Gill Hart: 'Political Society' & Its Discontents: South African Reflections on Indian Debates

Partha Chatterjee Interviewed by Manu Goswami

Partha Chatterjee Interviewed by Manu Goswami 2013 by TigersEye99

Revisiting Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Conversation with Partha Chatterjee

Partha Chatterjee: The Vice-Chancellor's Open Letter, University of Cape Town

Partha Chatterjee: Subaltern Studies and Capital

Partha Chatterjee: Subaltern Studies and Capital by TigersEye99

Marxism & the Legacy of Subaltern Studies

Partha Chatterjee: After Subaltern Studies

Partha Chatterjee: After Subaltern Studies by TigersEye99

Slum politics: Community leaders, everyday needs, and utopian aspirations in Recife, Brazil

by Martijn Koster and Pieter A. de Vries

This article envisages slum dwellers’ politics in Recife, Brazil as a realm of possibility in which care and recognition are central. Community leaders are its main facilitators as articulators of slum dwellers’ needs and aspirations. The article’s notion of slum politics is an elaboration of Chatterjee’s (2004) ideas on popular politics as a “politics of the governed.” Yet the article critiques the governmentality perspective for its inability to envisage a politics of hope and possibility. It distinguishes among slum politics, governmental politics (projects and programs), and electoral politics (voting), which are entwined and interdependent, but different. Zooming in on a community leader’s urban agriculture project, the article argues that this project, which from an outsiders’ perspective may be considered non-viable, provided slum dwellers with possibilities to strive for community solidarity and personal recognition. Slum politics, the article concludes, is about claiming the right to be counted and recognized, and about the care for the other.

After Subaltern Studies

By Partha Chatterjee, Economic & Political Weekly

As an intellectual project, Subaltern Studies was perhaps overdetermined by its times. Given today's changed contexts the tasks set out by it cannot be taken forward within the framework and methods mobilised for it. Subaltern Studies was a product of its time; another time calls for other projects. An exploration of what Subaltern Studies achieved, what remained unasked and unrecognised and what has changed in the historical context to necessitate new intellectual project(s).

This article is based on the Keynote address given at the conference on “After Subaltern Studies” held at Princeton University, 27-28 April 2012.

Subaltern Studies: No Dalit Movement so No Dalit Question Part 1-4

Partha Chatterjee: The Black Hole of Empire

Thought Amidst Waste

Presented by Richard Pithouse, WISER

Date: 

Monday, 28 May, 2012 - 15:00

Achille Mbembe argues that the rendering of human beings as waste by the interface of racism and capitalism in South Africa means that “for the democratic project to have any future at all, it should necessarily take the form of a conscious attempt to retrieve life and 'the human' from a history of waste”. This paper notes that people who have been rendered as waste in South Africa have often contested their position as the damned of the transition to parliamentary democracy by asserting their humanity, in principle and in practice. But it argues that some approaches to defending democracy in South Africa against growing hostility to democratic values and practices from within the ruling party are taking the form of an active reinscription of the rendering of people as waste. It suggests that we need to question the nature of our democracy rather than the demand for inclusion.

Partha Chatterjee: The Black Hole of Empire

The Small Voice of History

Permanent Black

Ranajit Guha is arguably the Indian historian whose writings have had a massive and formative impact on contemporary scholarship in several disciplines throughout the world: on postcolonial studies in literature, in anthropology, in history, in cultural studies, in art history.

Guha first became known as the practitioner of a critical Marxism that ran parallel to the work of British and French Marxist historians of the 1960s and 1970s but which, instead of re-creating a ‘history from below’, sought active political engagement with the present by deploying insights drawn from Gramsci and Mao. More recently, Guha’s writings have drawn attention to the phenomenological and the everyday, and been noticed for their sustained critique of the disciplinary practices of history-writing.

Permanent Black Interview with Partha Chatterjee

Partha Chatterjee

Permanent Black

Q: Your concept of ‘political society’ in your book The Politics of the Governed and now in your next work, The Lineages of Political Society, adds a new dimension to our understanding of how non-Western democracy functions. Could you explain this concept simply, and how you came upon it?

The politics of the governed: reflections on popular politics in most of the world

The second chapter from this book, 'Populations and Political Society' is online here. The entire book is online here.

In this brilliant set of essays, Partha Chatterjee develops an original thesis about what used to be called the Third World. Contrary to accepted wisdom, he argues that the growth of democracy there does not depend primarily on the strengthening of "civil society" (where modern citizens exercise their rights in relation to one another and to the state) but on something else: the increasing entry of the rural and urban poor into "political society." This is the space of governmentality, in which marginal population groups are able to compel the post-colonial state to negotiate their entitlements -- often in illegal ways. The Politics of the Governed is a deeply thought-provoking book, skillfully combining rich ethnographic detail with important theoretical insights. It moves effortlessly from describing the political struggles of shanty-town dwellers in India to analyzing the contradictory effects of global capitalism and discussing the moves of American imperial power around the world. No one who is seriously concerned with understanding the political predicament of the contemporary world can afford to miss this humane and illuminating work.
 (Talal Asad, distinguished professor of anthropology, City University of New York