The Lost Archive: An Interview with Marina Rustow
I stared at the documents long enough to realize that some of them had as many as five different hands on them, crammed onto a tiny tax receipt for instance, or the top segment of an archival copy of a decree—it’s quite amazing. There are hundreds or thousands of these documents now, and there were probably hundreds of thousands of them back then, and they have multiple personnel and predictable structures and layouts, but those structures and layouts differ by genre and function. All this suggests that there’s a complex system of trained people—that they’re not running a state by the seat of their pants. They’re doing it in a deliberate and elaborated way, and with detailed technical skill.
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Call for Pitches: The Final Frontier? Bilad al-Sudan in African and Middle Eastern Studies
Borderlines seeks thoughtful and innovative contributions that help us rethink the historical construction and transformation of racial difference in Sudan, its entanglement with other axes of social, economic, and cultural politics and its contemporary manifestations and implications. We are particularly interested in studies that take on a transregional focus connecting Ottoman, Arab-Afro and trans-Saharan African borderlands, and that engage with recent debates situated at the intersection of African and Middle Eastern Studies. Works on contemporary as well as historical phenomena and developments tied to questions of slavery, revolution, and artistic production are particularly welcomed. We are also interested in publishing translations of literary texts that engage with cinema and art as well as studies of primary-sources that interrogate the vicissitudes and production of racial difference in the borderland region of Bilad al-Sudan and beyond.
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Call for Pitches: Another Worldmaking? Art, Culture and Thought
How did anticolonial worldmaking offer “strategies to mitigate, circumvent, and undo the hierarchies that facilitated domination”, and how did these strategies work in the intellectual, artistic and spiritual realm?
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Lost Opportunities: Housing Crisis and Urban Non-Governance in Egypt
“Rationalising the complicated mesh of conflicting ownership and usufruct claims is likely impossible without acknowledging ‘adverse possession’ and claims-in-place. But doing so raises a different sort of problematic: that of the fait accompli and the creation of ‘facts on the ground’ by the local centres of power found in both elite and subaltern neighbourhoods. The underlying dilemma is thus the lack of public authority with sufficient ‘reach’ and competence to negotiate competing demands.”
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Shelter as Capital: Housing and Commodification: Lessons from the Global South
“But labor immobility is not always the motivating factor in housing projects. Other possibilities abound. The slum must also (unlike the prison) be an active source of a reserve army of labor. Or, as in my study of Delhi, housing projects might emerge quite apart from the question of labor. Here the establishment of a Delhi Improvement Trust (in 1937, nearly 40 years after the BIT) was initiated by a piece of bad press.”
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Protest, Politics, and Panjab
“At the level of historical analysis, there is a long history of conflict… For “ruler” and “ruled” within Panjab, much of the literature, poetry, and aphorisms point to widespread irreverence and even contempt of common people toward authority. This resonates through Sikhi and its philosophy of empowering the most exploited and excluded to confront their oppressors. Even at a broader level, it is not merely a colonialist fantasy to acknowledge that the legitimacy of rulers in Panjab and its environs was quite precarious.”
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On Touch, Intimacy, and Difference: Quarantine Exchanges with Santanu Das
The mother’s body is usually our first memory. In situations of crisis, people revert to these primal moments: we crave once more for the maternal embrace. I work on the First World War, and I am reminded of young men in the trenches who, in their final moments, would often ask for their mother. Two scenes, in particular, come to mind…
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Worldmaking and Empire: Humanity and Universals Not Sought
Even though we're differently positioned disciplinarily, we're all kind of interested in—the ways that ideas and institutions are mobile, that they can be reconfigured. You can't make anything and everything with them—but they are available for recapture and repurposing. To get at this, we are also all looking at moments in which a certain form of transformation is possible or these moments of repurposing are available to certain kinds of actors.
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“Where is the working class? It’s all over the world today”: Jairus Banaji in conversation with Sheetal Chhabria and Andrew Liu
“My problem was how do we write a history of capitalism, if you call yourself a Marxist, you have all these categories before you, how do you use them to write a history of capitalism? And it always struck me as paradoxical that Marxists above all should have been writing a history of capitalism but weren't. I mean, whereas you had the Annales school and the various continental historians and so on writing histories of capitalism. Whenever a Marxist attempted to write a history of capitalism…”
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“Where is the working class? It’s all over the world today”: Jairus Banaji in conversation with Sheetal Chhabria and Andrew Liu
“I avoided the word “origins” of capitalism because this wasn't a substantial cognitive claim. It was a looser agenda, namely the rise of capitalism. I hope you see the point of a distinction between talking about the origins of something as putatively specific and the rise of something as more flexible and potentially more fertile. So that was the essay where I argued that it made no sense to transplant Marx's strictly methodological remarks in Capital about the relationship between commercial and industrial capital to a history of capitalism…”
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Revolution and Disenchantment: An Interview with Fadi Bardawil
I do think that there is simultaneously too much authority that's granted to theory and too little. Let me spell out what I mean by that. There are some thinkers who attribute a lot of what happens in the world— radical transformations of the world, ontological violence—to the discursive assumptions of particular theories? How does it sometimes move from being a critical theory to becoming a political ideology? How does a work of critique, like Edward Said’s Orientalism, become appropriated by certain political forces, be they Arab nationalists or Islamists, for example, and included in their ideological arsenal that is marshaled against the West.
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Transcript: Columbia University Ambedkar Initiative Podcast
We want to think about how Ambedkar's own intellectual formation might open up new ways to understand the history of the University, ways to turn the University inside out, if you will, to open up the University to novel gaze, to rethinking its relationship with its neighbors. For instance, with Harlem, but also the links between the University and the world and the ways in which the figure of Ambedkar might allow us to do so.
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Columbia University Ambedkar Initiative Podcast
We started [the Ambedkar Initiative] in 2018—about a century after B.R. Ambedkar studied at Columbia University. This is a project of critical commemoration, which thinks about the distinctive legacies of a figure who stretched ideas of democracy and equality in fundamentally new directions ... But we also want to think about how Ambedkar’s own intellectual formation might open up new ways to understand the history of the University.
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Subaltern Urbanism II: Performing Resistance
Seeing Bombay/Mumbai through the words of R.B. More is a fascinating challenge to the historical conundrum of archival absence or textual misreading. Narratives about Dalit life in Bombay appear in More’s autobiography through descriptions of spaces hitherto little explored, or documented, especially through histories of performance such as theatre, and songs of protest and persistence that are passed down generations. Wandana Sonalkar’s translation of More’s autobiography is revelatory of More’s own Bombay, a spatial and cultural entity emerging from the places of cultural production he frequented. When describing his early life in the city, Moré leads the reader into these cultural spaces.
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Return to Ruin: A Conversation with Anthropologist Zainab Saleh
Aamer Ibraheem, PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University, met with Assistant Professor Zainab Saleh from Haverford College’s Department of Anthropology to discuss her new book, Return to Ruin: Iraqi Narratives of Exile and Nostalgia.
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Shelter as Capital: Egypt’s Housing Crisis in the Countryside
When commuting on the Cairo-Alexandria agricultural road, one does not have to look far to find high-rise apartment buildings that appear empty and uninhabited. Driving along the Cairo-Alexandria agricultural road, orange-colored residential units—built for youth under Hosni Mubarak’s government in the 1990s— have remained empty since their construction. At the same time as these uninhabited buildings remain, he country has also seen the large-scale demolition of homes built informally on agricultural land. Government-led campaigns against building informal homes in the countryside have posed a particular problem, as these campaigns concern building structures on land designated for architectural use. Through doctoral fieldwork conducted in a Nile Delta Beheira governorate village between 2016 and 2018 I found that large scale demolitions were taking place by the government
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Shelter as Capital: Egypt’s fight for Domicile Against ‘Gentrification’
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 mushkilat iskan 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.
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Dalit is the New Political and Epistemic Horizon: An Interview with Suraj Yengde
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.
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Shelter as Capital: The City as Prison/The Housing Question in Egypt
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?
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Writing the legacies of a partition: a conversation with Joya Chatterji
“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.”
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