This essay examines extractivism as both a project and a process that is bolstering new forms of ... more This essay examines extractivism as both a project and a process that is bolstering new forms of imperialism on a world scale. It argues that extractivism is as much grounded in material accumulation as it is in cultural extraction to create new forms of value. The writings of indigenous writers such as Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar offer an important key to understanding the work of the literary in making visible and resistant that which extractivism seeks to exploit for profit.
From Singapore to New York, via New Delhi, Johannesburg, London, Glasgow and Buenos Aires, “Citie... more From Singapore to New York, via New Delhi, Johannesburg, London, Glasgow and Buenos Aires, “Cities in Flux” registers some of the most profound impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on cities around the world. Narrated in different styles, the individual pieces draw on theories of global cities in neoliberal times as well as on the phenomenological truths of inhabiting these disparate places bound together by a global crisis. The pieces make use of a plethora of urban signs—flashing images, sounds of silence and emergency vehicles, Whatsapp chatter, billboards, found objects, and media noise—to reflect on experiences that are both deeply personal and embodied as well as reflective of a common urban predicament. Even as the pandemic exacerbated problems of housing, transport, health, schooling, employment, environment, and food supply, it also created feelings of waste, loss, and loneliness. All the pieces draw inspiration from a range of urban projects such as the Hot City Collective in ...
This essay examines extractivism as both a project and a process that is bolstering new forms of ... more This essay examines extractivism as both a project and a process that is bolstering new forms of imperialism on a world scale. It argues that extractivism is as much grounded in material accumulation as it is in cultural extraction to create new forms of value. The writings of indigenous writers such as Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar offer an important key to understanding the work of the literary in making visible and resistant that which extractivism seeks to exploit for profit.
Marxism, Postcolonial Theory and the Future of Critique, 2018
Using the aesthetic and political concerns of Parry’s oeuvre as a touchstone, this book explores ... more Using the aesthetic and political concerns of Parry’s oeuvre as a touchstone, this book explores new directions for postcolonial studies, Marxist literary criticism, and world literature in the contemporary moment, seeking to re-imagine the field, and alongside it, new possibilities for left critique. It is the first volume of essays focusing on the field-defining intellectual legacy of the literary scholar Benita Parry. As a leading critic of the post-structuralist turn within postcolonial studies, Parry has not only brought Marxism and postcolonial theory into a productive, albeit tense, dialogue, but has reinvigorated the field by bringing critical questions of resistance and struggle to bear on aesthetic forms. The book’s aim is two-fold: first, to evaluate Parry’s formative influence within postcolonial studies and its interface with Marxist literary criticism, and second, to explore new terrains of scholarship opened up by Parry’s work. It provides a critical overview of Parry’s key interventions, such as her contributions to colonial discourse theory; her debate with Spivak on subaltern consciousness and representation; her critique of post-apartheid reconciliation and neoliberalism in South Africa; her materialist critique of writers such as Kipling, Conrad, and Salih; her work on liberation theory, resistance, and radical agency; as well as more recent work on the aesthetics of "peripheral modernity." The volume contains cutting-edge work on peripheral aesthetics, the world-literary system, critiques of global capitalism and capitalist modernity, and the resurgence of Marxism, communism, and liberation theory by a range of established and new scholars who represent a dissident and new school of thought within postcolonial studies more generally. It concludes with the first-ever detailed interview with Benita Parry about her activism, political commitments, and her life and work as a scholar.
This article provides an introduction to the special issue, ‘Marxism and Postcolonial Theory: Wha... more This article provides an introduction to the special issue, ‘Marxism and Postcolonial Theory: What’s Left of the Debate?’ It casts a critical glance at the long history of engagements between Marxism and postcolonial theory that have been both collaborative and antagonistic. The authors argue that far from materializing the end of either postcolonial theory or of Marxist approaches, these exchanges have been productive and have underscored the continuing currency of both, pointing to ways that go beyond the impasse. The article also provides a critical overview of the debates within different disciplines and suggests new and creative ways of reconceptualizing Marxism and postcolonial theory for the current conjuncture.
The theme of this special issue of Feminist Dissent focuses on the ways in which religious fundam... more The theme of this special issue of Feminist Dissent focuses on the ways in which religious fundamentalist movements have become hegemonic in many secular states around the world. This purported paradox of fundamentalist politics gaining power in secular states is all the more challenging to analyse in the context of both the consolidation and re-articulation of neoliberalism as an ideology and framework for organising economy and society in the era of late capitalism and its successive crises. Specifically, we are interested in exploring the ways in which these transformations within state, society and the economy have affected women’s positions and gender relations. The illustrative case studies we examine in this issue are India, Israel and Turkey.
The postcolonial Indian state has since its inception used sexual violence to keep resurgent rebe... more The postcolonial Indian state has since its inception used sexual violence to keep resurgent rebellions in check within its formal territory, and has for long provided the means of the production of sexual violence to dominant sections of society. In this essay I suggest that with the rise of the Hindu right to political power at key levels of states and the centre over the last three decades, a new social and political dynamic has been unleashed. Sexual violence has come to constitute public and private lives in unprecedented ways that include a radical realignment of public and private spheres as well as the production of a rejuvenated masculinist state and society seeking to resignify tradition and modernity within the framework of Hindutva or Hindu supremacy. While this force signals a political defeat for liberal and secular feminism at some level, it also opens up new opportunities to reimagine the vocabularies of freedom and rights against the new political order.
Translated from the original 'Jamia ki Ladkiyan' in Urdu by Rashmi Varma) They unmask kings they ... more Translated from the original 'Jamia ki Ladkiyan' in Urdu by Rashmi Varma) They unmask kings they launch revolutions through subtle glances the girls of Jamia As they tear apart the garb of patriarchy, people clear the path ahead when they embark stubbornly on their journey the girls of Jamia And when the police raise their batons, and the people throw stones And screams are heard from the slaughterhouse, and human breaths are scuffled the sighs are stifled, the eyes downcast and when people begin to pay obeisance to injustice and power and when the slaves tire of fighting the masters when the broken shards of humanity fall in pieces on the road they clench their fists and raise a cry the girls of Jamia
Abstract: Michal Osterweil and Rashmi Varma, two leaders of the campus movement for Peace and Jus... more Abstract: Michal Osterweil and Rashmi Varma, two leaders of the campus movement for Peace and Justice at the University of Chapel Hill in North Carolina, committed to the broader global justice movement, share their thoughts and concerns with regards to the ...
This book considers twentieth and twenty-first century literary and cultural formations of the po... more This book considers twentieth and twenty-first century literary and cultural formations of the postcolonial city and the constitution of new subjects within it. Varma offers a reading of both historical and contemporary debates on urbanism through the filter of postcolonial fictions ...
This essay examines extractivism as both a project and a process that is bolstering new forms of ... more This essay examines extractivism as both a project and a process that is bolstering new forms of imperialism on a world scale. It argues that extractivism is as much grounded in material accumulation as it is in cultural extraction to create new forms of value. The writings of indigenous writers such as Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar offer an important key to understanding the work of the literary in making visible and resistant that which extractivism seeks to exploit for profit.
From Singapore to New York, via New Delhi, Johannesburg, London, Glasgow and Buenos Aires, “Citie... more From Singapore to New York, via New Delhi, Johannesburg, London, Glasgow and Buenos Aires, “Cities in Flux” registers some of the most profound impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on cities around the world. Narrated in different styles, the individual pieces draw on theories of global cities in neoliberal times as well as on the phenomenological truths of inhabiting these disparate places bound together by a global crisis. The pieces make use of a plethora of urban signs—flashing images, sounds of silence and emergency vehicles, Whatsapp chatter, billboards, found objects, and media noise—to reflect on experiences that are both deeply personal and embodied as well as reflective of a common urban predicament. Even as the pandemic exacerbated problems of housing, transport, health, schooling, employment, environment, and food supply, it also created feelings of waste, loss, and loneliness. All the pieces draw inspiration from a range of urban projects such as the Hot City Collective in ...
This essay examines extractivism as both a project and a process that is bolstering new forms of ... more This essay examines extractivism as both a project and a process that is bolstering new forms of imperialism on a world scale. It argues that extractivism is as much grounded in material accumulation as it is in cultural extraction to create new forms of value. The writings of indigenous writers such as Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar offer an important key to understanding the work of the literary in making visible and resistant that which extractivism seeks to exploit for profit.
Marxism, Postcolonial Theory and the Future of Critique, 2018
Using the aesthetic and political concerns of Parry’s oeuvre as a touchstone, this book explores ... more Using the aesthetic and political concerns of Parry’s oeuvre as a touchstone, this book explores new directions for postcolonial studies, Marxist literary criticism, and world literature in the contemporary moment, seeking to re-imagine the field, and alongside it, new possibilities for left critique. It is the first volume of essays focusing on the field-defining intellectual legacy of the literary scholar Benita Parry. As a leading critic of the post-structuralist turn within postcolonial studies, Parry has not only brought Marxism and postcolonial theory into a productive, albeit tense, dialogue, but has reinvigorated the field by bringing critical questions of resistance and struggle to bear on aesthetic forms. The book’s aim is two-fold: first, to evaluate Parry’s formative influence within postcolonial studies and its interface with Marxist literary criticism, and second, to explore new terrains of scholarship opened up by Parry’s work. It provides a critical overview of Parry’s key interventions, such as her contributions to colonial discourse theory; her debate with Spivak on subaltern consciousness and representation; her critique of post-apartheid reconciliation and neoliberalism in South Africa; her materialist critique of writers such as Kipling, Conrad, and Salih; her work on liberation theory, resistance, and radical agency; as well as more recent work on the aesthetics of "peripheral modernity." The volume contains cutting-edge work on peripheral aesthetics, the world-literary system, critiques of global capitalism and capitalist modernity, and the resurgence of Marxism, communism, and liberation theory by a range of established and new scholars who represent a dissident and new school of thought within postcolonial studies more generally. It concludes with the first-ever detailed interview with Benita Parry about her activism, political commitments, and her life and work as a scholar.
This article provides an introduction to the special issue, ‘Marxism and Postcolonial Theory: Wha... more This article provides an introduction to the special issue, ‘Marxism and Postcolonial Theory: What’s Left of the Debate?’ It casts a critical glance at the long history of engagements between Marxism and postcolonial theory that have been both collaborative and antagonistic. The authors argue that far from materializing the end of either postcolonial theory or of Marxist approaches, these exchanges have been productive and have underscored the continuing currency of both, pointing to ways that go beyond the impasse. The article also provides a critical overview of the debates within different disciplines and suggests new and creative ways of reconceptualizing Marxism and postcolonial theory for the current conjuncture.
The theme of this special issue of Feminist Dissent focuses on the ways in which religious fundam... more The theme of this special issue of Feminist Dissent focuses on the ways in which religious fundamentalist movements have become hegemonic in many secular states around the world. This purported paradox of fundamentalist politics gaining power in secular states is all the more challenging to analyse in the context of both the consolidation and re-articulation of neoliberalism as an ideology and framework for organising economy and society in the era of late capitalism and its successive crises. Specifically, we are interested in exploring the ways in which these transformations within state, society and the economy have affected women’s positions and gender relations. The illustrative case studies we examine in this issue are India, Israel and Turkey.
The postcolonial Indian state has since its inception used sexual violence to keep resurgent rebe... more The postcolonial Indian state has since its inception used sexual violence to keep resurgent rebellions in check within its formal territory, and has for long provided the means of the production of sexual violence to dominant sections of society. In this essay I suggest that with the rise of the Hindu right to political power at key levels of states and the centre over the last three decades, a new social and political dynamic has been unleashed. Sexual violence has come to constitute public and private lives in unprecedented ways that include a radical realignment of public and private spheres as well as the production of a rejuvenated masculinist state and society seeking to resignify tradition and modernity within the framework of Hindutva or Hindu supremacy. While this force signals a political defeat for liberal and secular feminism at some level, it also opens up new opportunities to reimagine the vocabularies of freedom and rights against the new political order.
Translated from the original 'Jamia ki Ladkiyan' in Urdu by Rashmi Varma) They unmask kings they ... more Translated from the original 'Jamia ki Ladkiyan' in Urdu by Rashmi Varma) They unmask kings they launch revolutions through subtle glances the girls of Jamia As they tear apart the garb of patriarchy, people clear the path ahead when they embark stubbornly on their journey the girls of Jamia And when the police raise their batons, and the people throw stones And screams are heard from the slaughterhouse, and human breaths are scuffled the sighs are stifled, the eyes downcast and when people begin to pay obeisance to injustice and power and when the slaves tire of fighting the masters when the broken shards of humanity fall in pieces on the road they clench their fists and raise a cry the girls of Jamia
Abstract: Michal Osterweil and Rashmi Varma, two leaders of the campus movement for Peace and Jus... more Abstract: Michal Osterweil and Rashmi Varma, two leaders of the campus movement for Peace and Justice at the University of Chapel Hill in North Carolina, committed to the broader global justice movement, share their thoughts and concerns with regards to the ...
This book considers twentieth and twenty-first century literary and cultural formations of the po... more This book considers twentieth and twenty-first century literary and cultural formations of the postcolonial city and the constitution of new subjects within it. Varma offers a reading of both historical and contemporary debates on urbanism through the filter of postcolonial fictions ...
This book considers twentieth and twenty-first century literary and cultural formations of the po... more This book considers twentieth and twenty-first century literary and cultural formations of the postcolonial city and the constitution of new subjects within it. Varma offers a reading of both historical and contemporary debates on urbanism through the filter of postcolonial fictions ...
Editor's introduction to Marxism, Postcolonial Theory, and the Future of Critique.
Using the ae... more Editor's introduction to Marxism, Postcolonial Theory, and the Future of Critique.
Using the aesthetic and political concerns of Parry’s oeuvre as a touchstone, this book explores new directions for postcolonial studies, Marxist literary criticism, and world literature in the contemporary moment, seeking to re-imagine the field, and alongside it, new possibilities for Left critique. It is the first volume of essays focusing on the field-defining intellectual legacy of the literary scholar Benita Parry. As a leading dissident of the poststructuralist turn within postcolonial studies, Parry has not only brought Marxism and postcolonial theory into a productive, albeit tense, dialogue, but has reinvigorated the field by having critical questions of resistance and struggle to bear on aesthetic forms. The book’s aim is two-fold: first, to evaluate Parry’s formative influence within postcolonial studies and its interface with Marxist literary criticism, and second to explore new terrains of scholarship opened up by Parry’s work. It provides a critical overview of Parry’s key interventions, such as her contributions to colonial discourse theory; her debate with Spivak on subaltern consciousness and representation; her critique of post-apartheid reconciliation and neoliberalism in South Africa; her materialist critique of writers such as Kipling, Conrad, and Salih; her work on liberation theory, resistance, and radical agency; as well as more recent work on the aesthetics of "peripheral modernity". The volume contains cutting-edge work on peripheral aesthetics, the world-literary system, critiques of global capitalism and capitalist modernity, and the resurgence of Marxism, communism, and liberation theory by a range of established and new scholars who represent a dissident and new school of thought within postcolonial studies more generally. It concludes with the first-ever detailed interview with Benita Parry about her activism, political commitments, and her life and work as a scholar.
In this essay (from a special issue of MLQ 8.4) the Warwick Research Collective (WReC) addresses... more In this essay (from a special issue of MLQ 8.4) the Warwick Research Collective (WReC) addresses the question of "what is and isn't changing" in literary studies by reflecting on the material conditions that structure its disciplinary workscape. The essay notes that the pressures of a specifically academic form of capitalism, responding to and flourishing in a period of institutional crisis, tend to replicate top-down, marketized models of academic entrepreneurship in the ways we read. Departing from more widely favored models of "collaboration" and "interdisciplinarity" as solutions to this problem, the essay reflects instead on the history and potential of the collective as a form of self-organized, nonhierarchical knowledge production. It argues that the interlinked crises of how to read in world-literary terms, and on what scale, unavoidably index more general crises of the humanities and of academic labor when considered against the backdrop of an unstable neoliberal hegemony, particularly that of the mass automatization and shedding of labor. The essay concludes by considering political and literary examples of collaborative authorship before addressing the question of WReC's own process, a form of joint working-through that the collective regards as fundamental to any emancipatory politics.
The contentious discourse around world literature tends to stress the ‘world’ in the phrase. This... more The contentious discourse around world literature tends to stress the ‘world’ in the phrase. This volume, in contrast, asks what it means to approach world literature by inflecting the question of the literary. Debates for, against, and around ‘world literature’ have brought renewed attention to the worldly aspects of the literary enterprise. Literature is studied with regard to its sociopolitical and cultural references, contexts and conditions of production, circulation, distribution, and translation. But what becomes of the literary when one speaks of world literature? Responding to Derek Attridge’s theory of how literature ‘works’, the contributions in this volume explore in diverse ways and with attention to a variety of literary practices what it might mean to speak of ‘the work of world literature’. The volume shows how attention to literariness complicates the ethical and political conundrums at the centre of debates about world literature.
Essays by: Derek Attridge on the work of translation Lorna Burns on world literature and postcolonialism Francesco Giusti on gestural community Benjamin Lewis Robinson on the world without literature Rashmi Varma on extractivism and indigeneity Dirk Wiemann on a literary ethics of commitment Jarad Zimbler on world literary criticism With an afterword by Emily Apter on reparative translation
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Using the aesthetic and political concerns of Parry’s oeuvre as a touchstone, this book explores new directions for postcolonial studies, Marxist literary criticism, and world literature in the contemporary moment, seeking to re-imagine the field, and alongside it, new possibilities for Left critique. It is the first volume of essays focusing on the field-defining intellectual legacy of the literary scholar Benita Parry. As a leading dissident of the poststructuralist turn within postcolonial studies, Parry has not only brought Marxism and postcolonial theory into a productive, albeit tense, dialogue, but has reinvigorated the field by having critical questions of resistance and struggle to bear on aesthetic forms. The book’s aim is two-fold: first, to evaluate Parry’s formative influence within postcolonial studies and its interface with Marxist literary criticism, and second to explore new terrains of scholarship opened up by Parry’s work. It provides a critical overview of Parry’s key interventions, such as her contributions to colonial discourse theory; her debate with Spivak on subaltern consciousness and representation; her critique of post-apartheid reconciliation and neoliberalism in South Africa; her materialist critique of writers such as Kipling, Conrad, and Salih; her work on liberation theory, resistance, and radical agency; as well as more recent work on the aesthetics of "peripheral modernity". The volume contains cutting-edge work on peripheral aesthetics, the world-literary system, critiques of global capitalism and capitalist modernity, and the resurgence of Marxism, communism, and liberation theory by a range of established and new scholars who represent a dissident and new school of thought within postcolonial studies more generally. It concludes with the first-ever detailed interview with Benita Parry about her activism, political commitments, and her life and work as a scholar.
Essays by:
Derek Attridge on the work of translation
Lorna Burns on world literature and postcolonialism
Francesco Giusti on gestural community
Benjamin Lewis Robinson on the world without literature
Rashmi Varma on extractivism and indigeneity
Dirk Wiemann on a literary ethics of commitment
Jarad Zimbler on world literary criticism
With an afterword by Emily Apter on reparative translation
The volume is available in both open access and print version
at https://press.ici-berlin.org/catalogue/doi/10.37050/ci-19