Subaltern Resistance Research Articles

Resistance is fertile: Toward a political ecology of translocal resistance

There are more than 3000 ongoing conflicts involving the extractive industries (mining, gas, and oil) and communities impacted by extractive activity. Most of these conflicts are in the developing countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In this paper we examine three resistance movements in Brazil, Chile, and India where Indigenous groups are resisting mining operations on their lands. We argue these movements represent forms of translocal subaltern resistance based on local political ecologies of marginalized communities. In particular, we develop the notion of disembeddedness to show how conflicts arise between local political ecologies and the political economy of resource extraction. We contribute to the literature by (1) bridging insights from subaltern studies and political ecology to explain how forms of resistance emerge (2) providing empirical support to theories of translocal resistance by conducting a comparative analysis of resistance movements from three countries. We discuss the theoretical implications of our findings for resistance movements.

Can the Gandharvas Speak?: A Study of Gandharva Songs

In the social context of Nepal, Gandharvas are regarded as Dalits, the people who are suppressed and silenced by the society. Such subaltern groups are thought to have no voice. They are considered ‘muted’ or ‘inarticulate’ without any agency, consciousness and power of resistance. However, breaking such boundaries, the present research aims at exploring the voices of Gandharvas expressed through their folk songs, which express their real subaltern condition and a sense of dissatisfaction towards the mechanism of society constructed and controlled by the elites. For this, some of the representative folk songs are taken and viewed from the perspective of subaltern voice, consciousness, resistance and agency developed by Antonio Gramsci, Ranjit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee and Gautam Bhadra. With the thorough analysis of their songs, it is inferred that although they are deprived of any rank and recognition in the mainstream Nepali society, they have clearly expressed their voices as well as manifested consciousness, reflecting their real life experiences marked by domination, marginalization and suppression. The manifestation of such consciousness and expression of inner voice is also used as an instrument to subvert the hegemony constructed by the complacent upper class of the society.

The After-life of Social Movements

Probing the nature of social mobilization of minorities germinating from the COVID-19 crisis is the focal point of this paper. While medico-scientific discourses to fight the Pandemic gained ground in Global North, the Global South is still grappling with pseudo-knowledge/occult science narratives. The BJP displayed spectacular political opportunism during this Pandemic by prescribing traditional health practices to gain a hegemonic sway over the masses who became objects in this pedagogical discourse, often coupled with islamophobic propaganda birthed conspiracy theories binarily structured on ‘Otherness’. The purpose of this paper is to reveal findings of a self-conducted survey of the social activities of a former squatter colony based in Kolkata to examine subaltern consciousness/agency demonstrated through gaps and fissures of negotiation with power structures. Often alternate translational spaces showed possibilities of articulation from such indeterminacy and dissent. This paper’s crux is built on such collective activities like propitiating Corona Devi through religious rituals that draw precedent from similar subaltern community movements during the British Raj to counter epidemics by the worship of ‘Sitaladevi/Salabai’. The paper traces historical contingency in subaltern resistance within the domain of conflicting relations between tradition and rationality.

With the margins: Writing subaltern resistance and social transformation

AbstractIn this study, we surface the problems of representation mainstream organizational theory encounters in documenting and telling accounts of subaltern actors and social transformation. We explore how writing practices that draw on feminist postcolonial literary traditions can transform organizational studies of social change. Drawing on three literary texts—Mahasweta Devi's Draupadi, Urmila Pawar's The Weave of My Life, and Arundhati Roy's Ministry of Utmost Happiness—we reflect on how we may represent the lives of others. Inspired by these three writers, we suggest solidaristic transgression, unsettled habitation, and counter‐discursive memory work as three modes of engagement that challenge us as academics writing for change.

The practice of jathera worship in Punjab: A case study of jathera Baba Kala Mehar Sandhu in Faridkot, Punjab

ABSTRACT Jathera worship is a popular devotional practice of Punjab in which obeisance is paid to ancestors of the got/gotra. This paper presents a case study of a jathera known as Baba Kala Mehar Sandhu in Faridkot. Its worship is marked by heterodox rituals such as offering and consuming liquor as parshad (oblation) to the deity. I argue that the continued persistence of the practice into the twenty-first century, despite facing proscription from the dominant religions of Punjab, is on account of the complex modes of negotiation that the jathera undertakes and the potentialities for subaltern resistance that it offers to its primary cultural agents - a caste of genealogists-musicians known as Dhadis and Mirasis.

Performing on the streets: Infrastructures of subaltern resistance in Pakistan

This article explores infrastructures of subaltern resistance in Pakistan through a focus on spatial and performative modes and across a number of historical and contemporary examples. I start with the figure of the puppet, tracing it historically as an example of how culturally specific modes of dissent have evolved from a colonial to a postcolonial context, and further into a neoliberal space. I then analyse the practice of ‘wall chalking’, which could be considered a local form of graffiti that also embodies debates over religious and ethnic identity through the contested status of script in the country. In narrating these examples, my aim is to show how a specific form of resistance has developed in the country through the displacement of the dissenting subject. Here I conceptualise resistance as a Foucauldian counter-conduct that transforms space through a creative and embodied use of tactics. It is a form of subaltern resistance that emerges in relation to non-humans and everyday rituals and has developed in subtler (and more resistant) forms, through ways of enacting that thrive within and through the vulnerability of the subject.

Subaltern voices and postcolonial schizophrenia: The political tensions of M.I.A.’s Kala

ABSTRACTBanned from the U.S. during the “war on terror,” the British/Sri Lankan hip-hop artist M.I.A. responded by recording her 2007 album Kala in multiple locations throughout the global South, collating indigenous musical styles and unorthodox recording techniques. Via a critical/cultural analysis, this paper explores M.I.A.’s work on Kala as subaltern resistance mobilized by “differential movement,” particularly in its mode of production, which operated outside of, and in opposition to, institutional mechanisms designed to expunge or neutralize politically subversive art and artists. Yet M.I.A.’s musical sampling also surfaces conflicts between creative freedom and cultural appropriation, emblematizing “postcolonialist/postmodern schizophrenia” (Vályi, 2011. Remixing cultures: Bartók and Kodály in the age of indigenous cultural rights. In K. McLeod & R. Kuenzli (Eds.), Cutting across media: Appropriation art, interventionist collage, and copyright law (pp. 219–236). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.).

Histories, Identities and the Subaltern Resistance in Goa

Spectacular outbreaks against the Portuguese receive regular scholarly attention. Resistance qualifies as an act against the colonial state, and in doing so, the dominant castes have succeeded in misrecognizing their social dominance. Fixing dominance on the colonial state narrows the agency of resistance and, consequently, produces a framework that leads to an emphasis on the formal properties of colonial power, ignoring its local and micro-context in which the dominant castes are deeply implicated. In addition, the dominant castes are relocated and redefined as primordial nationalists whose every act signals resistance. These two tendencies on the notion of resistance have been in vogue for at least a century, and the problem—existence of local dominance—is held in analytical abeyance. This article analyses the scholarly framework on the concept of resistance in Goa and examines the interplay of subaltern resistance, more particularly through identity and temple ownership with the workings of power.

Dancing Revolution: Bodies, Space, and Sound in American Cultural History by Christopher J. Smith

Reviewed by: Dancing Revolution: Bodies, Space, and Sound in American Cultural History by Christopher J. Smith M. Alison Kibler Dancing Revolution: Bodies, Space, and Sound in American Cultural History. By Christopher J. Smith. Music in American Life. (Urbana and other cities: University of Illinois Press, 2019. Pp xiv, 255. Paper, $27.95, ISBN 978-0252-08418-8; cloth, $110.00, ISBN 978-0-252-04239-3.) In this ambitious study Christopher J. Smith traces more than two hundred years of street music and dance in the United States, from the public performances of the First Great Awakening to Josephine Baker's banana dance (1926) and the dances in the Marx Brothers' A Day at the Races (1937) and beyond. This "participatory dance culture" was political (p. 2). Through unregulated movement, ordinary people temporarily reclaimed public space, challenged European norms of bodily movement, and expressed "resistance to dominant control" (p. 13). Sometimes the "'rough dance'" was part of political protest; other times it was performed at a festival, a religious event, or a dance hall (p. 32). Running through these different settings was the distinctive "akimbo" style: "to dance with bent arms or twisted torso" to a syncopated rhythm (p. 32). The style grew out of the mixing of races and nationalities in the United States, particularly the transatlantic encounters of Africans and Europeans. Smith's work pushes the boundaries of cultural history and canons of dance to include street dance and encourages readers to see the political significance of dance throughout the history of the United States. Resistance through dance took many different forms. For example, in eighteenth-century New Orleans, black and white people danced together despite official segregation. The Native American Ghost Dance spread across the northern Great Plains in the late nineteenth century as resistance to poor living conditions on reservations and changes to reservation policy. Lakota leaders refused to end the Ghost Dance, despite fearful white people's demands. White misunderstanding of the meaning of the dance played a role in the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. In the twentieth century, the distortions, crossed eyes, and bent knees and arms of Josephine Baker, who became a civil rights activist, were acts of "self-liberation" (p. 100). These examples of resistance clearly diverge. Some dancers broke the law; in other cases, the rough dancing does not seem to have attracted the attention of lawmakers at all. Some dancers risked extreme violence, while some dancers' transgressions were the basis of global stardom. Some dances were solos; other dances involved groups. Smith's approach, however, tends to flatten out difference by asserting that all examples are instances of "subaltern resistance" (p. 3). More detailed analysis would help readers understand the significance of different styles and contexts for reaching particular goals. Smith theorizes that dances that do not enact permanent change are still worthy of analysis as [End Page 680] "subaltern tactics" (p. 57). Yet Smith's series of case studies invites the question: Which dances were effective protests? The sheer variety of dances included here has some advantages, such as showing how contexts of racial mixing shaped dance over a long period, but it also has drawbacks. Some case studies seem out of place. Smith offers a detailed reading of the blackface minstrelsy in Spike Lee's Bamboozled (2000), comparing it with dance in Malcolm X's Autobiography (1965) because both demonstrate "dance-based cross-racial attraction," but Smith does not explore the distinct contexts and audiences for these texts (p. 103). Other examples also lack detail. While Smith breaks down the dance steps of the Lindy Hop in conjunction with musical lyrics and a tin whistle in A Day at the Races, his discussion of Malcom X's dancing lacks detail. He notes that Malcolm X's balletic white partner drew attention to the duo, but Smith does not describe how their contrasting styles might have worked together. In addition, although Smith considers sexual objectification in Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Baby Got Back" (1992), he does not draw this layer of gendered analysis into his discussion of Josephine Baker. For the most part, this cultural history presents dance as simply resistance, not as a contradictory practice...

Leopard in kitten heels: The politics of Theresa May’s sartorial choices

This article discusses the clothing choices of Theresa May as a female Member of Parliament (MP) and as the second woman prime minister of Great Britain. A Conservative MP since 1997 with a conservative background growing up a Vicar’s daughter and grammar school education, Mrs May’s sartorial choices have evolved to conform with an understanding of female MP’s as proxy men and to reflect British national dress as defined by tradition. However, within this conservative persona, a discordant note is struck by her choice of shoes. Not always neutral, in this article, her choice of fabric is examined as a form of ‘everyday resistance’. Compromised as these choices are, her choice of leopard print kitten heels is suggested as a form of subaltern resistance.

Ordoliberal Authoritarian Governance in China since 1978: World Market, Performance Legitimacy, and Biosovereign Ordering

My contribution has six parts. First, starting from the Harvey-Ong debate on the ‘strange case’ of neoliberalism in China, it proceeds to the wider discussion of the path-dependent, geographically-conditioned variegation of neoliberalization. Second, it suggests how a meso-level cultural political economy can mediate between abstract-simple and concrete-complex analyses. Third, it proposes making ordoliberal and authoritarian turns to examine (non-western) cases where sovereign, disciplinary and biopolitical power coexist and co-evolve. Fourth, it deploys the concept of ordoliberal authoritarian governance to examine China since Deng’s opened it to the world market in 1978. Specifically, it describes a hybridized ensemble of meta-governance ground rules (e.g., GDPism), socialist statecraft, the bio-sovereign ordering of the population through hukou (household registration system) and suzhi (human quality), and the politics of desire/morality (e.g., consumption and neo-Confucianism). These governing techniques and strategies have strengthened China’s national growth and entrepreneurial potential; but they have also weakened them through exclusionary practices that generate inequalities and social unrest. Fifth, it considers the new subaltern resistance identity of Diaosi, which has emerged since 2011. Diaosi live in marginal and subaltern conditions but also aspire to gain urban hukou and embrace suzhi consumption. To re-establish control in response to these challenges, the government has intensified Internet surveillance, censorship and the use of a “social credit” system. Sixth, the article offers some conclusions on the cultural political economy perspective on variegation and heuristic potential of the ordoliberal and authoritarian turns in examining variegated neoliberalization/ordoliberalization in non-western settings.

Theorizing Settler Colonialism: Alternative Indigenous Methodologies

Feminist Studies 45, no. 2/3. © 2019 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 455 Jennifer McLerran Theorizing Settler Colonialism: Alternative Indigenous Methodologies In Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism, Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd asserts that US imperialism propagates itself, expanding into new territories through a “transferable ‘Indianness .’”1 Positioning those it wishes to dominate and whose land and resources it seeks to appropriate as “savage” facilitates its project. Building on the theories of Australian scholar Patrick Wolfe, Byrd asserts that this process continues into the present through settler colonialism .2 Byrd notes, “How we have come to know intimacy, kinship, and identity within an empire born out of settler colonialism is predicated upon discourses of indigenous displacements that remain with the present everydayness of settler colonialism, even if its constellations have been naturalized by hegemony.”3 Wolfe argues that settler colonialism, which is predicated on the disappearance of the Indigenous subject, is a structure, not an event; and, because it structures modern Western culture in seemingly intractable ways, it remains with us today. Byrd 1. Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 5. 2. Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Continuum International , 1999); Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409; Patrick Wolfe, “Structure and Event: Settler Colonialism, Time, and the Question of Genocide,” in Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (Oxford: Berghahn, 2008), 102–132. 3. Byrd, xviii. 456 Jennifer McLerran Books Discussed in This Essay Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. Edited by Joanne Barker. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Indigenous Americas series). By Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. asserts, “Our contemporary challenge is to theorize alternative methodologies to address the problems imperialism continues to create” (xxvi). She explains, “The challenge facing indigenous studies in the academy is not just the need to negotiate the Western colonial biases that render indigenous peoples as precolonial ethnographic purveyors of cultural authenticity instead of scholars capable of research and insight, but also the need to respect the local specificities, histories and geographies that inform the concept of indigeneity” (xxix). The best Indigenous critical theory, Byrd asserts, is first grounded in Indigenous epistemologies and the specific beliefs and practices of the communitiesfromwhichtheyoriginateandwhichtheysustain.Founded on an Indigenous base, such theory may then be productively explored in relation to European cultural and legal systems. Byrd explains, “Indigenous critical theory could be said to exist in its best form when it centers itself within indigenous epistemologies and the specificities of the communities and cultures from which it emerges and then looks outward to engage European philosophical, legal, and cultural traditions in order to build upon all the allied tools available . . . indigenous critical theory has the potential in this mode to offer a transformative accountability ” (xxx). Indigenous scholars have risen to this task, grounding Indigenous theory in local epistemologies, transforming the discourse, and opening Jennifer McLerran 457 new avenues of inquiry. Works by three innovative theorists, Lenape scholar Joanne Barker, Native Hawaiian J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, and Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson are reviewed here. Each explores Indigenous strategies of resistance to settler colonialism. Barker advocates for a heuristic based on a “polity of the Indigenous,” which she describes as “the unique governance, territory, and culture of Indigenous peoples in unique and related systems of (non)-human relationships and responsibilities to one another” (5). Positioning her arguments in the context of critical Indigenous, gender, sexuality, and feminist studies, Barker stresses the importance of sovereignty and self-determination as well as critical exploration of the ways in which these values are represented, conceived, and exercised. Barker begins with a discussion of the terms and debates that comprise the intellectual genealogy of “critical Indigenous gender, sexuality, and feminist studies” (5). Her introduction and the essays comprising...

Hawaiian Music and Oceanizing American Studies

American studies has been dedicated to understanding cultural forms from its beginnings as a field. Music, as one such form, is especially centered in the field as a lens through which to seek the cultural “essence” of US America – as texts from which to glean insight into negotiations of intellectual thought, social relations, subaltern resistance, or identity formation, or as a form of labor that produces an exchangeable commodity. In particular, the featuring of folk, indigenous, and popular music directly responded to anxieties in the intellectual circles of the postwar era around America's purported lack of serious culture in comparison to Europe. According to John Gilkeson, American studies scholars in the 1950s and 1960s “vulgarized” the culture concept introduced by the Boasian school of anthropology, opening the door to serious consideration of popular culture as equal in value to high culture.1

The Study of Involuntary Migration as a Hermeneutical Guide for Reading the Jacob Narrative

AbstractThe patriarch Jacob is an involuntary migrant. Jacob lives as an asylum seeker from Esau’s threat of violence and then as a refugee under Laban’s protection. Eventually, Jacob returns ‘home’ to Canaan, but he finds there a society totally different than the one he remembers or imagines. Jacob resembles involuntary migrants from other cultures in all of these ways. The experiences of other involuntary migrants can and should, therefore, guide interpretation of this narrative. This article, therefore, exegetes the texts concerning Jacob in Genesis 25-33 by utilising findings from the social-scientific study of involuntary migration, James C. Scott’s work on subaltern resistance, and studies on the role of trickster narratives in the Hebrew Bible. By generating new interpretive solutions to perennially problematic passages and showing the prominence of the experience of involuntary migration in Genesis, this article outlines an important new hermeneutical approach relevant not only for this text but also for a large number of texts in the Hebrew Bible concerned with involuntary migration.

Production of the Global Health Doctor: Discourses on International Medical Electives

This article attempts to interrupt dominant narratives in the literature about international service-learning (ISL) in the field of medicine by critically deconstructing discourse related to a common model used to teach global health in undergraduate medical education: the international medical elective (IME). Based on a study conducted in 2012, the results have not been previously published. Using a Foucauldian discourse analysis, the study interrogated the underlying assumptions behind the nature of “service” being rendered by conveying the imagery, language, and consequences of the dominant discourses used in journal articles indexed on MEDLINE between 2000 and 2011. The analysis revealed an IMEs literature steeped in problematic discursive (re)productions of colonial constructs and imagined geographies, primarily through two dominant discourses designated as “disease and brokenness” and “romanticizing poverty.” These discourses both justify and reinforce privileged subject positions for students engaged in these ISL experiences, while inadequately considering structures and systems that perpetuate marginalization and health inequities. Such discourses often marginalize or essentialize people of so-called “host” countries, while silencing subaltern perspectives, resistance struggles, knowledges, and epistemologies. Challenging current ISL practices in medicine requires educators to actively work towards decolonialization, in part by recognizing the ability of discourses to produce meaning and subjects.

Power Relations and the Adoption of Foreign Material Culture: A Different Perspective from First-Millennium BCE Nubia

Questions of power relations have long been central to archaeological study of culture contact, with colonial relationships exciting particular interest. However, current frameworks do not account for the adoption of foreign material culture by cultures that are politically stronger than those from which they adopt. The wide variety of Egyptian material culture forms on display at first millennium BCE royal sites in Nubia such as the cemeteries of el-Kurru and Nuri is one such example of non-colonial cultural interaction which is not adequately explained by the postcolonial theories currently popular. This paper argues that the Kushite royal adoption of Egyptian forms was not based in concerns of ethnic identity or subaltern resistance, but instead reflected native Kushite state structures and value systems. It argues that theories of state structure and economy, including prestige goods economies, are more useful for understanding the nature of culture contact in non-colonial situations.

A study in dispossession: the political ecology of phosphate in Tunisia

This article seeks to evidence the social, environmental and political repercussions of phosphate extraction and transformation on two peripheral Tunisian cities (Gabes and Gafsa). After positing the difference between class environmentalism and political ecology, it addresses the harmful effects of phosphate transformation on the world's last coastal oasis and on various cities of the Gulf of Gabes. It then sheds light on the gross social, environmental and health inequalities brought about by phosphate extraction in the mining region of Gafsa. The confiscatory practices of the phosphate industry are subsequently linked with global production and distribution chains at the international level as well as with centralized and authoritarian forms of government at the national and local level. Dispossessed local communities have few alternatives other than violent protest movements and emigration towards urban centers of wealth. Using the recent experience in self-government in the Jemna palm grove, the article ends with a reflection on the possible forms of subaltern resistance to transnational extractivism and highlights the ambiguous role of the new "democratic state" as a power structure reproducing patterns of domination and repression inherited from the colonial period and cemented under the dictatorship of Ben Ali.Keywords: political ecology, transnational extractivism, phosphate, Tunisia.

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.

Sales and survival within the contested acoustic territories of Mexico City's Historic Centre

ABSTRACTThe diverse and highly stylised cries (pregones) of street vendors are ubiquitous features of Mexico City's soundscape and audible manifestations of its cultural heritage. Throughout its history, Mexico City's Historic Centre has served as a site of informal commerce. However, the adoption of neoliberal economic policies and the privatisation of public spaces have produced a paradox. While the number of street vendors rises as options for gainful employment dwindle, the criminalisation of their means of subsistence has exposed these individuals to police bribes, confiscation and harassment. Sounds (e.g., street cries, whistles and coded language) are essential to the maintenance of this tenuous way of life. Sounds are used to lure customers, claim territory and execute highly coordinated evasions of police raids. This article explores the specialised listening and sound-making of street vendors and demonstrates the integral relationship between aurality and subaltern resistance in contemporary Mexico City.

Resistance is Fertile: Livelihood Struggles and Resistance Movements against Extractive Industries

There are more than 400 ongoing conflicts involving the extractive industries (mining, gas and oil) and communities impacted by extractive activity. Most of these conflicts are in the developing countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America. In this paper we examine three resistance movements in Brazil, Chile and India where Indigenous groups are resisting mining operations on their lands. We argue these movements represent forms of subaltern resistance whereby marginalized communities negotiate with market and state actors to protect their livelihoods. In particular, we highlight the ecological and cultural aspects of these resistance movements and explore the tensions and contradictions that arise from mining activity. We draw on insights from political ecology to develop a more grounded theoretical account of resistance movements. We discuss the theoretical implications of our findings for resistance movements particularly with respect to the role of the state, and corporate social responsibility.