Manu Goswami

From Swadeshi to Swaraj: Nation, Economy, Territory in Colonial South Asia, 1870 to 1907

Our present historical moment is marked by a complex interlocking between processes of globalization and the proliferation of nationalisms. Contemporary processes of globalization have attenuated the institutional capacities of nation-states to regulate their national economies See Harvey (1989), Held (1990, 1995), Hirsch (1995), Sassen (1991, 1996). and challenged the spatial correspondence between nation, state, economy, culture, and people that has long defined the nation-state. See Agnew (1994), Appadurai (1996, 1997), Gupta and Ferguson (1992), Malkii (1992), Robertson (1992). The inherited hyphenization of nation and state, forged during the late-nineteenth century, now appears “less as an icon of conjuncture than an index of disjuncture.” Appadurai (1996:39). The increasing visibility of the strains in the union between nation and state has been matched by a remarkable burst in analyses of nationalism and the nation-state. In particular, the territorial bases of nationhood has emerged as a major theme in studies of nationalism. This essay seeks to extend and broaden this line of enquiry through an analysis of the historical production of a national space and economy in late nineteenth century colonial India. My discussion of the nationalization of conceptions of economy and territory at once engages with and departs from received approaches to national territory.

Provincializing sociology: The case of a premature postcolonial sociologist

This essay seeks to extend the original gambit of this forum, of thinking possible modes of postcolonial sociology, unto a more relational terrain. It takes as its point of departure the vexed status of history in sociology and the hermeneutic suspicion of comparison in postcolonial theory. Any potential rapprochement between postcolonial theory and sociology must engage with the deeply incongruent status of history and comparison across these fields. I attempt to bridge this divide historically by revisiting an anti-imperial internationalist sociology forged in interwar colonial India. I seek thereby to show what Pierre Bourdieu called a “particular case of the possible” and to participate in ongoing efforts to “provincialize” sociology.

Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, eds., States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001.

The provocative, lucid, and wide-ranging set of essays contained in States of Imagination attempt to fashion a “denaturalizing approach” to the postcolonial state, one that moves beyond both orthodox Marxist renderings of the state as epiphenomenal and modernization-theoretical approaches that substituted a catalogue of negative definitions (narratives of lack) for a critical engagement with postcolonial governance. While rooted in an explicitly anthropological perspective, the introduction and the thirteen essays that follow position themselves in a conceptual “space” between Gramscian and Foucauldian frameworks that have broad interdisciplinary import (p. 3). A central assumption here is that the distinct epistemological grounding of Gramscian and Foucauldian perspectives does not translate into fundamental incompatibility, much less demand a rigorous epistemic hygiene. The conceptually dense introduction and essays seek to parlay the operative metaphor of a “space between” Gramscian and Foucauldian frameworks in order to render intelligible a range of paradoxes constitutive of the state in postcolonial worlds. While the attempted rapprochement between Gramscian analyses of hegemony and class relations and the currently ascendant Foucauldian analytic of governmentality is somewhat uneven in execution, it is motivated by a concern to grasp the “ambiguities of the state” as “both illusory as well as a set of concrete institutions” as “both distant and impersonal ideas as well as localized and personified institutions” as “both violent and destructive as well as benevolent and productive” (5).