Indigenous Insurgents and Rioting Ryots

Abstract

The chapter considers the articulation of class and national consciousness in the protest sensibilities of two contemporary movements of ‘anti‐globalization’ protest—the Zapatistas in Mexico and the Karnataka State Farmers' Association in India. The lack of opportunities for political contention in domestic venues gives social movements incentives to frame their grievances in cosmopolitan terms. Yet they also have multiple uses for nationalism. Nationalism helps obscure differences of interest and/or identity amongst domestic groups, enabling the formation of alliances with other subaltern groups or across class lines. Such nationalisms are often deployed against the postcolonial state, employing a rhetoric of betrayal that accuses the state of having prioritized the interests of transnational capital over those of the nation and attempting to ‘re‐nationalize’ what neo‐Gramscians call the ‘transnationalized’ state. Rather than being antithetical to one another, cosmopolitan class consciousness and nationalist identification are conjoined in contemporary struggles for global social redistribution.