Tag: political

The Political Life of Memory: Birsa Munda in Contemporary India

By Rahul Ranjan

This book examines the representation of Birsa’s political life, memory politics and the making of anticolonialism in contemporary Jharkhand. It offers contrasting features of political imaginations deployed in developing memorial landscapes. Framing of Birsa in the heroic narrative through a grand scale of memorialisation, often in the form of the built environment, curates a selective version. This isolates the scope of elaborating his political ideas outside the confines of atypical historical records and their relevance in the contemporary context. The book argues that everyday politics through affective sites such as memorials and statues produce political visions, emotions, and opportunities. It shows how such symbolic sites are often strategically placed and politically motivated to inscribe ideologies. This process outlines how the state and Adivasi use memory as a political tool to lay claims to the past of the Birsa Movement.

Read the book here.

Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary

Edited by Ashish Kothari, Ariel Salleh, Arturo Escobar, Federico Demaria, and Alberto Acosta

This book invites readers to join in a deep process of intellectual, emotional, ethical, and spiritual decolonization. The editors’ shared conviction is that the idea of ‘development as progress’ needs to be deconstructed to open a way for cultural alternatives that nurture and respect life on Earth. The dominant Western development model is a homogenizing construct, one that has usually been adopted by people across the world under material duress. The counter-term ‘post-development’ implies a myriad of systemic critiques and ways of living. This Dictionary is intended to re-politicize the ongoing debate over socio-ecological transformation by emphasizing its multi-dimensionality. It can be used for teaching and research; to inspire movement activists; to initiate the curious, and even those in power who no longer feel at ease with their world.

The editors are conscious of thematic and geographical gaps, but offer the book as an invitation to explore what they see as relational ‘ways of being’. This means remaking politics in a way that is deeply felt. Just so, in editing this book – as in any act of care – they themselves have encountered the limits of their own cultural reflexivity, even vulnerabilities, and in turn, discovered new understandings and acceptance. The ‘personal is political’, as feminists say. The book speaks to a worldwide confluence of economic, socio-political, cultural, and ecological visions. Each essay is written by someone who is deeply engaged with the world-view or practice described – from indigenous resisters to middle-class rebels.

The Dictionary is unconventional for its genre in having three parts. These reflect the historical transition that twenty-first century scholars and activists must work in: Development and Its Crises, Universalizing the Earth, and A People’s Pluriverse. The visions and practices contained in this Dictionary are not about applying a set of policies, instruments and indicators to exit ‘maldevelopment’. Rather, they are about recognizing the diversity of people’s views on planetary well-being and their skills in protecting it. They seek to ground human activities in the rhythms and frames of nature, respecting the interconnected materiality of all that lives. This indispensible knowledge needs to be held safe in the commons, not privatized or commodified for sale. The visions and practices offered here put buen vivir before material accumulation. They honour cooperation rather than competitiveness as the norm. They see work in pleasurable livelihoods, not ‘deadlihoods’ to escape from on weekends or ecotouristic vacations. Again, too often in the name of ‘development’, human creativity is destroyed by dull, homogenizing education systems.

They assemble this Dictionary to help in the collective search for an ecologically wise and socially just world. They envisage the book as contributing to a journey towards a Global Tapestry of Alternatives, strengthening hope and inspiration by learning from each other; strategizing advocacy and action; and building collaborative initiatives. In doing so, they do not underestimate the epistemological, political, and emotional challenges of remaking our own histories.

Read the full book here.

Cancer and the Kali Yuga: Gender, Inequality, and Health in South India

By Cecilia Coale Van Hollen

As news spread that more women died from breast and cervical cancer in India than anywhere else in the world in the early twenty-first century, global public health planners accelerated efforts to prevent, screen, and treat these reproductive cancers in low-income Indian communities. Cancer and the Kali Yuga reveals that women who are the targets of these interventions in Tamil Nadu, South India, hold views about cancer causality, late diagnosis, and challenges to accessing treatment that differ from the public health discourse. Cecilia Coale Van Hollen’s critical feminist ethnography centers and amplifies the voices of Dalit Tamil women who situate cancer within the nexus of their class, caste, and gender positions. Dalit women’s narratives about their experiences with cancer present a powerful and poignant critique of the sociocultural and political-economic conditions that marginalize them and jeopardize their health and well-being in twenty-first-century India.

Read the book here.

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