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ABSTRACT
Isolating certain critical blind spots that one encounters in studying lifeworlds of the global South, this essay calls for: (1) a grasp of the irreducible singularity of each historical formation as an essential aspect of southern Cultural Studies, so that its lessons are not readily erased, dismissed as signs of failure, or bracketed as idiosyncratic exceptions to universalized standards; and (2) the recognition of volatile and illicit forms of popular agency—emerging in friction with the security-obsessed governmentality of the borderlands, the exclusionary institutions of civil society, and the normativities of citizenship—as legitimate heralds of a global political futurity.
Acknowledgements
I thank Bishnupriya Ghosh, Somak Mukherjee, and Raka Shome for their comments and insights.
Notes
1 Some colonized spaces—India and the settler colonies of North America, to take the largest examples—were located, strictly speaking, above the equator. But the colonial imagination produced the former as a “southern” land (stagnant yet exotic, supine yet intractable), while the latter were reframed as sovereign nations carved out of tabula rasa territory, thereby erasing their genocidal origins.
2 Throughout this essay, when “cultural studies,” “area studies” etc are used as nouns, the first letters are capitalized (e.g., the field of Cultural Studies); when they are used as adjectives, the terms are in small letters (e.g., cultural studies approaches).
3 Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988), 45.
4 Bishnupriya Ghosh, “Looking through Coca Cola: Global Icons and the Popular,” Public Culture 22, no. 2 (2010): 333–68, doi:10.1215/08992363-2009-031.
5 For a more detailed exploration of the case of the char inhabitants, especially in relation to documentary mediation, see Bhaskar Sarkar, “On No Man's (Is)land: Futurities at the Border,” Transnational Cinemas 9, no. 1 (2018): 47–67, doi:10.1080/20403526.2018.1472828.
6 The emergence of Delhi, Johannesburg, and Manila as new sites of global knowledge production has much to do with their success in adapting and internalizing northern modalities.
7 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Difference: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 70.
8 Ibid.
9 Significant examples of such narratives include Amar, Akbar, Anthony (1977), Mr. India (1987), and Dil Se (1997). For a discussion of the musical numbers, see Anna Morcom, Hindi Film Songs and the Cinema (Oxford, UK: Routledge, 2016); Bhaskar Sarkar, “The Mellifluous Illogics of the Bollywood Musical,” in The Sound of Musicals, ed. Steven Cohen (London: BFI, 2011), 30–40.
10 Tatiana Siegel and Anne Thompson, “DreamWorks, Reliance Close Deal,” Variety, September 19, 2008, https://variety.com/2008/film/features/dreamworks-reliance-close-deal-1117992505/ (accessed July 18, 2019).
11 See Dick Hebdige: “Staking out the Posts,” in Hiding in the Light, ed. Dick Hebdige (Routledge: London, 1989), 181–207.
12 See Arjun Appadurai’s memorable argument about “the imagination as a social practice” and as “the key component of the new global order” in Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Modernity at Large (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 31.
13 Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson, and Jane Shattuc, eds., Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002) seeks to represent Anglophone Cultural Studies 2.0 as practiced by a new generation of scholars, focusing on North America, Europe, and Australia. But the volume's subtitle, “The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture,” suggests a far more general scope, unreflectively reproducing an all too common academic tendency.
14 See Rey Chow, “The Age of the World Target: Atomic Bombs, Alterity, Area Studies,” in The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work, ed. Rey Chow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 25–44.
15 Ariel Heryanto, “The Intimacies of Cultural Studies and Area Studies: The Case of Southeast Asia,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 16, no. 3 (May 2013): 303–16, doi:10.1177/1367877912474541; Anthony Reid, “Studying ‘Asia’ in Asia,” Asian Studies Review 23, no. 2 (1999): 141–51, doi:10.1080/10357829908713227.
16 Cultural Studies scholars who have similar arguments include Lawrence Grossberg, “Cultural Studies and/in New Worlds,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 10, no. 1 (1993): 1–22, doi:10.1080/15295039309366846; Alberto Moreias, The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); and Raka Shome, “Space Matters: The Power and Practice of Space,” Communication Theory 13, no. 1 (2003): 39–56, doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.2003.tb00281.x.
17 Here I have in mind rigorous attempts, mainly by historians and anthropologists working within Area Studies, to pluralize various global—even universal—categories by insisting on linguistic and cultural specificities: for instance, critical attempts to conceptualize traditions of cosmopolitanism as situated, rooted, or vernacular. See, for instance, Carol Breckenridge and others, eds., Cosmopolitanism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); and Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).
18 Giles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (London: Continuum, 2004).
19 Ibid. The entire first chapter of Difference and Repetition is an exposition on “difference-in-itself.”
20 Ibid., 63.
21 Ibid., emphasis added.
22 Thomas Lamarre, “Your Brain on Screens: Neuronal Risk and Media Addiction,” in The Routledge Companion to Media and Risk, eds. Bishnupriya Ghosh and Bhaskar Sarkar (New York: Routledge, forthcoming 2019).
23 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 253, emphasis in original.
24 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1977), 83–88; Stuart Hall, “Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance,” in Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism, ed. UNESCO (Paris, France: UNESCO, 1980), 305–45; Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, no. 1 (1989): 139–65, http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8.
25 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual; Lamarre, “Your Brain on Screens.”
26 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 253.
27 Michael Foucault, Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–76 (New York: Picador, 2003), 246–50; Elizabeth Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Achille Mbembé, Necropolitics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming 2019).
28 Jon Beasley-Murray, Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
29 Toby Miller, ed., A Companion to Cultural Studies (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2006), xvii.
30 Beasley-Murray, Posthegemony.
31 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 253.
32 Lamarre, “Your Brain on Screens.”
33 Ibid.
34 Toby Miller, A Companion to Cultural Studies, 3.
35 Ibid., xvii, xx.
36 Padma Chirumamilla, “Remaking the Set: Innovation and Obsolescence in Television's Digital Future,” Media Culture, & Society (June 2018), doi:10.1177/0163443718781993. Recent popular discourse has shifted to the daunting problems of e-waste management posed by the massive new electronic markets in Brazil, China, and India, with little awareness of the longstanding local practices that, contrary to North America or Western Europe, have helped recycle discarded electronic equipment. See Syed Faraz Ahmed, “The Global Cost of Electronic Waste,” The Atlantic, September 29, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/09/the-global-cost-of-electronic-waste/502019/ (accessed July 19, 2019).
37 Radhika Govindarajan, Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India's Central Himalayas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); Corey Byrnes, Fixing Landscape: A Techno-Poetic History of China's Three Gorges (New York City: Columbia University Press, 2019).
38 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Scattered Speculations on the Subaltern and the Popular,” Postcolonial Studies 8, no. 4 (2005): 475–86, doi:10.1080/13688790500375132.
39 Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
40 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Difference.
41 Ibid., 77–78.
42 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Difference.
43 Ibid., 78.
44 Ibid.
45 Anibal Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2 (2007): 176, doi:10.1080/09502380601164353.
46 Ibid., 177.
47 Ibid.
48 Ibid., 178.
49 Of course, the essay “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” from the mid-1940s, included in Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, remains the most significant statement from the Frankfurt School. The historical context that instigates Adorno and Horkheimer's damning critique of the culture industry is obvious:
Culture is a paradoxical commodity. It is so completely subject to the law of exchange that it is no longer exchanged; it is so blindly equated with use that it can no longer be used. For this reason it merges with the advertisement. […] Advertising becomes simply the art with which Goebbels presciently equated it, l’art pour l’art, advertising for advertising's sake, the pure representation of social power.
50 E.P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past & Present 50, no. 1 (February, 1971): 76. doi:10.1093/past/50.1.76.
51 This understanding draws on a central tenet of the Westphalian international order and presumes its applicability within each sovereign territory: peace and legal covenant as the bases for commerce and other pursuits.
52 This idea is ubiquitous across Marx's writings. For instance, “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York City: International Publishers Co., 2014) 3.
53 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. and eds. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (New York City: International Publishers Co., 1971), especially 445–557.
54 Ibid., 134–61.
55 Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 3.
56 In writing about the Occupy Movement, Judith Butler has brought the phrase to the center of academic discourse. But what I have in mind is a more explosive and less civil arena, “the street” being the decidedly southern spaces of the inner cities, the slums, and the shanty towns, marked by raw opportunism, desperate making do, and an endless struggle for survival. Judith Butler, “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street,” in Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, ed. Judith Butler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 66–98.
57 Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed, 4.
58 Ibid., 25.
59 Ibid., 146.
60 Ibid., 146–7.
61 Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed.
62 Kalyan Rudra, “The Encroaching Ganga and Social Conflicts: The Case of West Bengal,” http://gangawaterway.in/assets/02Rudra.pdf (accessed July 19, 2019); Rajiv Sinha and Santosh Ghosh, “Understanding Dynamics of Large Rivers Aided by Satellite Remote Sensing: A Case Study from Lower Ganga Plains, India.” Geocarto International 27, no. 3 (2012): 207–19, doi:10.1080/10106049.2011.620180.
63 Rudra, “The Encroaching Ganga.”
64 Arati Kumar-Rao, “The Nowhere People,” http://peepli.org/stories/the-nowhere-people/ (accessed July 19, 2019).
65 Ibid.
66 … Moddhikhane Char, directed by Sourav Sarangi (2012: India), documentary film; Sarkar, “On No Man's (Is)land.”
67 Press reports leading up to the 2019 general elections claimed that the BJP had focused on the populous Dalit group, Matua Mahasangha, as a strategy of chipping away at the electoral strength of the locally invincible Trinamool Congress party. See for instance, Shoaib Daniyal, “Why Hindu Immigrants from Bangladesh are a Key Component of the BJP's West Bengal Expansion Strategy,” Scroll.in, August 10, 2017, https://scroll.in/article/845354/why-hindu-immigrants-from-bangladesh-are-a-key-component-of-the-bjps-west-bengal-expansion-strategy (accessed July 19, 2019).
68 Rudra, “The Encroaching Ganga”; Sinha and Ghosh, “Understanding Dynamics.”
69 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987); Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York City: Routledge, 1994); José Saldívar, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997).
70 Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, Border as Method, or, The Multiplication of Labor (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).
71 Paula Banerjee, “Bengal Border Revisited,” Journal of Borderland Studies 27, no. 1 (2012): 31–44, doi:10.1080/08865655.2012.687208.
72 Mezzadra and Neilson, Border as Method.
73 Nicholas De Genova, “Spectacles of Migrant ‘Illegality’: The Scene of Exclusion, the Obscene of Inclusion,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 36, no. 7 (2013): 1180–98, doi:10.1080/01419870.2013.783710.
74 Ranabir Samaddar, “Who is Afraid of the Migrants in Bengal?” in Passive Revolution in Bengal, 1977–2011 (New Delhi: Sage, 2013), 63–72; Banerjee, “Bengal Border Revisited.”
75 Bhaskar Sarkar, “Media Piracy and the Terrorist Boogeyman: Speculative Potentiations,” Positions: Asia Critique 24, no. 2 (2016): 343–68, doi:10.1215/10679847-3458649.
76 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 2005).
77 Ibid.
78 Ibid., 158–88.
79 Ibid., 162, 181.
80 Dilip Gaonkar, “After the Fictions: Notes Towards a Phenomenology of the Multitude,” e-flux 58 (October, 2014): 13. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/58/61187/after-the-fictions-notes-towards-a-phenomenology-of-the-multitude/ (accessed July 19, 2019).
81 Ibid., 12–13.
82 Ibid., 13.
83 Ibid.
84 Ibid.