1st Edition
Alternative Futures and the Present Postcolonial Possibilities
This book explores the idea that alternatives to our present condition are available in the present, such that a search for alternatives must involve rigorous study of some of its central texts, events, and thinkers.
Through engagement with selected modern thinkers, texts, and events, it imagines a different future from the position of the current postcolonial moment, indicating the possibilities that emerge from the present and which shape contemporary radical thinking.
An invitation to imagine a possible future marked with alternative possibilities of conducting struggles, and living through contentions and social restructuring, it will appeal to scholars with interests in social and political theory, political philosophy, colonialism and postcolonialism, and historical materialism.
Introduction: Time, and the Politics and Poetics of Alternative
Section One: Social Transformation and the Space and Time of Nation
- Karl Marx: Colonialism, Nation Form, and Social Transformation
- Home, World, and an Uncertain Nation
- In the Time of Nations
- The Problem of Population: Recalling Marx’s Critique of Malthus
- Populations and Populism as a Problematic in Transformative Politics
- Hegel’s India and Imperial Imaginary of the Universal
- Annihilation of Caste and Universalism of the Oppressed
- Charles Tilly’s Theorising of Contention
- Genocide: A Most Contentious Word and Concept of Modern time
- The Impossibility of Politics: Brecht, Manto and Two Acts of Literature
- Memories of the Forgotten
- Settling Account with the Point of Origin: Marx, Engels, and the Revolution of 1848
- The Actuality of October Revolution as an Alternative in the Colonial and Postcolonial Time
- Occupy College Street, 1967-69
- Crisis, Biopolitics from Below, and a New Model of Public Power
- Layers of Solidarity
- Epilogue
Section Two: The Problematic of Population and Power in Transformative Politics
Section Three: Two Universalisms: Imperial Imaginary and Imaginary of the Oppressed
Section Four: Contentions and Antagonisms as Template of Alternative Thinking
Section Five: Beyond the Political, Imaginaries of Other Kinds
Section Six: Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities
Biography
Ranabir Samaddar is currently the Distinguished Chair in Migration and Forced Migration Studies, Calcutta Research Group, Kolkata, India. He belongs to the critical school of thinking and is considered one of the foremost theorists in the field of migration and forced migration studies. His writings on migration, forms of labour, urbanisation, and political struggles have signalled a new turn in postcolonial thinking. Among his influential works are: The Marginal Nation: Transborder Migration from Bangladesh to West Bengal (1999) and Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age (2018). His most recent publications are The Postcolonial Age of Migration (2020), and written in the background of the COVID pandemic, A Pandemic and the Politics of Life (2021).
