Alf Nilsen, Political Modernity in the Postcolony

Alf Nilsen (University of Agder)

Political Modernity in the Postcolony: A Perspective from India’s Bhil Heartland

4.00-5.30 Thursday 6^th September, Merewether 498

Abstract:

How do we conceptualise political modernity in the contemporary postcolony? This talk engages this question through an analysis of the roles played by law, civil society, and citizenship among Bhil adivasis in western India. Engaging critically with Partha Chatterjee’s recent work, I suggest that the meanings and practices that we associate with universalising democratic vocabularies have always been shaped and reshaped – and, crucially, expanded in more progressive and encompassing directions – by the mobilisations of subaltern groups in the postcolony.

The talk is based on my book Adivasis and the State: Subalternity and Citizenship in the Bhil Heartland‘, which is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

Author: Bill Dunn

Bill Dunn works in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney. His principal research interests are in the contemporary global political economy of labour, crises, international trade and Marxism.

Has contemporary industrialisation taken India down the ‘low road’?

Globalisation has been shifting manufacturing from richer to poorer countries for decades. In its initial phase, the global shift of labour-intensive products like garments, sho...

The River and the Rage: Dispossession and Resistance in the Narmada Valley

The attention granted to the Grand Renaissance dam in Ethiopia, costing more than $4.3bn, forming Africa’s largest hydroelectric plant and raising controversy with Egypt over...

Adivasis and the State

How is subalternity both constituted and contested in and through state-society relations in India today? This is the question at the heart of my new book, Adivasis and the Stat...

Authoritarian Populism in India

In a recent article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, I analyse the emergence of authoritarian populism in India under the Modi regime. The article is part of a special iss...