Subaltern Struggles Research Articles

Racial Capitalism and Subaltern Struggles in Neo-Apartheid Sweden

Racial Capitalism and Subaltern Struggles in Neo-Apartheid Sweden

Nông dân being wronged: fighting for the world in a place

ABSTRACT In this article, I attend to the politics of world making in subaltern struggles against agrarian displacement by listening closely to Vietnamese villagers’ refusal to be displaced. I argue that rendering these struggles intelligible through the prevalent framework of rights obscures the ontological violence and stakes involved. It is crucial to be vigilant of not only the limitations of rights’ (in)capacity to address wrongs, but also the implication of the rights discourse in unequal power relations and global hegemony. To contemplate politics and ethics ‘after rights’ is to explore globally diverse languages and desires for just relations that have long existed before and alongside rights. It requires us to be mindful of the complex layers of subaltern speeches and actions beyond the dominant lexicon. Here I examine carefully the hermeneutic and ontological layers of peasants’ claims of being wronged (‘nông dân oan’) in their battle against displacement in Việt Nam. I suggest that their articulations of violation, dialogue, and revolt open us up to conceptions of being human and being just alternative to those contained within rights discourse.

We need to talk about political society: subaltern resistances beyond civil society in Eastern Europe and Eurasia

ABSTRACT This article points out the need to talk about the political society, or the politics and resistances, of subaltern groups in Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Existing literature frames diversity marginalized struggles as civil society struggles or decries the weakness of donor-driven, disembedded civil societies, reproducing the understanding of political life in the region in terms of absences, voids and deficiencies. Challenging this subsumption or dismissal of subaltern struggles, I advance two arguments. First, I argue against broadening the civil society concept to include various subaltern struggles as this approach risks overwriting differences between those groups that mobilize as rights-bearing citizens and the ones that are not recognized or treated as civil society. Instead, I propose acknowledging the historically and spatially contingent character of civil society and the defining role of the state and other actors in shaping which struggles fall within or beyond institutional and discursive frameworks of legality and legitimacy. Second, I argue that Patra Chatterjee’s concept of ‘political society’ can serve better as a meta-vocabulary to account for a diversity of struggles shunted as backwards, premodern and uncivilized, and to refocus research from what is absent to what is present, towards understanding counter-hegemonic discourses and practices.

The Whiteness of the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (RHM)

In this essay, I interrogate the whiteness of the disciplinary claims of the emergent area of rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM). Critically examining the practices of erasure written into the disciplinary claims of RHM, I attend to the strategies of establishing white hegemony paradoxically positioned as a response to the whiteness of health communication. I conclude with articulation of the key tenets of the culture-centered approach as anchors for co-creating communicative infrastructures for voices amid subaltern struggles.

Disrupting Gentrification: From Barricades and Housing Occupations to an Insurgent Urban Subaltern History in a Southern City

AbstractHousing struggles are key to disrupting gentrification capital flows and dispossessions. Based on life histories, key informant interviews, and six years of engaged ethnography with slum activists in the Philippine capital, this paper explicates political geographies of insurgent housing practices, including community barricades and housing occupations, and marks a history of militant subaltern struggles for the right to the city. I contend that these highly‐organised insurgent practices disrupt real estate capital pathways and nurture political subjectification where emancipatory spaces and socialities of care can be founded. Moreover, I intervene in the lack of attendance to the co‐constitution of barricades and occupations to less visible forms of insurgent housing practices. As these are emplaced to other subaltern times and spaces, political knowledges and subjectivities developed against forced evictions and demolitions enhance anti‐gentrification struggles. In tracing this militant urban history, I mark the incremental advance of subaltern housing struggles in a Southern economy highly reliant on real estate capital investments.

Carnivalizing Imoinda’s Silence

In this essay, I analyze Joan Anim-Addo’s libretto Imoinda, or She Who Will Lose Her Name (2008) and illustrate how its narrative poetry generates a speculative, gendered history around the slave past. Informed by Srinivas Aravamudan’s observation of parodic subversion in the afterlives of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), I return to Anim-Addo’s oeuvre in order to read Imoinda as a work that counter-writes the colonial gaze of “Western” knowledge. By centering on Caribbean carnival as the performance context for the libretto, I examine how histories of rebellion and survival carried out by enslaved Africans and their descendants unfold through the libretto’s narrative poetry. I argue that Imoinda, under the guise of artistic forms associated with “the West,” breaks from Eurocentric perspectives that misrepresented subaltern struggles while ushering forth the question of “who speaks?” in critical discourses. I conclude by aligning Anim-Addo’s Imoinda in relation to Sylvia Wynter’s conceptualization of “demonic grounds” to highlight a transformative epistemic space of Caribbean women’s literature.

Whiteness, internationalization, and erasure: decolonizing futures from the Global South

ABSTRACT The essay explores the mobility of Whiteness in networks of Communication Studies that posture themselves as speaking from the Global South. Depoliticized languages of de-westernizing, internationalizing, and decolonizing are often articulated by elites in North-South networks pushing neoliberal governmentality, erasing claims to radical equality that emerge from within socialist struggles in the Global South. In resistance, a radical framework of knowledge from the Global South emerges from within subaltern struggles for hegemony, achieved through (a) delinking from the metropoles of the North and (b) explicitly crafting a socialist anticolonial politics that names and dismantles Whiteness as a capitalist project.

Sustainability, Ecology, and Agriculture in Women Farmers’ Voices: Culture-Centering Gender and Development

Abstract The neoliberal/neocolonial transformation of agriculture in the global South is achieved through the hegemony of expert-led interventions of privatization that erase the knowledge of agricultural practices held by subaltern communities. Neocolonial development interventions serve the privatizing logics of agro-capital through the circulation of logics of profits, efficiency, and growth through both paid and state-controlled communication channels. In this backdrop, our ethnographic description of a culture-centered intervention carried out in solidarity with dalit, women farmers organized under the umbrella of sanghams (cooperatives) points toward communication sovereignty as a theoretical anchor for re-imagining the relationships among ecology, agriculture, and sustainability in resistance to capitalist agriculture. Challenging hegemonic models of participatory engagement put forth by neocolonial structures of development, the concept of communicative justice inverts listening, radically placing power in the hands of subaltern communities. Layers of inequalities from households to community spaces to market structures are disrupted through the voices of dalit women farmers and their participation in practices that materially resist capitalist agriculture. Moreover, the co-creative work of generating theory from within subaltern struggles for sovereignty in the global South dislocates the colonial nature of abs/ex-tractive theorizing in the metropole in the North, situating the work of theorizing amidst the lifeworlds of subaltern communities performing everyday transformative practices that dismantle capitalist logics.

Learning from and Translating Peasant Struggles as Anti-Colonial Praxis: The Ghadar Party in Punjab

The Ghadar Party introduced a radical anticolonial praxis to Punjab, British India, in the early 1910s. Much of the literature on the Ghadar Party situates the birth of the movement among Punjabi peasants along the Pacific coast of North America who returned to their homeland intent on waging an anticolonial mutiny. One strand of argumentation locates the failure of the Ghadar Party in a problem of incompatibility between their migrant political consciousness and the conditions and experiences of their co-patriots in Punjab. I use Antonio Gramsci's concept of “translation,” a semi-metaphorical means to describe political practices that transform existing political struggles, to demonstrate how the Ghadar Party's work of political education was not unidirectional, but rather consisted of learning from peasant experiences and histories of struggle, as well as transforming extant forms of peasant resistance – such as, banditry – for building a radical anticolonial movement. Translation is an anticolonial practice that works on subaltern experiences and struggles. The Ghadar Party's praxis of translating subaltern struggles into anticolonialism is demonstrative of how movements learn from and transform existing movements.

Against the scandal: itinerant curriculum theory as subaltern momentum

PurposeKeeping Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in mind, the purpose of this paper is to examine the itinerant curriculum theory (ICT) as a subaltern momentum unveiling how ICT informs subaltern ways of being and thus, potentially, the research lens for qualitative approaches. In this context, the paper examines how curriculum as an ideological devise produces an epistemicide – the killing of knowledge – an epistemological havoc cooked up daily in the process of qualitative studies promoting and legitimizing a specific modern western Eurocentric episteme.Design/methodology/approachThe paper dissects modernity as a colonial zone, creating “abyssal thinking,” a eugenic system of visible and invisible distinctions that legitimizes the visible, i.e. “this side of the line” and produces “the other side of the line” as “non-existent.”FindingsThe paper urges the need to decolonize leading modern western Eurocentric counter-hegemonic traditions such as Marxism.Originality/valueThe paper analyzes ICT’s contribution to subaltern struggles, asserts ICT’s commitment against any form of canon, grabs the educational matrix of qualitative research as an eugenic beast from its very own ideological horns, alerting the need to examine any study of education and society within the ideological eugenic political economy and modes of production of systems pillared by poverty, exploitation, segregation, and intellectual rape.

The Political Ecology of Austerity: An Analysis of Socio-environmental Conflict under Crisis in Greece

ABSTRACTThe paper focuses on two largely understudied and interrelated aspects of the post-2008 economic crisis: how the politics of austerity influences the dynamics of environmental conflict and how the environment is mobilized in subaltern struggles against the normalization of austerity as the hegemonic response to crisis. We ground our analysis on two grassroots conflicts in Greece: the “no-middlemen” solidarity food distribution networks (across Greece) and the movement against gold mining in Halkidiki (northern Greece). Using a Gramscian political ecology framework, our analysis shows that by reciprocally combining anti-austerity politics and alternative ways of understanding and using “nature,” both projects challenge the reproduction of uneven society–environment relations exacerbated by the neoliberal austerity agenda.

Susan F. Quimpo and Nathan Gilbert Quimpo. Subversive Lives: A Family Memoir of the Marcos Years. Manila: Anvil Publishing, 2012, 468p.

Subversive Lives: A Family Memoir of the Marcos Years Susan F. Quimpo and Nathan Gilbert Quimpo Manila: Anvil Publishing, 2012, 468p.In recent years, there have been a number of publications which reflect on the troubled history of the Philippines during the Marcos years, a period from 1965-86 characterized as a fascist dictatorial revolution presumed to emanate from the center. It was contested by rebellious movements from the Marxist-influenced Left and Moro secessionism and a traditional reformist elite displaced by a different patronage politics of supporting national leaders in exchange for exclusive business contracts, unrestrained local dominion, and nepotistic appointments to government positions (see de Dios et al. 1988). While writings published in the years immediately after the downfall of Marcos sprang from journalistic coverage and generally focused on the political, socio-economic, and religious state of the nation (Allarey-Mercado 1986; Project 28 Days 1986; Burton 1989; de Dios et al. 1988; Thompson 1996), books released in the last several years have dealt with the more personal dimensions of the anti-Marcos struggle. They share individual political involvement (Segovia 2008; Vizmanos 2003; Abreu 2009), gather thought-provoking perspectives on the experiences of activists during those tumultuous times (Llanes 2012; Maglipon 2012), and creatively reflect on those experiences (Cimatu and Tolentino 2010). Such works are much needed contributions to creating a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the period. Subversive Lives offers different insights in considering the state and revolution of the time. Written by an unusual brood of activist children, it is a collective familial take on the profound changes which the larger realms of society and politics have wrought on a family. The book views governmental authoritarianism and the social revolution it kindled through the collective eyes of the Quimpos, a middle-class family based in Metro Manila who struggled against an iniquitous social order and, eventually, the alternatives to it.The memoir begins by sharing the family life of the Quimpos. Although scions of relatively wealthy and ilustrado (enlightened, i.e. educated) background, Ishmael de los Reyes Quimpo and Esperanza Evangelista Ferrer moved down to the middle class and labored hard to give a comfortable life for their kids. Because of Ishmael's transfer of job assignment and crucial medical attention to one polio-stricken son, the Quimpos had to move from Iloilo province in the central Philippines to the capital, Manila, and there raise all 10 of their kids (Lys, Norman, Emilie, Caren, Lillian, Nathan, Jan, Ryan, Jun, and Susan), vowing to provide them with the best education available. At first, the children became involved in organizations that actively addressed social ills, reform-inspired student councils, and Catholic organizations. Later on, they became involved with revolution-oriented social movements. One by one, 7 of the 10 became activists, leading them to become distant from their strict and conflict-averse family. They hid their involvement from their parents to no avail.As a first-hand account of their engagements in social transformation, the anthology is remarkable in sharing the intense personal crises each of the siblings experienced as they wrestled with personal ambitions and guilt over their parents' sacrifices in order to give them a much better life. They were not only turning against the status quo in Philippine society, but also the deeply-entrenched traditionalist values of their families. One may also ask whether the children's progressive and revolutionary stances which impelled them to commit to radical work were also not a creation of their parents' hard work-honesty, fairness, and diligence inculcated inside the home and service to others learned in school. The memoir also highlights the postwar phenomenon of the boom generation of youngsters who had better lives than what their parents enjoyed, who benefited from an expanding educational system, and were exposed to decolonization and subaltern struggles (See Gitlin 2003). …

Subaltern Struggles and the Global Media in Koodankulam and Kashmir

This paper analyses the interactions between subaltern struggles and the global media, with special reference to the ways in which subalterns find opportunities in the media to make their voices heard. The paper argues that rather than losing their state of subalternity in the process of gaining a voice through media exposure, media representation reinforces the subaltern identity of the marginalised. Scrutinising the politics of representation in the media representation of the Koodankulam anti-nuclear protests and the Kashmir conflict in India, this essay draws on insights from post-colonial studies to explore new ways to read the work of the global media in their coverage of the subaltern.

Extractivism, Transnational Capital, and Subaltern Struggles in Latin America

Development projects at the national level in Latin American countries are linked with the needs of global transnational extractive-rentier capital accumulation. The concept of unequal geographic development is useful for understanding the articulation between the strategies of transnational capital in the extraction of minerals, hydrocarbons, and agri-foods and the national-scale development projects expressed in the political and economic configurations of the states of the region. This articulation must be approached in terms of the conflictive relations between dominant and subaltern actors and the way in which they are expressed in the structure of the state. Analysis of three concrete cases of subaltern struggles against the strategies of extractive-rentier transnational capital (Peru, Ecuador, and Argentina) reveal the limits and possibilities of transcending local-level disputes to produce a development project that is an alternative to extractivism on the national and continental levels. Los proyectos de desarrollo a escala nacional de los países de América Latina están vinculados con las necesidades de la acumulación global del capital transnacional extractivo-rentista. El concepto de desarrollos geográficos desiguales ayuda a comprender la articulación existente entre las estrategias del capital transnacional que se ubica en la extracción de minerales, hidrocarburos y agro-alimentos y los proyectos de desarrollo a escala nacional que se expresan en las configuraciones políticas y económicas de los estados de la región. Dicha articulación entre escalas debe abordarse a partir de las relaciones conflictivas entre actores dominantes y subalternos y la forma concreta en que estas relaciones se expresan en la estructura estatal. Un análisis de tres casos concretos de luchas subalternas de oposición a las estrategias del capital transnacional extractivo-rentista (Perú, Ecuador y Argentina) revela los límites y las posibilidades de traspasar las disputas en el plano local para posicionar un proyecto de desarrollo alternativo al extractivismo en escala nacional y continental.

Politics beyond identity: reconsidering the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland

The Northern Irish civil rights movement, like other minority or subaltern struggles, has been interpreted in terms of the national minority’s struggle for state recognition. Such frameworks emphasise the importance of identity in political conflict and tend to assume the state as guarantor of the recognition of identity. The difficulty here is that political possibilities that exceed the terms of identity and the state are obscured. Moreover, the interpretation of the Northern Irish conflict in these terms forms part of the consociational approach to conflict resolution which operates as normative underpinning to the post-conflict state. This article provides an alternative interpretation of the political significance of the civil rights movement. Rather than assuming the analytical usefulness and political significance of identity, I seek to trace the tension between identity and disidentification within the movement, drawing attention to the ways in which activists were aware of, and sought to respond to, the dangers of identity politics.

Hegemonic Developments: The New Indian Middle Class, Gendered Subalterns, and Diasporic Returnees in theEvent of Neoliberalism

The "new middle class" as a political construct is valuable for feminist theorizations of international political economy, particularly those concerned with development. The rise of the new middle class is usually juxtaposed with neoliberalism, so we offer a new theorization of neoliberalism-as-event and analyze an array of new-middle-class signs and subjects in India. Questioning the repetition of the figure of the new Indian woman in resolving the sociotemporal and spatiotemporal paradoxes of the nation, we argue, first, that the figure of the subaltern woman is a necessary counter to the new Indian woman. The arrival of the gendered subaltern on the national stage is celebrated through discourses that articulate and disarticulate the subaltern woman and bear the traces of subaltern struggles. Her gendered body constitutes the line between who can be new middle class and at the vanguard of neoliberal development and who cannot. Second, we argue that new-middle-class formation is taking place in the households of diasporic returnees through class practices that involve speaking to and for domestic servants. Returnees hold in tension urges to encourage class mobility and to discipline their servants through neoliberal governmentalities that draw on global discourses of corporate responsibility, professionalism, and empowerment. These development scripts are interspersed with reflections on the poor material conditions of domestic service work. The implications of this article for feminist theorizations of international political economy are methodological, analytical, and political.

Atlantic networks, antagonisms and the formation of subaltern political identities

This paper engages with historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker's account of the connections and circulations which they argue constituted a multi-ethnic Atlantic working class in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Linebaugh and Rediker 1991, 2000). Their stories of the mobile, networked insurgencies that traversed the early modern Atlantic challenge accounts of the geographies of resistance and labour which treat ethnicities as given and sealed, view subaltern movements as trapped in place and privilege the boundaries between spatial scales. This paper sketches some preliminary aspects of an agenda for thinking spatially the political identities constituted through Atlantic resistances. The paper foregrounds the multiple antagonisms constituted through Atlantic subaltern resistances to explore three aspects of the formation of subaltern political identities in the early-modern Atlantic. Firstly, how the spatial relations of Atlantic networks were brought into contestation through subaltern struggles. Secondly, the plural and mobile character of antagonisms between and within subaltern groups. Finally, the paper explores how subaltern agency and identities were formed in relation to the materialities of Atlantic networks. These arguments are developed through discussion of subaltern resistances in and between Ireland, Newfoundland, the West Coast of Africa, the Virgin Isles and London in the eighteenth century.

Towards the Relational Construction of Militant Particularisms: Or Why the Geographies of Past Struggles Matter for Resistance to Neoliberal Globalisation

This paper argues that rejecting a bounded notion of past struggles can generate stories that resonate with the diverse and spatially stretched resistances to neoliberal globalisation. It explores some of the routes and connections which made up subaltern struggles in eighteenth-century London. It uses these stories to position militant particularisms as mobile, as the product of interrelations and as actively negotiating spatial relations rather than as fixed, bounded, origins of political struggles. The final section of the paper uses this re-imagining of militant particularisms to address key tensions in counter-globalisation politics. The paper argues that choices between local or global resistance are false and destructive of political possibilities. It contends that connections between different place-located struggles are crucial to opposing exclusionary nationalist oppositions to globalisation.

Subaltern Struggles and the Politics of Place: Remapping Resistance in Zimbabwe's Eastern Highlands

In August 1996, I climbed a steep ridge overlooking a portion of the Kaerezi River valley in Zimbabwe's Eastern Highlands, its rugged mountains cascading toward the sunrise over Mozambique. The well-worn path, carved by the feet of children's daily travels to the small school in the next river valley, snaked its way up the slope. Fresh tracks bore the imprint of an oxen-drawn sledge, a popular mode of transport despite its violation of state conservation law. Nationalist guerrillas and Rhodesian forces traversed the same terrain in the 1970s, when armed skirmishes dotted what was then the white-owned Gaeresi Ranch. At Independence, the land became the state-administered Kaerezi Resettlement Scheme.' Fields were to be allocated to household heads, spatially separated from concentrated residential grids, to promote the administrative vision of orderly land use. Yet more than 15 years after Zimbabwe's independence in 1980, the planned linear resettlement grids consisted of unpeopled, barren plots marked by rusted metal stakes. Beyond these demarcated zones, local defiance of government policy inscribed the landscape with mud-and-wattle and sundried brick huts scattered across the river valley. Maize fields emanated from thatched huts in the heart of most homesteads, spreading out into pastures that climbed toward Mount Nyangani, Zimbabwe's highest peak. A bright blue cement house stood out sharply from the agrarian mosaic of green and brown hues. The construction of this brightly painted house precipitated a heated controversy in the early 1990s when I was conducting fieldwork on popular perceptions of resettlement policy in Kaerezi. Built upon colonial land use planning principles that physically and functionally separated residential, grazing, and arable spaces, state resettlement efforts sought to move Kaerezi farmers from their historically dispersed residences, placing them in concentrated linear residential grids. In the early 1990s, government officials repeatedly voiced threats to evict all Kaerezians who refused to move into the planned linear villages, demarcated spaces located far from the natural water points and springs where settlers had sited their homesteads.2 The local chief, in an effort to assert his