Subaltern Agency Research Articles

Political Opinion Formation as Epistemic Practice: The Hashtag Assemblage of #metwo

The article contributes to the literature on the political use of hashtags. We argue that hashtag assemblages could be understood in the tradition of representing public opinion through datafication in the context of democratic politics. While traditional data-based epistemic practices like polls lead to the ‘passivation’ of citizens, in the digital constellation this tendency is currently challenged. In media like Twitter, hashtags serve as a technical operator to order the discursive fabrication of diverse publicly articulated opinions that manifest in the assemblage of tweets, algorithms and criticisms. We conceptualize such a critical public as an epistemic sensorium for dislocations based on the expression of experienced social imbalances and its political amplification. On the level of opinion formation, this constitutes a process of democratization, allowing for the expression of diverse opinions and issues even under singular hashtags. Despite this diversity, we see a strong tendency of publicly relevant actors such as news outlets to represent digital forms of opinion expression as unified movements. We argue that this tendency can partly be explained by the affordances of networked media, relating the process of objectification to the network position of the observer. We make this argument empirically plausible by applying methods of network analysis and topic modelling to a dataset of 196,987 tweets sampled via the hashtag #metwo that emerged in the German Twittersphere in the summer of 2018 and united a discourse concerned with racism and identity. In light of this data, we not only demonstrate the hashtag assemblage’s heterogeneity and potential for subaltern agency; we also make visible how hashtag assemblages as epistemic practices are inherently dynamic, distinguishing it from opinion polling through the limited observational capacities and active participation of the actors representing its claims within the hybrid media system.

Postcolonial sociology as a remedy for global diffusion theory

The dominant theoretical approaches that aim to explain the origins and subsequent global diffusion of modern norms, practices, and institutions have reached an impasse. World polity theory and ‘coercion’ perspectives describe a process in which norms originate in the Global North and spread to the rest of the world. For the former, diffusion occurs via the willful imitation of shared values; for the latter, it occurs due to economic/political pressure and/or force. However, both approaches are unable to account for norms that emerge in the Global South and get adopted globally. This article argues that postcolonial sociology can help overcome the common pitfalls of the existing theories and provide a theoretical framework for analyzing global diffusion through its analytical focus on subaltern agency, ‘relationalism,’ and colonial contours of power. The utility of postcolonial sociology is demonstrated using archival data and an historical analysis of the 1938 Trade Disputes (Arbitration and Inquiry) Ordinance, which emerged in Trinidad and Tobago and was subsequently adopted by a number of colonies across the British empire.

Resisting subalternity: Palestinian mimicry and passing in the Israeli cultural industries

This article explores the complexity of minority creative workers in the media industry. It challenges the common notion in the literature that minority creative workers are fully submissive to the dominant power structure and examines whether such workers could still be conceived as active agents by resisting submission and marginalization even when they cannot influence their own representation in hegemonic media texts. To answer this question, it explores the performances of minority creative workers in a hegemonic cultural industry. To determine whether one can speak of subaltern agency and, if possible, examine how it manifests itself in reality, it addresses the daily performances of Palestinian creative workers during the production of the second season of the Israeli television series, Fauda. Observations conducted during production demonstrate that since in such contexts minority creative workers cannot avoid being projected in negative roles in the media text, they adopt creative subversive practices of passing and transgressive mimicry, resisting full compliance with the production, without endangering their own position. By doing so, the article contributes not only to the emerging field of creative entrepreneurship in cultural production, but also enables determination of common practices of creative subversion in the cultural industries.

Accusers of capitalism: masculinity and populism on the Scottish radical left in the late twentieth century

ABSTRACTScotland offers a valuable case study of the ways in which a combination of transnational and national structural changes can open up national articulations of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ to subaltern contestation. During the late twentieth century, the subjection of an imagined industrial community to both global capital flows and state planning priorities produced opportunities for the re-articulation of hegemonic masculinity as a means of securing subaltern agency within a counter-movement against neoliberalism. The defiant but respectable left-wing ‘hard man’ – a signifier of collective morality and populist counter-legitimacy against state and market – was mobilized by leaders espousing an often explicitly gendered vision of respectable militancy. This article identifies three such leaders: Jimmy Reid, Jim Sillars and Tommy Sheridan. Each leader advocated resistance to market forces and the state by personally embodying a traditional masculine authority rooted in the cultural imaginary of industrial working-class communities. This article examines the parameters of Scottish left-wing populism before analysing its decline in the late twentieth century. Under devolution this populism has been displaced by a more inclusive ‘civic’ nationalism less comfortable with gendered and militant rhetoric, as the social basis of masculine left populism has been eroded.

Introduction: Margins and the State—Caste, ‘Tribe’ and Criminality in South Asia

This introduction outlines some of the key historiographical debates concerning caste, ‘tribe’ and criminality, and their relationship to the modern state, in South Asia. Although these social categories have long, complex and often inter-related histories rooted in indigenous and precolonial ideas and institutions, they emerged most forcefully as categories of governance in the legal-political system of the colonial and postcolonial states. These categories remained highly unstable, however. There was a clear disjuncture between forms of ‘colonial’ knowledge which structured legal categorization and everyday negotiations and contestations of the same. Using the example of India’s so-called ‘criminal tribes’ - the 200 or so communities declared as criminals ‘by birth’ under the Criminal Tribes Act (1871) during the colonial regime - we consider broader debates over the governing of ‘colonial’ categories, and subaltern agency and resistance in their making, as a way of interrogating the complex relationship between the ‘margins’ and the state.

Postcolonial Theology and Intersectionality

Many two-thirds-world Christian theologians have turned to postcolonial theory as a more indigenous theoretical way of addressing the sinful effects of colonialism in its various manifestations. These theologians employ, in particular, the postcolonial concept of hybridity as a way of accounting for the complicated political agency of the "subaltern" (oppressed) subject. This concept emerged out of the postcolonial experience to describe the ways in which subaltern subjects sometimes embrace and confront the "master's tools" when constructing new postcolonial identities. What could look like support of the oppressor may, in fact, be a complex process of formulating and activating subaltern agency in relation to colonialist as well as indigenous cultural practices, languages, attitudes, and religions. This essay argues that these are forms of intersectional theologizing.

Politics of neutrality: Urban knowledge practices and everyday formalisation in Karachi’s waterscape

Formalisation in cities is commonly associated with top-down processes like slum demolition, land titling and economic regulation. By contrast, this article explores processes of everyday formalisation by considering how locally grounded understandings of formality and informality are reproduced. It thus theorises everyday formalisation as a process distinct from state-led formalisation in terms of both the scale (local) and mechanisms (everyday) through which formal/informal dichotomisation occurs. To explore the effects of such everyday formalisation, this article draws on a case study of water access in a low-income settlement of Karachi, Pakistan. Turning attention to everyday practices of water access in the settlement, this article highlights how residents and water board officials understand and enact distinctions between formality and informality through daily knowledge practices and meanings of neutrality. By focusing on everyday formalisation, this article makes two wider contributions to urban theory. First, it demonstrates that urban informality gives rise to diverse lived experiences, not all of which may be characterised as examples of subaltern agency. Secondly, it demonstrates that urban learning and local knowledge generation can be conceptualised not only as tools for urban ‘navigation’, but as distinctive practices that reproduce urban space according to hegemonic categories like formal and informal.

Solidarities from Below in the Making of Emancipatory Rural Politics: Insights from Food Sovereignty Struggles in the Basque Country

AbstractExclusionary and regressive politics are on the rise globally. How do food sovereignty struggles help counter these forces? We ground our analysis on how EHNE‐Bizkaia, a Vía Campesina member organisation in the Basque Country, conceptualises and practices food sovereignty. Inspired by Massey’s ‘politics of place beyond place’ and Featherstone’s work on left politics and solidarity, we shed light on the ways that this organisation mobilises food sovereignty to establish political bonds between those marginalised by neo‐liberalism, helping to construct political identities and enact forms of subaltern agency that challenge uneven power relations and geographies. We argue that ‘solidarity from below’ is key in building an emancipatory rural politics rooted in class‐based alliances, intersectionality, and internationalism as well as non‐exclusionary notions of sovereignty. The article provides theoretical and empirical insights on what constitutes an emancipatory politics of food sovereignty that has the potential to act as a counterforce to right‐wing populism.

“Violent and Not Quite Modern?”: Lascars and Everyday Resistance Across the Sail–Steam Divide

By exploring forms of maritime resistance spanning the age of sail and steam, this article interrogates certain preponderant assumptions within the historiography of subaltern agency. Within this historiography, “modernity” has generally come to be signalled by trade union organisation and a concomitant regard for legality, while violent resistance is implicitly or explicitly taken to signify the Other of modernity: traditional, primitive, incomplete. Arguing that this tradition/modernity divide has mapped onto the sail–steam divide in the historiography of maritime resistance, this article complicates the association of violent mutiny with the age of sail and litigiousness with the age of steam. It does this by bringing both epochs into single focus, thereby finding important continuities in forms of everyday resistance on board ship across the sail-steam divide. Using existing scholarship to look at resistance in the age of sail and archival material like ships’ logbooks, newspapers and “Lascari”–English dictionaries for the age of the steam, it argues that rather than trade unions fundamentally reshaping the forms of everyday resistance into legal channels, it was in fact these longer traditions of quotidian contestation that fed into the formation of unions at the end of World War I, and continued through the 1920s and 1930s.

Decolonizing the Northeast: Brazilian Subalterns, Non-European Heritages, and Radical Geography in Pernambuco

This article addresses histories and geographies of the northeast of Brazil in the works of radical Pernambuco geographer Manuel Correia de Andrade and his main intellectual inspirations, such as Euclides da Cunha and Josué de Castro. Drawing on current literature on subaltern spaces, critical race studies, and the Modernity–Coloniality–Decoloniality project, I especially consider de Andrade’s works that address popular revolts by marginalized and racialized groups in Brazilian history, including the plurisecular saga of black slaves’ quilombos and their role in the abolition of slavery, as well as the formation of Brazilian territories. My main argument is that the marginalized groups analyzed in these works, similar to more studied cases such as Haiti’s revolutionaries, provided examples of subaltern agency and resistance by taking their freedom by themselves, through direct action, without waiting for legitimation from their European counterparts. Subaltern spaces, intended as spaces of resistance, are key to understanding these movements. The fact that members of the radical circuits of Brazilian and Pernambucan geography in the second half of the twentieth century showed awareness of what today is called the coloniality of power and colonial difference accounts for the effectiveness of studying linguistically and culturally different geographical traditions to decolonize (Western and English-speaking) academia. Key Words: alternative geographical traditions, decolonial turn, northeast of Brazil, quilombos, subaltern space.

A Coffin for Malthusianism: Josué De Castro’s Subaltern Geopolitics

ABSTRACT This paper addresses the idea of geopolitics of hunger as proposed by a Brazilian geographer, Josué de Castro, whose originality and international impact in the fields of critical geography and development studies still merit fuller acknowledgement both within and beyond the discipline of geography. Drawing upon archival research on de Castro’s correspondences and scholarly networks and on the editorial history of his key book Geopolitics of Hunger, first I argue that de Castro was a forerunner of the definition of geopolitics in a critical sense and that this nonconformist attitude has been one of the primary reasons for his persistent scholarly neglect. Second, I argue that de Castro’s anti-colonial geopolitics, based on subaltern agency, furnishes powerful arguments to present-day critics of ‘food security’, who challenge the revival of Malthusian concepts, Euro-centric views and neo-colonial recipes in development debates, a clear geopolitical matter for contemporary scholarly and political conversations. Finally, de Castro’s international networking and his biography as a political dissident and exile provide some useful practical examples of performing geopolitical discourses outside institutional and statist frameworks.

Maritime labour, transnational political trajectories and decolonization from below: the opposition to the 1935 British Shipping Assistance Act

AbstractThis article uses a discussion of struggles over attempts by the National Union of Seamen to exclude seafarers from the maritime labour market in the inter‐war period to contribute to debates at the intersection of maritime spaces and transnational labour geographies (cf. Balachandran 2012; Høgsbjerg 2013). By focusing on struggles engendered by the British Shipping (Assistance) Act of 1935, I explore some of the transnational dynamics through which racialized forms of trade unionism were contested. I argue that the political trajectories, solidarities and organizing spaces constructed by the alliances formed to oppose the effects of the act shaped articulations of ‘decolonization from below’ (James 2015). In this way, engaging with the political trajectories and activities of activists from organizations like the Colonial Seamen's Association can reveal new ways of understanding the spatial politics of decolonization and new accounts of who or how such processes were articulated and contested. I conclude the article by arguing that engagement with these struggles can help assert the importance of forms of subaltern agency in shaping processes of decolonization.

Subaltern agency and the problems in the project of decolonization in the study of religion and liberal secularism

ABSTRACTDecolonization has become an important process in the present-day academia. Reviewing Jakob De Roover’s new book, this article critically analyses the problems in the methodologies of the decolonization project. The article strongly argues for the need to avoid decontexualisation of historical and contemporary developments, and to take an intersectional approach that would ensure the recognition of subaltern agency.

The Chronotope of Revolution. ‘Volcanic’ Narrations of the Haitian Revolution

The article considers the significance of geological metaphors in German narrations of the Haitian Revolution. In the late 18 th and early 19 th century, volcanic eruptions served as key metaphors for revolutionary events. At the same time, in geological discourse volcanic eruptions were themselves described as ‘revolutions of the earth‘. Moreover, geological metaphors have to be considered a constitutive part in the formation of the modern concept of ‘revolution’ itself. The key argument of this article is that in depicting the geological nature of Haiti as ‘revolutionary’, the country was regarded as a privileged site for political revolutions: a chronotope of revolution. This had a strong impact on narrations of the Haitian Revolution, particularly on their temporal dimension that concerned the abruptness of events on one the hand and their long-term conditions on the other, which were related to two geological paradigms, catastrophism and uniformitarianism. Finally, the article discusses how natural tropes of revolution affected the idea of subaltern agency.

Literary non-fiction and the neo-liberal city: Subalternity and urban governance in Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers

ABSTRACTThis article challenges claims made for Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers as a piece of non-fiction, using the text to explore questions around subaltern agency and voice that have been at the centre of postcolonial studies since Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak asked “Can the Subaltern Speak?” It foregrounds the continued relevance of Spivak’s question in the postmillennial context of the neo-liberal city, particularly as it relates to issues of urban governance, and argues that a postcolonial reading of Boo’s book reveals a new set of triangulated connections between subalternity, literary non-fiction and the neo-liberal Indian city. Beautiful Forevers reveals how the violent infrastructures of such cities continue to be shaped by the legacies of colonialism and exacerbated by neo-liberal urban governance, and how the genre of literary non-fiction is responding to, and at times both complicit with and resistant to, this neo-liberal urban regime.

Exploring (transit) migration through a postcolonial lens: Tibetans migrating to India and beyond

ABSTRACTThis study contributes to the scholarly call to increase studies on migration from the perspective of postcolonial thought by exploring a novel ethnographic case; the migration of Tibetans who have migrated from Tibet via Nepal to India and who often aspire migrating onwards from India. It is argued that postcolonial thought gives a fuller understanding of migration via one place or several towards migrants’ final destinations, often called transit migration in scholarly writings, by demonstrating how unequal power structures, such as unequal distribution of wealth or access to mobility and opportunities, increase migration (aspirations) of Tibetans both in China and in India, where they have a minority position. Despite this, their migration reveals an active subaltern agency taking advantage of the various opportunities during their migratory processes, such as the international networks in Dharamsala and the images of Tibetans as exotic ‘Others’.

CSR as Gendered Neocoloniality in the Global South

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has generally been recognized as corporate pro-social behavior aimed at remediating social issues external to organizations, while political CSR has acknowledged the political nature of such activity beyond social aims. Despite the growth of this literature, there is still little attention given to gender as the starting point for a conversation on CSR, ethics, and the Global South. Deploying critical insights from feminist work in postcolonial traditions, I outline how MNCs replicate gendered neocolonialist discourses and perpetuate exploitative material dependences between Global North/South through CSR activities. Specifically, I address issues of neocolonial relations, subaltern agency, and ethics in the context of gendered global division of labor through the exemplar of Rana Plaza and its aftermath. In all, I offer new directions for CSR scholarship by attending to the intersections of gender, ethics, and responsibility as they relate to corporate actions in the Global South.

When food becomes a feminist issue: popular feminism and subaltern agency in the World March of Women

ABSTRACTIn ongoing contests over neoliberal globalization, feminists are increasingly forging alliances with non-feminist others around common struggles, both locally and transnationally. This is indicative of a broader shift in transnational feminist politics from intra-movement to inter-movement alliances, and maps onto a historic transition from the UN era (roughly 1985–1995) to the global justice era (roughly 1995–present). Engagement with new partners on non-traditional issues is shifting the scope and contours of the feminisms in question and raising anew the question of hierarchy in transnational feminist networks and in their coalition politics. This article traces the appropriation of food sovereignty by the World March of Women in the context of its alliance with the transnational peasant movement, Vía Campesina, the development of a feminist politics and discourse of food sovereignty, and enquires into the relationship between these processes and “grassroots” members of the March – the rural, peasant and Indigenous women who are understood to be the primary subjects of a feminist politics of food sovereignty.

Rural Women, Resistance, and the Egyptian Family Planning Program, 1965–1980

This article proposes new ways of thinking about subaltern agency and resistance through a historical study of Egypt's family planning program. According to demographic data and ethnographic studies of rural reproduction in Egypt from 1965 to 1980, the vast majority of rural Egyptian women resisted government attempts to manage their reproduction. This resistance was unique from other forms of subaltern resistance scholars usually study: it was neither a violent uprising, nor was it a "hidden transcript" as described by the historian James C. Scott. Instead, rural women engaged in a different kind of resistance by openly flouting the government's initiatives in an unorganized way without fear of state retribution. Examining rural women's responses to this new government family planning program reveals the state's developmental anxieties in the post-colonial period and the strategies that rural women adopted in response to changing economic circumstances. This article contributes new insights about subaltern agency, resistance, and state power.

Negotiating Structural Absences: Voices of Indigenous Subalterns of Eastern India

Historically, indigenous people have been struggling with the issues of material and communicative absences and their voices systematically erased from discursive spaces. Critical-cultural frameworks such as the culture-centered approach (CCA) argue that reflexive engagements with subaltern communities by listening to their narratives are instrumental in interrogating structural absences. By mindfully attending to the emerging contextual narratives, this CCA study examines how indigenous villagers of eastern-India negotiate and exert agency with situated structural absences in their day-to-day existence. This research seeks to explore as well as extend our understanding of structural marginalization and its negotiations in the realm of subaltern agency.