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Leguizamón, Amalia. Seeds of Power: Environmental Injustice and Genetically Modified Soybeans in Argentina.
No full textLeguizamón, Amalia. Seeds of Power: Environmental Injustice and Genetically Modified Soybeans in Argentina. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020
Didascalia 8: Caption 8 (2022–2023) by Alessandro Morino, Ivan Schiavone
No full textDidascalia 8Caption 8 (2022–2023)by Alessandro Morino, Ivan SchiavoneTranslated by Gianluca Rizzo and Dominic Siracus
Imagining a New State: (Re)visiting the Gandhian Model of Panchayati Raj in the Contemporary Discourse of Postcolonialism and Neoliberalism
No full textThe famous Miliband-Poulantzas debate between the Marxist theorists Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas gave a new way to understand the conditions of states in a capitalist and neocolonial world. Later theorists, like Hamza Alavi, critiqued state theorists and emphasized that state formation and nation-building in postcolonial societies differ from the Western understanding of the state. In today’s world, there is an extensive body of literature by theorists and critical ethnographers defining and theorizing the postcolonial state. However, much before these “state theorists,” M. K. Gandhi problematized the conditions of postcolonial states. His emphasis on the localization of government is distinct from the economic model of capitalization and globalization in the current socioeconomicconfigurations of the world. He imagined a state where Panchayat (villages) would be the basic units of administration, and every individual would be an essential part of the system. He emphasized empowering Grams (villages), which would lead India to be a truly progressive and democratic state. This localization of governance stands in direct opposition to the prevailing homogenous model of governance. Through a detailed analysis, this paper aims to shed light on the contrasting nature of localized governance and its divergence from centralized approaches. Additionally, it seeks to contextualize the various facets of Panchayati Raj within the framework of a capitalist and globalized society in the modern world. In doing so, the argument unfolds to underscore the significance of revisiting and reevaluating Gandhian principles for their potential insights into governance in the present context
“Against Forgetting”: Witnessing and Memory-Making in Agha Shahid Ali’s The Country Without a Post Office
No full textThis paper investigates the witnessing and memory-making functions of the poetry of Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali. Against the backdrop of prevailing institutionalized constraints on journalism and mass media reportage by a postcolonial nation-state in a conflict-ridden territory, this paper shows how Shahid’s poetry fills the lacuna and serves not only as an archive of collective memories of his people, or witness to their sufferings, but also engages the critical as well as emotional faculties of a wider audience to elicit empathies and garner committed solidarities. It throws light on the complexity of witnessing with respect to the poet’s positionality as he bore witness to the occurrences of his homeland while being physically distant from it and yet offering a substitution to news, especially in the present times when journalism, in Kashmir, has failed in its obligation to represent the experiences of the ordinary people. The study primarily focuses on Shahid’s 1997 collection, The Country Without a Post Office, for its investigation of the witnessing functions of his poetry
A Narrative House of Mirrors: Reading Language and the City in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Exit West
No full textThe paper reads The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) and Exit West (2017) as texts of displacement: texts that are about displaced people, but that also showcase narrative displacement, a refusal on the part of the narrative to congeal into a fixed, unitary set of meanings. It traces the ways in which these novels stage, in and through their linguistic and narrative choices, the constitutive incompleteness of the process of displacement, willed or not, and its unavailability as a coherent or fixed referent. There is constant disarticulation and slippage between words and their accepted meanings, between places and their supposed distinctiveness, and between relationships and their expected outcomes. I examine these narrative aporias to posit these novels as texts that make for a radically unsettling reading experience, at the same time as they are texts about the radical unsettlement undergone by migrants and refugees as they leave a home in search of a new one. I offer, further, that it is through an elaboration of the city— or cities— in these novels that they are able to create a highly productive effect of the uncanny. Both The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Exit West deploy a range of cities from all over the globe to set up a conversation between them as in a narrative house of mirrors, asking the reader to acknowledge the placing of borders between places, between people and between their stories, as an imperfect and ineffectual attempt to deny the great deal that links them together
Wiersema, Juliet B. The History of a Periphery: The Spanish Colonial Cartography from Colombia’s Pacific Lowlands.
No full textReview of: Wiersema, Juliet B. The History of a Periphery: The Spanish Colonial Cartography from Colombia’s Pacific Lowlands. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2023
McCarthy, John F., Andrew McWilliam, and Gerben Nooteboom. The Paradox of Agrarian Change: Food Security and the Politics of Social Protection in Indonesia.
No full textMcCarthy, John F., Andrew McWilliam, and Gerben Nooteboom. The Paradox of Agrarian Change: Food Security and the Politics of Social Protection in Indonesia. Singapore: National University Singapore Press, 2022