All three facets of urban politics in Egypt come to the fore through a different mechanism. But the discourse that binds them – namely the housing crisis azmat al-iskan – is a relatively new term that belongs to 1960s Egypt and its socialist policy of creating housing for all. The shift, from the abstract article in mushkilatiskan to the denominative mushkilat al-Iskan the housing problem, is a shift that is known to most historians and theoreticians of the economy as opposed to the older use of the word economy – as Timothy Mitchell has argued.
In this interview, Suraj Yengde speaks with Borderlines on how Dalit intellectual assertion is shaping new horizons for politics, media, and academia across the globe. He discusses Ambedkar's writings and life as a mark of the intersection between critical Dalit and Black thought; and perceptions of the term Dalit within and outside of India. He outlines what it means to build Dalit-Muslim solidarities, how to analyze Prime Minister Narendra Modi's leadership through the lens of caste, and the pressing question of political prisoners in India. The interview explores multiple projects Yengde has taken on, including his books Caste Matters and the Radical in Ambedkar (co-edited with Anand Teltumbde), and the Dalit Film Festival.
But if a prison is like a city can we say that the reverse is also true? Can we ask in what ways cities are like prisons? What precisely would we able to see we saw the city not as the symbol or “crucible” of modern mobility – as in dominant strands of social theory since at least Adam Smith – but instead as a site meant to render immobile and stuck in place the masses of people cities now house?
“My line is quite simple here. History challenges theory, however great. History is messy whereas theory is tidy, and, for the most part, seamless. History has its work to do, and that is, fundamentally, to stand in opposition to, and in a critical location towards, theory. We must allow the ‘mess’ to come through. If I have grown ever more concerned with chaotic agency, this is the reason why.”
“Histories usually have more to say about the presents in which they are written than they do about the past. This is as true of the Selimname as it is of any other text. Later in the sixteenth century and then into the seventeenth, there are efforts to resuscitate earlier sultans, to portray them as projections of Ottoman strength to serve the immediacy of the contemporary moment. This is more about that present than it is about the past it portrays. This is par for the course. You have to be able to understand the context in which any historical narration was produced to interpret the text correctly.”
“Fiction, as it becomes harder to parse, offers a snag that can begin to help us understand where we need to do some reconstructive concept work. In the interstices, there is something that literary method allows us to approach, sometimes just because we have to put back together the plot, resolve the financial mystery. There's a certain way of reading for the plot here that enables us to get a sense of what was animating these moments: worry, concern, suspense, hope, desire, deceit.”
“Recognizing that a form of territorialization particular to an imperial frontier such as the Inner Line and the other boundaries has persisted into our times is important for understanding the nature of postcolonial sovereignty, not in the way it is idealized by nationalists and by the United Nations way of seeing, but in its actually existing form.” Sanjib Baruah speaks with Rishav Thakur about his book In the Name of the Nation: India and its Northeast
“How is it that housing functions in Egypt and how do people access housing? Unfortunately, we believe that housing in Egypt is a market like most Western markets. Whereas actually one of the main things that you find is that most people actually build their housing themselves; self built or buna’ ahaly, as it's called. And this, paradoxically, is the housing that is most demonized by the government and by planning experts and by architects as Ashwaiyat, slums, or informal housing. So this was for me, really what I was trying to find out: where is the norm and how far are we from it?”
“I can think of three things that have contributed to this flowering of legal history among South Asianists in the new millennium. First, there is the simple realization that case law is a kind of storytelling…”. Uponita Mukherjee speaks with Mitra Sharafi about what it means to study the legal history of South Asia now. The discussion explores new methods and the new possibilities (and challenges) in writing socio-legal studies of South Asia.
In this collage-essay, Josué David Chávez uses data visualization technology to ‘map’ R.B. Moré's recently translated memoirs. By using the text Chavez attempts to visualize possible acts of imagination by Moré as he traversed the chawls of Bombay. Chavez asks how these visuals could have provided Moré with a way to recognize injustices that needed redress but existed beyond the field of legibility for existing models of identity-based justice [cover image: RB More (far left, standing) with his wife, Sitabai, and family. Photo courtesy of Subodh More].
Suraj Gogoi interrogates the tension between ‘theory’ and ‘ground realities’ in writing on the completed yet contested NRC process in India’s North-Eastern state of Assam. Gogoi writes, “the intent of the article is two-fold. First, the article seeks to uncover the ecology of academic work on the background of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) process in contemporary Assam, which aims to identify 'illegal' citizens in the Northeast Indian state…Secondly… the various grounds of such critique —underground, overground, background, foreground, groundlessness—will also be explored.”
In Cairo Collages, Abaza adopts the visual as method, and chooses to narrate her story through the framework of collages. “I found myself struggling with images and snapshots of particular moments that might in appearance look unrelated but that are clearly bound together,” Abaza explained. It was, ultimately, an attempt of putting together different pieces of a puzzle that might appear fragmented and contradictory but are dictated by a narrative line of urban life as experienced through the microcosm of living in an apartment building.
My moment of awakening came when I was monitoring the gender effects of the Arab uprisings (between 2010-2015) for a webzine called open Democracy. My evolving thoughts on the meanings and effects of citizen and youth mobilization led to a series of short articles probing into the dynamics of a new politics of gender. It was evident that a whole range of authoritarian regimes that had signally failed to meet the expectations of their citizenry were no longer able to contain their respective societies except through recourse to increased coercion…
Based on her research at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University, Rohini Shukla outlines the intellectual formations behind B.R. Ambedkar’s education at Columbia. This article explores the impact of Franz Boas, Raymond C. Knox and Wendell T. Bush on the shifting nature of the academic disciplines that Ambedkar studied, and demonstrates their impact on his essay “Castes in India”
On the 10th anniversary of The Caste Question, Anupama Rao speaks to Kelvin Ng about the questions that her book addressed and the debates it raised. They discuss how the book shifted the debate on caste from questions of social justice and the state to problems of personhood and Dalit subject formation; the way it drew from writing on slavery, anti-slavery and emancipation; Ambedkar’s anger at the unavailability of the Dalit subject in history; the dilemmas of competing minorities: the emergence of the Dalit subject and the unmaking of the Muslim subject in South Asia; different receptions to the book; the convergence of subaltern thought with global history; and contemporary Indian politics as a contingent and conjunctural process.
Is caste a peculiarly South Asian problem? Joel Lee talks to N. Paul Divakar, Rita Izsák-Ndiaye, and Mohamed Nur Iftin, at the sidelines of the International Congress on Discrimination based on Work and Descent, Casteism, Antigypsism, Traditional and Contemporary Forms of Slavery and Other Analogous Forms of Discrimination about groups across the world who face enforced endogamy, and coerced occupational specialization in stigmatized forms of labour, and asks them to critically reflect on a new concept in global thought: Discrimination based on Work and Descent.
“Historians of slavery need to liberate ourselves from a method of study which naturalizes Eurocentric racial imaginations, histories and categories of race, caste and labor as uninterrogated and universal grounds for theorizing about all co-existent societies of the globe”. Last year, our sister site CSSAAME published a thematic issue on the question of comparative slavery. In this interview, we ask Indrani Chatterjee: What might a comparative analysis of transregional slaveries look like? What can we learn from reading Indian Ocean histories of slavery beyond trans-Atlantic and colonial terminologies of race and difference?
Every lover of Indian art knows this story: in 1947, in the immediate aftermath of India’s independence from British rule, six firebrands united in Bombay to forge a modern art for the newly free nation. They were the Progressive Artists’ Group (also known as ‘the PAG’). What does the PAG’s commitment to a heterogenous nation; a multi-cultural past have to offer us today? Art historians Karin Zitzewitz(KZ), Sonal Khullar (SK) and Zehra Jumabhoy (ZJ) unpack the loaded and inter-connected complexities of the modern and the secular given the trajectories of nation-building and cosmopolitanism in the art of those associated with the PAG.
In Familiar Futures, Sara Pursley investigates how Western and Iraqi policymakers promoted changes in schooling, land ownership, and family law to better differentiate Iraq's citizens by class, sex, and age. Peasants were resettled on isolated family farms; rural boys received education limited to training in agricultural skills; girls were required to take home economics courses; and adolescents were educated on the formation of proper families. Future-oriented discourses about the importance of sexual difference to Iraq's modernization worked paradoxically, deferring demands for political change in the present and reproducing existing capitalist relations. Ultimately, the book shows how certain goods—most obviously, democratic ideals—were repeatedly sacrificed in the name of the nation's economic development in an ever-receding future.
