different view emerges of adivasi engagements with the modern state and economy in the mid-nineteenth century. This view of the past depicts the modern tribal subject within the logics of modern state-making and capitalism, not outside or prior to it. Such a reading points to the limits of neo-romantic representations of the exotic beyond “reason and evidence.” Acknowledging how state and tribe constitute each other in the margins of modern India is, Uday Chandra argues, a necessary step to undo the colonial legacies that inhere ironically yet not surprisingly in neo-romantic representations of adivasi pasts. This seminar series is organised with the support of the History Faculty.

New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualizing Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India (Oxford University Press, 2015), edited by Alf Gunvald Nilsen and Srila Roy, is a wonderfully rich and theoretically coherent collection of texts that critically assess the legacies of Subaltern Studies through research into political movements in India today. The case studies range from students at elite higher education institutes shoring up their privilege, to queer activism in Kolkata, to Dalit villagers fighting land grabs, and the studies’ richness allows for a really nuanced relational understanding of subalternity, hegemony and the state that make the book a truly conceptually and ethnographically innovative collection. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualizing Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India (Oxford University Press, 2015), edited by Alf Gunvald Nilsen and Srila Roy, is a wonderfully rich and theoretically coherent collection of texts that critically assess the legacies of Subaltern Studies through research into political movements in India today. The case studies range from students at elite higher education institutes shoring up their privilege, to queer activism in Kolkata, to Dalit villagers fighting land grabs, and the studies’ richness allows for a really nuanced relational understanding of subalternity, hegemony and the state that make the book a truly conceptually and ethnographically innovative collection. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualizing Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India (Oxford University Press, 2015), edited by Alf Gunvald Nilsen and Srila Roy, is a wonderfully rich and theoretically coherent collection of texts that critically assess the legacies of Subaltern Studies through research into political movements in India today. The case studies range from students at elite higher education institutes shoring up their privilege, to queer activism in Kolkata, to Dalit villagers fighting land grabs, and the studies’ richness allows for a really nuanced relational understanding of subalternity, hegemony and the state that make the book a truly conceptually and ethnographically innovative collection. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualizing Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India (Oxford University Press, 2015), edited by Alf Gunvald Nilsen and Srila Roy, is a wonderfully rich and theoretically coherent collection of texts that critically assess the legacies of Subaltern Studies through research into political movements in India today. The case studies range from students at elite higher education institutes shoring up their privilege, to queer activism in Kolkata, to Dalit villagers fighting land grabs, and the studies’ richness allows for a really nuanced relational understanding of subalternity, hegemony and the state that make the book a truly conceptually and ethnographically innovative collection. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualizing Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India (Oxford University Press, 2015), edited by Alf Gunvald Nilsen and Srila Roy, is a wonderfully rich and theoretically coherent collection of texts that critically assess the legacies of Subaltern Studies through research into political movements in India today. The case studies range from students at elite higher education institutes shoring up their privilege, to queer activism in Kolkata, to Dalit villagers fighting land grabs, and the studies’ richness allows for a really nuanced relational understanding of subalternity, hegemony and the state that make the book a truly conceptually and ethnographically innovative collection. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualizing Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India (Oxford University Press, 2015), edited by Alf Gunvald Nilsen and Srila Roy, is a wonderfully rich and theoretically coherent collection of texts that critically assess the legacies of Subaltern Studies through research into political movements in India today. The case studies range from students at elite higher education institutes shoring up their privilege, to queer activism in Kolkata, to Dalit villagers fighting land grabs, and the studies’ richness allows for a really nuanced relational understanding of subalternity, hegemony and the state that make the book a truly conceptually and ethnographically innovative collection. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualizing Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India (Oxford University Press, 2015), edited by Alf Gunvald Nilsen and Srila Roy, is a wonderfully rich and theoretically coherent collection of texts that critically assess the legacies of Subaltern Studies through research into political movements in India today. The case studies range from students at elite higher education institutes shoring up their privilege, to queer activism in Kolkata, to Dalit villagers fighting land grabs, and the studies' richness allows for a really nuanced relational understanding of subalternity, hegemony and the state that make the book a truly conceptually and ethnographically innovative collection.