Vinay Gidwani

Circular Migration and the Spaces of Cultural Assertion

Abstract Harnessing primary and secondary evidence from India, our essay conceptualizes the cultural dynamics of migration. In so doing, it demonstrates the incompleteness of standard marginalist and Marxist accounts of labor circulation. As a corrective, we examine the linkages between culture, politics, space, and labor mobility and offer a way to think about them by building on poststructural critiques of development and postcolonial theories of migrant subjectivity. The proverbial compression of space-time not only has made extralocal work more viable for members of proletarianized groups but, more importantly, has allowed them to transfer their experiences of new ways of being into local contexts through acts of consumption and labor deployment that can become elements of a Gramscian counterhegemonic praxis. We argue that the possibility of this sort of “body politics” compels not merely a critique of the modernization paradigm that has organized classical migration studies but, more profoundly, a reassessment of the way we understand modernity itself. We advocate an approach that provincializes the Eurowest and foregrounds the existence of pluritopic “regional modernities.”

Circular migration and rural cosmopolitanism in India

In this article we present a provisional theory of rural cosmopolitanism as a counterpoint to conventional discussions of cosmopolitanism and demonstrate its significance for studying South Asian modernities. We explore our ideas through the figure of the circular migrant: someone who transmits through movements in geographic space not just sensi bilities and ideas, but also the materials and techniques that enable the transformation of social space in multiple worlds. The regionalisation of labour markets in India, with a consequent rise in labour circulation, provides empirical justification to our foeus on circular migrants. But neither circular migration nor rural cosmopolitanism is a new phenomenon. Instead, we suggest that by probing the largely invisible histories of move ment within South Asia, we may end up writing the rise of nationalisms, regional political movements, and modernities in that part of the world in very different ways. This is pre cisely why it is necessary to reject the figure of an international or transnational subject as the standard bearer of cosmopolitanism and realise that cosmopolitanism operates at various scales; and, equally, that the cosmopolitan is a person who disrupts conven tional spatial divisions and produces newly salient spaces of work, pleasure, habitation and politics.

Introduction: Urban revolutions in the age of global urbanism

This special issue, papers presented at an Urban Studies Foundation-funded conference in Jakarta (March 2011), examines the current ‘urban century’ in terms of three revolutions. Revolutions from above index the logics and norms of mainstream global urbanism, particularly the form they have taken as policymakers work with municipal officials worldwide to organise urban development around neoliberal norms. Revolutions from below refer to the multifaceted contestations of global urbanism that take place in and around cities, ranging from urban street demonstrations and occupations (such as those riveting the world in early 2011 when these papers were written) to the quotidian actions of those pursuing politics and livelihoods that subvert the norms of mainstream global urbanism. It also highlights conceptual revolutions, referencing the ongoing challenge of reconceptualising urban theory from the South – not simply as a hemispheric location or geopolitical category but an epistemological stance, staged from many different locations but always fraught with the differentials of power and the weight of historical geographies. Drawing on the insights of scholars writing from, and not just about, such locations, a further iteration in this ‘southern’ turn of urban theorising is proposed. This spatio-temporal conjunctural approach emphasises how the specificity of cities – their existence as entities that are at once singular and universal – emerges from spatio-temporal dynamics, connectivities and horizontal and vertical relations. Practically, such scholarship entails taking the field seriously through collaborative work that is multi-sited, engages people along the spectrum of academics and activists, and is presented before and scrutinised by multiple publics.

Six theses on waste, value, and commons

The origins of capitalist value theory lie in transformations of property through enclosure of ‘commons-as-waste’ and practices of ‘commoning’ that supported these. These processes, repeated with difference, remain with us. Capitalist value production becomes a structure of necessity in societies that are profit seeking rather than needs oriented; the history of capitalist value is one of the unrelenting attempts to subordinate needs-oriented forms of value production to its accumulative logic. In the process, it continuously casts certain people, places, and conducts as wasteful, superfluous, or residual. In short, capitalist value constantly battles to assert its normative superiority over and autonomy from other forms of value production that interweaves with it. Waste, immanent to capitals becoming-being, poses a jeopardy to capital accumulation: it is, on the one hand, capitalist value-in-waiting and on the other hand, it is an omnipresent logic of dissipation that evades or exceeds capitals dialectic, threatening its legitimacy and existence.

The unbearable modernity of 'development'? Canal irrigation and development planning in Western India

Abstract Post-development theorists have argued that ideas such as ‘progress’, ‘growth’, ‘poverty’ and ‘underdevelopment’, are artifacts of a discourse of development that has imposed its normalizing and teleological vision on the world. I intend this essay as a provisional critique of post-development theory. I show with the help of a detailed case study of canal irrigation-led development in central Gujarat, India, that while the general critique of development presented by post-development theorists is valid in many respects, the criticisms they launch are neither novel; nor, are their understandings of development processes particularly nuanced. Morever, I demonstrate that post-development theory is philosophically inconsistent when examined on its own terms. In contrast to the critics of development, whose project concludes, inevitably, in an anti-development stance, I argue that development can be liberatory in particular time–space contexts. We cannot make a priori assessments of development outcomes without understanding the freedoms they enable or curtail: in other words, their moral geographies. I suggest that as development planners and scholars interested in tackling issues of poverty, inequality, and deprivation, we can use our theoretical arsenal to expose and contest capricious and disempowering forms of development; and imagine alternative strategies.

Introduction: Grounds for a spatial ethnography of labor

We introduce this special issue as a way of bringing insights from the radical geography emerging from the work of Henri LefEbvre to ethnographies of work. What does attention to the social production of space under capitalism do for ethnographies of labor and work? We explore this question through three interrelated concepts: spaces of work and structures of feeling; capitalist reproduction and the reproduction of labor; and the spatial dynamics of modernist loss, specifically in experiences of migrant labor. Through these three themes, we show how the articles in this special issue use spatial ethnography to explore the changing grounds of knowledge and practice. Since work is always about the application of human interpretive and manual labor on geographies that are simultaneously natural, spatial, social and cultural, we argue that ethnographies must be as attentive to space and nature as to human creativity, or cultural production. The grounds for ethnographic knowledge of work must be seen in their diverse cultural and cosmological forms, but these forms must also be anchored in lived experience as it is forged in the interplay of active socio-cultural relations and spatial processes.We introduce this special issue as a way of bringing insights from the radical geography emerging from the work of Henri LefËbvre to ethnographies of work. What does attention to the social production of space under capitalism do for ethnographies of labor and work? We explore this question through three interrelated concepts: spaces of work and structures of feeling; capitalist reproduction and the reproduction of labor; and the spatial dynamics of modernist loss, specifically in experiences of migrant labor. Through these three themes, we show how the articles in this special issue use spatial ethnography to explore the changing grounds of knowledge and practice. Since work is always about the application of human interpretive and manual labor on geographies that are simultaneously natural, spatial, social and cultural, we argue that ethnographies must be as attentive to space and nature as to human creativity, or cultural production. The grounds for ethnographic knowledge of work must be seen in their diverse cultural and cosmological forms, but these forms must also be anchored in lived experience as it is forged in the interplay of active socio-cultural relations and spatial processes.

The Subaltern Moment in Hegel's Dialectic:

I stage the question ‘What about dialectics?’ by showing Frantz Fanons insurrectionary fidelity to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and his dialectic. Fanon is an acute and disloyal reader of Hegel, and relentlessly probes the moment of negation in Hegels dialectic to pry it open for an emancipatory, nonsublative politics of a ‘new humanity’. Fanons attempts to side with the radical implications of otherness disclose the ‘subaltern moment’ in Hegels dialectic and leave us a deformed Hegel, profoundly equivocal and no longer easily named (hence, recognized) as the philosopher of synthesis and reconciliation.

The Quest for Distinction: A Reappraisal of the Rural Labor Process in Kheda District (Gujarat), India*

Abstract In this article I examine how the rural labor process is constitutive of social identity, particularly status, by harnessing empirical evidence from Kheda District, Gujarat, and other parts of India. Emphasis is on the labor practices of the dominant Lewa Patel caste, and only secondarily on the practices of other caste groups. My central claim is that the labor process is a primary arena in which the quest for social distinction occurs and that the primary source of distinction is the ability to withdraw family labor power from the commoditized labor circuit. In this paper I seek to deepen conventional understandings of the labor process within economic geography, agrarian studies, and mainstream economics.