The Deep Futures of Subaltern Studies

Introduction by Ashwin Bajaj and Gayatri Mehra
Reviews by Vinay Lal, Adriana Michele Campos Johnson, and Richard Pithouse

Three reviews of Milinda, and Jelle J. P. Wouters. Subaltern Studies 2.0: Being Against the Capitalocene Banerjee. Prickly Paradigm Press, 2022.

Introduction
Gayatri Mehra and Ashwin Bajaj
University of California, Irvine

The following contributions comprising an extended review of Milinda Banerjee and Jelle Wouters’s Subaltern Studies 2.0 emerge out of a symposium on “Globalization or Global Apartheid” held at University of California, Irvine, which culminated in a roundtable discussion of the book by contributors Adriana Johnson, Vinay Lal, and Richard Pithouse. The symposium sought to raise problems of methodology, engage questions pertaining to disciplinary specificity, and debate the necessity and limitations of conceptual and theoretical translation across regions. In addition to advancing those discussions, Banerjee and Wouters’s anti-disciplinary text—drawing on Marxism, Western and non-Western philosophy, Subaltern School, poststructural theory, historicism, ecology, and anthropology, among others—also prompted the symposium to consider the proverbial question, “What is to be done?” Different approaches to the book—showcasing its broad disciplinary and theoretical range—are reproduced in the three reviews, which are grounded (though by no means exclusively) in questions of history and historical vision (Lal), problems of translatability, negativity, and legibility (Johnson), and the question of political relevance (Pithouse).

As the title suggests, Banerjee and Wouters invoke the original Subaltern School as a starting point of their own endeavor. Yet, the project inaugurated by Ranajit Guha—who passed away only days before the symposium was held—in the early 1980s is implicitly deemed to not have been radical enough. According to the book, the “fall” of Subaltern Studies must be plotted onto the triumph of neoliberalism which definitively proved that the “subaltern” hailed by the earlier project could not resist the onslaught of state and capital (33). The shrinking faith in the transformative potential of the subaltern led to the gradual subsumption of Subaltern Studies into cultural studies (33). Inevitably, as signaled in the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty, Andrew Sartori, Vivek Chibber, and the later writings of Partha Chatterjee, the political merit of the figure of the subaltern is revised and it ceases to be held up as a potentially radical “Other” (33-34). In their broader critique of contemporary knowledge production, Banerjee and Wouters go so far as to suggest that the felicitous collaboration between historians and anthropologists that had impelled the project of Subaltern Studies has now given way to “anthropological knowledge [that] has become darkened by despondency, dystopian, and extinction theories,” whereas history has relegated “decolonization as a phenomenon of the past, [and] not as an ongoing struggle” (35). In the face of such defeatism, in which scholars from the “neoliberal academia” have been reduced to merely “describ[ing] the world” or “lament[ing]” it cannot be transformed, the authors want to revitalize knowledge and politics via “the dethroning of Anthropos as earth-monarch, solitary species-sovereign” (37). The authors aver: “Nonhuman beings shall inspire us to transhuman ourselves. We must stream into other beings, share intelligence, be-in-common” (37). Hence, their concerns lie not in solely addressing whether the subaltern can speak or considering the ramifications of the historical erasure of subaltern struggles, but in accentuating the ontological category they propose should supplant the earlier varieties of the subaltern. If one is to follow the logic deployed by Banerjee and Wouters to its end, one may infer that even in producing alternative trajectories of historical change and consciousness, the original project of Subaltern Studies too unwittingly glosses over political possibilities engendered by other subject positions. Focalizing standpoints such as the peasantry, “lower castes,” and tribal communities ends up ignoring the potency of non-human ontological complexes, such as the version of “multispecies” being or “multibeing communities” that Banerjee and Wouters celebrate. In spite of its radical and inclusive intent, by confining itself to the realm of “human communities,” the earlier project inadvertently elides “the interdependence between human and nonhuman” (5)—which Banerjee and Wouters attempt to correct. Thus, while the authors think the original project’s emphasis on “community” offers the “best chance to resist state and capital” (4), their own project departs from Subaltern Studies 1.0—including in how they conceptualize community—in significant ways.

That we are now in a vastly different political moment from the former project’s is clear. This may be gauged by the scant attention devoted to the “nation,” especially given its place in the imaginary of the decolonizing world and the influential critiques offered by the Subaltern School of this collective category. While Banerjee and Wouters reiterate the prerogative to negate “capital” and “state” in any number of pages of their provocative pamphlet, the third leg of the trifecta of capital-state-nation is conspicuously missing. In this respect, the authors fuse nation with state (“nation-state”) as if to suggest that any distinct consideration is otiose in light of global politics today. However, the communitarian dimension of the “nation”—in either of its progressive or regressive avatars—cannot simply be understood as conjoined to the power mechanisms of the “state apparatus.” The omission is especially puzzling because any fruition of the kinds of macrocosmic alliances and communities (“communities in solidarity”) that the authors advance would need to contend for the very space that the nation currently occupies in the collective imaginary.

We end by returning to the theme of the symposium: “Globalization or Global Apartheid.” In our view, contrasting the homogenizing impulse of globalization with global apartheid cottons to a newer problem than those underlined by discourses either of difference or of uneven development. The emphasis placed on global apartheid suggests that classic formulations about the “identity of identity and difference” need to be reconsidered once the homogenizing imperative of capitalist globalization has itself begun to produce large enclaves, akin to fully marginalised spaces of absolute difference. The authors appear to repurpose considerations of communitarian, regional, and national difference—staples of Subaltern and Postcolonial Studies—for the terrain of ontological difference between the human and the non-human. To that end, one can read their assertion of a continuum of being (“the Being that pervades us all”) as bolstering the increasingly common interest in philosophical monism, which rejects older dualisms that had drawn an ontological distinction—however tentative—between nature and the freak of nature capable of modifying its surroundings to meet its own ends, i.e., the (hu)man. The contemporary political climate marked by a vacuum on the Left, right-wing ascendency in parliamentary institutions across the world, and growing immiseration and ecological catastrophe, demands brave intellectual experiments and newer political imaginaries. Whether the book’s turn to extra-human agency intimates such endeavors or capitulates to a newer form of political quietude is the point of torsion: readers must draw their own conclusions.

Capitalocene, Anthropocene, or Just Obscene: A Few Stray Thoughts on Subaltern Studies 2.0
Vinay Lal

It is now more than a decade since the twelfth and final volume of Subaltern Studies was published. Who is to say whether the collective, having thought that its work had been accomplished, or perhaps suffering from the inertia that over time afflicts most intellectual enterprises, disbanded or went into a hibernation from which it never emerged? A few short observations on the collective might be in order—all by means of furnishing something of a background to the present initiative, Subaltern Studies 2.0, and attempting to understand how its authors locate themselves vis-à-vis their predecessors. When volume one of Subaltern Studies appeared in 1982 from Oxford University Press, it came not merely as a whiff of fresh air, but as a jolt. It came as a jolt not only because of its intellectual promise but also because it dared to dethrone nationalist discourse as fundamentally aligned to colonial discourse, characterizing both as complicit in the writing of a history which did not deign to recognize the autonomy of the subaltern and only conceded the absolute sovereignty of the principle of the nation-state. Today, that far-reaching critique of nationalist discourse may not seem altogether novel, and some might question why it had been so long in the coming. The dream of independence had long soured: thirty years after that “tryst with destiny,” to invoke the phrase made memorable by Jawaharlal Nehru at the stroke of the midnight hour when India became free, a significant portion of the population remained mired in deep poverty, unemployment was rife, the project of secularism was beginning to show wide cracks, and India was barely present on the international stage. To cap it all, an internal emergency was imposed between mid-1975 and early 1977, and India had finally joined the ranks of the countries in the global South that had decolonized and gone the way of authoritarianism, military dictatorship, or intense civil strife. Mohandas Gandhi’s assassin and his many supporters among the elite had already declared the Mahatma obsolete just months into independence, but the specter of Gandhi lingered on—not least because, once in a while, Nehru was there to remind everyone that India’s struggle for freedom, for all the critique of it, had been inspired at least in part by a different moral vision. Now, in the mid-1970s, the traces that remained of Gandhi and Nehru were slowly disappearing when they were not being eviscerated, and the clarion call for intellectual autonomy to which Gandhi and Nehru remained committed, each in their own fashion, was similarly destined for cold storage.

Thus, when Subaltern Studies did arrive, it was least expected. A mere three to four years into the project, a leading American scholar of Indian studies could declare, apropos of the work of the collective and the programmatic statement by Ranajit Guha with which volume one commenced (Guha), that “Indians are, perhaps for the first time since colonization, showing sustained signs of reappropriating the capacity to represent themselves” (Inden, “Orientalist” 445). The sheer audacity and apparent condescension—and that from a scholar whose own work on decolonizing the colonial framework of knowledge has been of signal importance (Inden, Imagining)—of the author are breathtaking, not least because of the long span of time—“since colonization”—that is invoked, but the remark is instructive if only because it suggests just how important Subaltern Studies would become, though ironically more in the Western academy than in Indian universities, in suggesting that Indians were now likely to become at least minor players in the global political economy of knowledge production.

            Subaltern Studies 2.0—for the present, it exists as a volume, even if the idea of a long-term project is perhaps incipient in it—suggests that the subaltern studies project has been reincarnated. (It is, I suppose, unavoidable that in writing or thinking of India, the idea of reincarnation is going to rear its head.) The Subaltern Studies Collective, in its inception and through the early years, until at least into the early 1990s, carried the impress of Ranajit Guha’s style of thought. One must, nevertheless, not fall into the error of thinking that the collective always spoke in one voice: though Guha served as mentor to the group, its members would soon establish themselves as eminent scholars in their own right. Some, such as Sumit Sarkar and Partha Chatterjee, were already scholars of repute. Sarkar’s The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903-1908 was a landmark book in Indian history and had been published in 1973, while Partha Chatterjee had signaled his arrival on the Indian academic scene with works both in political theory and on the agrarian structure in Bengal. It is unnecessary to recount at this time the history of the collective, and more particularly the declared and undeclared fissures with which it would be afflicted. But suffice to say that the “authors” of Subaltern Studies 2.0, Milinda Banerjee and Jelle J. P. Wouters, are not entirely unmindful of the legacy bequeathed by Guha and company. There is deference towards Guha and perhaps Chatterjee, less so towards others. They write with approbation of Chatterjee whose work from the outset correctly “counterposed subaltern community against elite capital,” and they describe the subtext of his work, The Nation and Its Fragments (1993), as clear: “community was not just the anterior of capital and the state but the future beyond them” (29-30). It is in this fundamental respect that they find the (especially later) work of Dipesh Chakrabarty wanting: though in Provincializing Europe (2000) he holds on to the view that the universal history of capital (which Chakrabarty designates as History 1) could not subsume the community life of workers (including those who, through their tools and the relations of production they had entered into, were themselves caught in the swirl of capital), what Chakrabarty designates as History 2 (Provincializing 47-71), in The Climate of History (2021) he appears to have become incapable of envisioning “community life” as such. For Banerjee and Wouters, we are not merely still eminently living in an age of Capital: the labor of all, humans and nonhumans alike, is a commodity and “we are the bondsmen of King Capital” (26); but, still, History 2 prevails in its own way and has shown that it cannot be subsumed by History 1. From Chakrabarty’s standpoint, his own distinction between History 1 and History 2 does not reflect the fact, which had escaped him when he wrote Provincializing Europe, that humans are now, for the first time in history, geological and not just biological beings. Perhaps the distinction between History 1 and History 2 still serves a purpose, since in the here and now we must still wrestle with the oppressiveness of Capital, but the geological scales of time have put into question the usefulness of the scales of historical time that are the bread and butter of the historian’s work. Banerjee and Wouters will have none of this hierarchy of the Anthropocene over the Capitalocene: global warming and the scorching heat of capitalism feed into each other, militate against Being, and oppress humans and nonhumans equally.

            In what respects does Subaltern Studies 2.0 merely provide an answer to the query that was always lingering in the air, “what next after subaltern studies?,” and to what extent does it both partake in its predecessor and forge new paths of inquiry?  Both are questions to which I will only advert in passing rather than addressing them frontally. But let me state at the outset that nothing I will have to say by way of a critique of Subaltern Studies 2.0 mitigates my appreciation of the moral daring and the intellectual risk-taking that Banerjee and Wouters bring to their task. We should perhaps use the word “author” advisedly, taking our cues from those to whom the book is credited: as they note, “in the history of humanity, the author is a recent invention,” a process akin to the “usurpation of community by private ownership” (1). One of the book’s many virtues is its mellifluous blend of prose, poetry, and polemics: as they take inspiration from philosophers and singing minstrels across centuries and equally across expanses of land transgressing nation-state boundaries, the authors proclaim themselves “less as author-owners of words / And more as bards singing about a war” (3). Still, I wonder if the gesture on their part to eschew the author’s authority, to celebrate the principle of collective authorship, is not somewhat rhetorical: every human has a name, albeit a name that perforce is not of their own choosing, but animals exist as species-being and are not individuated through names, except of course when they are our pets, or have in some other fashion been domesticated, as when the zookeeper gives a lion, a panda, an elephant, or a chimpanzee a name. 

            That Banerjee and Wouters think of themselves as “singing about a war” tells us that they would readily differentiate themselves from scholars placed in war studies departments, the retired generals with comfortable sinecures at universities, the mandarins who stalk the corridors of military department offices, and the myriad others involved in the gargantuan military-industrial complex. When I think of the mostly dreary work that generally passes for “research,” or of yet another book reeking of some procrustean conception of “identity,” this book jumps at me as something out of the ordinary. The authors know very well that they will likely be mocked for speaking of fungi and fungal democracy, yak studies and “multispecies demos.” It is not only the likes of politicians such as the present governors of Texas and Florida who, merely at the mention of “fungal democracy” (122) or a “yak polity” (152) where “yaks shall vanguard the overthrow of state borders” (153), will throw a fit and announce the authors as specimens of a “woke culture” gone mad, but even readers of a liberal or left disposition who, one can readily imagine, will sigh and pronounce the authors to be hopelessly enmeshed in a worldview that romanticizes the pre-modern past and is either naïve or indifferent to the complicated histories of the human-animal nexus. It is all well and good to suggest the continuum between humans and animals, to critique the anthropocentric telos that has allowed for the unquestioning dominion of humans over the lesser species—indeed, to construe them, in the first instance, as “lesser” species since their speech is incomprehensible to us and they lack the vast range of human emotions and expressions—and even to celebrate those pasts that permit a more capacious reading of a time when animal democracy was not unknown and the notion of a multispecies Being could be more easily countenanced. But what of those histories, if anything more pervasive, which enabled the brute animalization of black, colored, indigenous, and colonized people? Have Banerjee and Wouters faced up to the corrosive rather heinous implications of the innumerable instances of dehumanization of people placed at the lower end of racial, ethnic, and sexual hierarchies?

            With all that said, I like very much the energy, exuberance, and ecumenism that “the authors” of this manifesto bring to their task. The commentators who share in the collective enterprise register their own appreciation and sometimes dissent from the views of the authors. Gayatri Spivak, while applauding the efforts of the two principal writers, expresses her unease, to take stock of one of her minor criticisms, at the South Asia-centric focus of the book and of the texts from that cultural milieu that make their way into the book; she is in some respects right, but nevertheless there is an ecumenical spirit that informs this book. This brings me back to the question that has been lurking in the interstices of my remarks: What is the book trying to do? Banerjee and Wouters construe as the heart of their enterprise one of Marx’s better-known aphorisms, in The Eighteenth Brumaire: “The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” They take to task the two disciplines with which they are most closely associated, history and anthropology, and their practitioners are indicted for at some point being the “high priests of imperialism” and abdicating their public responsibility (36-38). But this is much too easy. If they were working only within the realm of the human, then we might say that they deploy the metaphor of the future—imagined utopias, conceptions of cultural possibilities, social critiques of things to come—to redefine the present. But the Anthropocene is upon us: is it enough to affirm a social ethics and envision a more humane society in a world dominated by narrow and often reprehensible ideologies, and seek different grounds than those furnished by the experience of the last 250 years that had the calculated effect of flattening the world and diminishing the possibility of diverse and more ecumenical futures? The authors feel emboldened to enter into a critique of the course of human history, from around the time of the banishment of nonhumans from Being to the time when they began to divide from each other, and from there to the silencing of women and to the subjugation of all community speech—and to this extent they go much further than those who have been riveted on the Enlightenment and the limited ideas of “reason,” “progress,” and “development” that were first given shape in Europe before they were adopted in the rest of the world (48-50). The task at hand then becomes easier: How shall we reimagine Being in the era of the Necrocene, in an age when species are dying out and planetary life is at stake?

            While I applaud the authors for their learning, exuberance, and broad-mindedness, I also have some reservations and criticisms of specific points. My reservations generally are not those that I anticipate will be held by others, since I think it is all too lazy to dismiss this book as an explosion of half-baked ideas or as a naïve if not silly invocation of the alleged multispecies enactments of democratic practice. As I have already suggested, it is, in part, the book’s playfulness that I find rather endearing—a playfulness that allows the writers to roam around, taking in whatever they find useful or inspiring from across cultures, and transgressing the often-tiresome and frequently pretentious protocols of scholarship. But playfulness and risk-taking also have some relationship to the democratic sensibility, and the reader who is familiar with The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, one of the more influential works of humanistic inquiry about climate change, will at once perceive the sharp contrast between the two books. Chakrabarty is unequivocally clear that he is willing to accept the authority of the scientists, among whom there is, as he rightly submits, a near consensus that global warming is now upon us and that we are living in an age where humans are for the first time in history geological rather than just biological agents. He notes that some scholars in the social sciences, who are by no means climate deniers, are uneasy about the power and authority that scientists are able to claim for themselves “in defining the Anthropocene.” These social scientists, who “oppose handing full powers to the experts and losing the specific resources that every community has,” have raised the specter of “a geo-government by scientists”; and though Chakrabarty describes such a concern as “legitimate,” his response effectively is to sweep it under the rug (175). Banerjee and Wouters, in contrast, seem deeply committed not only to democratic outcomes but to the true sense of the demos as a polity that allows for a radical devolution of power. There is little recognition in Chakrabarty of the myriad ways in which experts, while purporting to act in the name of science and rationality, have undermined democracy.

            What, then, are some of my own reservations? First, the authors seem incapable at times of moving beyond rights-talk. In discussing recent developments that have led to personhood being conferred on nonhumans, they advert to an act of parliament in New Zealand, and a decision by the Supreme Court of Colombia, conferring the “rights” of personhood on the Whanganui River and the Colombian Amazon (107).  The High Court of Uttarakhand, a state in northern India, passed a similar decision some years ago, declaring that the Ganga and Yamuna rivers each has “the status of a legal person with all corresponding rights, duties and liabilities of a living person”; however, as supposed “minors,” the rivers were, the court affirmed, in need of guardians who would stand in loco parentis (High Court). It is another matter, one which I will not take up here, that the modern rights discourse has been framed with nearly supreme indifference to the conception of duties with which it was indelibly linked until comparatively recent times: it will not do to submit that the court decision places duties in apposition to rights, because this gesture appears to be dictated by legal protocol rather than by any appreciation of what is signified by a discourse of duties. The more germane consideration is that we live in an ever-expanding world of rights: to the liberal conception of the rights of freedom of speech, expression, religious worship, and mobility have been added our purported rights to housing, clothing, clean air, water and soil, minimum income, banking, ad infinitum. The greater the number of rights, the greater the role of the state: though the authors are vigorous critics of the state and its violent behavior, and advocate for the dissolution of the nation-state, there is little thought given to the fact that rights are generally conferred by the state. That has always been the dilemma for human rights activists, one that they have been slow to face up to: though rights are demanded of the state, the state is almost always the most egregious violator of rights. As Gayatri Spivak puts it cryptically in her exhortation, which she calls “The Next Steps,” “[t]he state is both medicine and poison” (165). I’m only gesturing here at a longer history that the writers would have to contend with: the very document that inaugurates the modern regime of rights, sounding a clarion call to overthrow the old order, “Of the Rights of Man and Citizen,” is itself a charter document for the suppression of nonhuman species. And I leave aside another related consideration: the activists in India who have called for legal status to be conferred on rivers, mountains, or trees conflate the juridical notion of personhood and the rights that are attendant upon persons with the sovereign nature of deities as understood in Hinduism.

            Secondly, the authors do not always understand or follow the implications of their own findings. Their discussion of the Nagas is a case in point. In the interest of brevity, I will discard the criticism that their invocation of the Nagas overlooks the violence committed by the Nagas and the patriarchy endemic to the community. Banerjee and Wouters admit that women were excluded from the Naga assembly, and their own discussion of headhunting among the Nagas should disabuse anyone of the notion that violence was foreign to the Nagas. Nevertheless, they suggest that something is to be learned from an intensive study of Naga headhunting: “Unlike state warfare, Naga headhunting remained local in scale. . . . Headhunting quite literally kept the Nagas politically acephalous” (19-20). This is a crucial point: there is no romanticism here, only the awareness that the Nagas engaged in headhunting for a purpose, not for sport, and placed limits to the exercise of their power. The colonial state in British India abolished headhunting, all in the name of “civilizing” the “savages,” but they “consolidated their rule through the violent sacrifice of many more Naga lives than had been required by the nonstate economy of soul force” (20). As an aside, I might add that, under the British dispensation, the abolition of sati, the immolation of widows, was to the plains what the abolition of headhunting was to the hills: varieties of the colonial discourse on cannibalism, one might say.

            So far so good. Banerjee and Wouters have established that one cannot speak of a Naga state, and thus one cannot speak of linguistic unity or comparatively centralized forms of communication: as they elaborate, in the Naga world, “language varied from village to village, and often across khels (wards) within the same village. There was no uniform grammar, script, epic, or song that would transcend village frontiers and connect multiple localities” (18). In this observation lie the seeds of a more radical argument that they, and everyone else, might wish to disavow but which, from my standpoint, must be pursued vigorously if one is to seek the grounds for a more just world. Just how did these villages communicate with each other? Or did they communicate at all? They seem to have done well enough without a common or uniform grammar, epic, and so on: here is the very antithesis of the modern nation-state, which cannot be wrought except through force and bloodshed, except through forcible homogenization typified by the flag, the national anthem, the school system, and much else. Even more pointedly, pluralism thrives when there is less of the so-called dialogue or exchange that has characterized the modern world: in the present conditions of gross inequality, massive disequilibrium of power, and a wholly skewed political economy of knowledge production that has rendered the universities in the United States and the West the paragons of knowledge, we should strive for less rather than more dialogue and exchange. This pervasive idea of more dialogue across cultures and nations is one of the supreme and nearly unquestioned liberal shibboleths. All such dialogue is an invitation to smaller communities to surrender the little autonomy that they have.

            Thirdly, speaking as a historian, some of Banerjee and Wouters’s judgments on the Indian past are questionable. For example: “Agrarian Indian militancy, embodied in fierce and continuous rebellions from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century,” they write, “has been the single biggest factor responsible for the collapse of the Raj” (28). There is but one word for such a claim: preposterous. This is what comes of reading Ranajit Guha’s Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India uncritically, though the initiator of the Subaltern Studies Collective was himself a little too giddy in thinking of the revolts of subaltern classes. Guha’s book is doubtless a magisterial work of history, but one might be forgiven for thinking that all subalterns do is revolt, when in fact the preponderant portion of their lives was spent in toiling on the soil, sleeping, eating, and carrying out those mundane chores that take up much of our lives. There is, of course, a history of mass movements that we need to be aware of, but what surprises is just how little agrarian militancy there was in colonial India. As one savant put it, the question is not why men revolt, but rather why they do not revolt.

            Banerjee and Wouters take such liberties often. We are assured, and they offer this remark as a parenthetical aside, perhaps in the hope that it will elicit little attention, that there “would be no Gandhi or Tagore without the forgotten Dalit-Bahujan-Adivasi villagers of India, whose consciousness—about nonviolence towards beings, about the commonness of the divine—they publicized” (119). I will largely ignore, though it is not without grave problems, the ease with which they, much like many modern commentators, think of the Dalit-Bahujan-Adivasi as a complex: there are acute internal differences, and of course subalternity is a relational concept, particularly in India where, no matter how far down one is on the ladder, one is adept at finding someone who is still lower. Moreover, in colonial India, the Dalits and Bahujans (neither term was very much in use then) were treated as part of the “caste” complex, whereas the Adivasis were dealt with differently, and I should say more brutally, as part of the “tribal” complex towards which the British had a purely extractive relationship. My objection here is to their claims about just exactly what it is that both Tagore and Gandhi imbibed with regard to the notion of ahimsa from their respectively long associations with Indian villagers. It is true, and I have often written on this, that Tagore entertained capacious ideas about the Indian villagers’ adherence to the idea of dharma, an idea that, in his thinking, made it possible for villagers to be uncommonly hospitable to the other.^[1] We may also concur with the notion that Gandhi harbored, to use an expression once shared with me by the late Sunderlal Bahuguna, that “Bharat ki atma gaon mein hain’” (“The soul of India resides in its villages”). But both Tagore and Gandhi had a far more complex relationship with Indian villagers than is suggested by our authors. Indeed, contrary to the common dismissal of Gandhi as someone who rather foolishly sought to “take back” India to the villages, he unhesitatingly described the Indian village, which he knew better than any of his contemporaries on the national stage, as a “dung heap.” The nonviolence of the weak, moreover, is no nonviolence—this is a cardinal concept of Gandhi’s worldview.

            Further, Banerjee and Wouters’s discussion of being rooted and rootlessness is unsatisfactory in the extreme (120-21). The critique is carried out in a section that tellingly bears the title, “Enough of ‘Postmodern’ Suspicion of Being” (54-56), though their articulation of what it means to be either “rooted” or “rootless” is inked everywhere in the book. One sees here the common Marxist suspicion of postmodernism as corrosively anti-foundational: among Indian Marxist scholars, Sumit Sarkar, who signaled his departure from the Subaltern Studies Collective with a polemic against the Saidian framework, and Achin Vanaik readily come to mind as critics who had had “enough” of postmodernism and a culture of “rejection.” Many others, including Lyotard and Derrida, are but cannon fodder for our authors, but they reserve their greatest ire for Deleuze and Guattari for their “glib championing of the rhizomatic society against the rooted one” (56). One could say that this leads them to an excess—well, another idea deriving from the diseased postmodern condition—for how else is one to understand the claim that “settler colonialism of the American frontier” is being “celebrated” as a “model of the rhizomatic society” against the rootedness of Native Americans, Maori peoples, Indigenous Hawaiians, Adivasi and Dalit communities, Kashmiris, Palestinians, Kurds, Uyghurs, Nagas, and Tibetans” (56). What follows is altogether predictable: “The celebration of the rhizome is an apologia for the rootlessness of capital.” The purported rootlessness of capital is the very condition of its rootedness in every ideology that opposes capital: the poor are but those who either do not have the capacity, or have not yet learnt, to be good consumers. But that is perhaps too wicked an argument—besides being one that celebrates the onward march of capital against Being. There is merit in their argument that the experience of European history too often serves as the template for the work that has emanated from European theorists, but the authors would need a more sustained critique than is on offer of the politics of knowledge systems to carry the day. But I am animated by another thought: what the authors describe as the opposition of the rooted to the rootless, which they mistakenly attribute only to the experience of “post-Holocaust, postwar Europe,” can be more fruitfully thought of as the opposition of the moved to the unmoved. More people are displaced today than at any point in the past; the condition of being on the move is preeminently the modern condition. By a curious twist of fate, or perhaps not, the moved remain unmoved by the sufferings of others; and it is the moved who are called to bear the sufferings of the unmoved upon their shoulders.

            Lastly, it is surely a matter of some concern how some of the ideas voiced by Banerjee and Wouters effortlessly feed into and conform to militant Hindu nationalist ideology. It seems wholly unreasonable, given the tenor of their work, to suppose that they have any brief on behalf of Hindu ideologues. Nevertheless, their oft-repeated pronouncement about the pre-colonial indigenous roots of democracy must be, if the cliché may be excused, music to the ears of Hindu nationalists. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has on more than one occasion pronounced with great pomposity that Bharat “is the mother of all democracies” and thus Vishwaguru, “Guru to the World,” and the Indian middle class and the country’s gargantuan army of trolls who have embraced Modi as a modern-day Vishwaguru leviathan are wholly convinced that India has nothing to learn from any other country. Not, perhaps, coincidentally, al-Biruni had quite the same impression a thousand years ago when he wrote of the Hindus that “according to their belief, there is no other country on earth but theirs, no other race of man but theirs, and no created beings besides them have any knowledge or science whatsoever” (Sachau 6). One would have hoped for some self-reflexivity on the part of Banerjee and Wouters, or, to deploy a key idea of Indian philosophical reasoning, some demonstration of their intent to adhere to the purvapaksa. The fact that their assessment is not partial to India may give them some reprieve: the “acephalous polities in Aboriginal Australia and the Indigenous Americas,” alongside “ancient Indian gana polities and Greek city-states,” not to mention scores of Dalit-Bahujan and Adivasis communities, are all equally summoned as instances of “participatory democracy” (60-61). This flattening is characteristic of some of Banerjee and Wouters’s scholarship: what relationship the development of democracy in the Greek world had to the presence of a large number of helots aside, there is ample evidence to suggest that pre-modern democratic polities, if one wants to call them such, could at the same time be deeply hierarchical. That should not surprise us in the least, not if the modern democracies on witness offer any insight into this matter.

            In closing, let me first return briefly to their discussion of the Naga worldview. As I have pointed out, I do not agree with the criticism that has been voiced of their understanding of Naga society, and it is possible to share the sentiment they have expressed in speaking of the “Naga grammar of assembly and agreement making that can provide us a pathway to overcome state and capital” (68). And it is also true they sometimes moderate their enthusiasm, as in their acknowledgment that the Naga world “contains a majestic grammar of democracy that can transform our world, if the flaws can be overcome” (73). That they have the temerity to invoke the examples of Naga, Bhutanese, or Mizoram societies as praxis-generating entities is what makes their intervention so laudable and an advance, not merely an incremental one, on the project known as Subaltern Studies. The global South is not merely a field to be mined by the mind of the West. The South can generate theory, it can generate transformative practices that long preceded what in the academy is fetishized as theory– practices of community, practices that allowed for animal democracy and fungal democracy, for the coexistence of human and non-human species, and so on. Some, in thinking of this present juncture, would like to speak of the Capitalocene; others are struck by the Necrocene; and still others are now gravitating towards the Anthropocene. Meanwhile, the world is hurtling forward, in all domains of life, towards the Obscene. We are all increasingly engulfed by the obscenities that mark the modern: the dehumanization of countless lives, and that too after several hundred years in the aftermath of what is called the Enlightenment; the ravenous, famine-inducing appetite for riches; the immeasurable and still growing gap between the haves and the have-nots; the loss of tens of thousands of nonhuman species; the merciless assault on the notion of the commons; the utter debasement of language; and what not. The “Age of Enlightenment” as the now old-fashioned historians put it had a love for the encyclopedia. Our present-day scholars and savants should now put together an encyclopedia of the Obscene. It is to of the credit of the authors that they are, to borrow a thought from Marx and expropriate the expropriators, perhaps the unwitting agents in making us think of the Age of the Obscene.

Reflections on Subaltern Studies 2.0
Adriana Michele Campos Johnson

The first words of Subaltern Studies 2.0: Being Against the Capitalocene (2022) are “Who Speaks?” Speech speaks in community and in assembly, is the answer. Subaltern Studies 2.0 is such assembly, a gathering of words that will include Naga elders, Bhutanese herders and yaks, Greek and Roman seers, Indian poets, cranes, and fungi (1-2). Milinda Banerjee and Jelle Wouters offer in this way a rejoinder to Spivak’s famed “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and a clue to their very different starting point. In the place of the vernacular insurgencies of communities in India that figured as the starting point for the theoretical reflection of the original subaltern studies project, this volume calls for heterogeneous social coalitions between the human and nonhuman in order to “overcome state and capital and revitalize being” (3). This project is said to be a new anticolonial struggle, an effort to complete what has only been a partial decolonization thus far, and it proceeds from the assumption that alternatives already exist, have always existed, in revolutionary communities as well as in other species. It is a matter of recognizing and hearing that which might otherwise register as noise. The book moves first through an inventory of what needs to be undone­—to understand the failures of certain knowledge formations such as history, anthropology, and Marxism, to dismantle the modern sovereign state form, to overthrow capital, to reverse the exile that has relegated nonhuman beings to unbeing, to counter abstraction, hierarchy and inequality—and then shifts into alternate ways of imagining being, community, connection and politics that already exist in subaltern actors (like the Naga), animals, plant and fungal life.

The difference in genre, the 2.0 that signals a reboot, the different relation to language and to words, might be said to change everything. Subaltern Studies 2.0 calls itself a pamphlet. It lays claim to a minor genre, one that circulates in a public sphere and intends to mobilize political affects. Indeed, the text is as clear-sighted as the original Subaltern Studies historians on the provincialism of genre, the way reality has been cramped into certain formal rules of recognition and plausibility. Under capitalism, it says, “The Jakata is regarded as fable, Virgil reduced to a work of literature. Species reality becomes myth” (106). To some extent the book strives to reverse this: to transform what seems fable, literature, myth into realism, into what may be possible. The deliberate torsion of words, the creative re-use of language in what is both a poetic and political project is one the more generative aspects of the text and produces some startling connections: “Human woman clean bovine women with water, anoint their horns with oil” (141); “Plantation agriculture is multispecies slavery” (142); “Animism is rooted nomadism” (147); “A supermarket is a morgue” (106). As evident here, the fundamental speech act in the book is a declarative mode. It affirms, commands, acclaims, conjures. Like a manifesto, like “bards singing about war” (3). Thus: “Nomadism is the original nomos” (136); “The yak polity must be decolonized” (152); “Avianize territory” (134); “Humans shall vegetalize” (148); “Reanimalize the map” (134).

The effort of conjuring into being new realities is tied to a project to excavate and resurface buried and silenced knowledges, to gather them back into the chorus. One of the most interesting of these is the recounting of older intellectual traditions that recognized different social organizations and politics among animals (the behavior of wolf packs, bee colonies, or friendships among birds). In Indian languages, write Banerjee and Wouters, “There is no linguistic sense that animals have a different social form than humans” (104); words like “collectivity” and “leader” are used both for humans and for animals. In English, in contrast, if a word like “herd” is used for humans it is only done so disparagingly. Subaltern Studies 2.0 considers traditions (such as manuals of statecraft in India) where the behavior of animals was observed in great detail and used to elaborate political conclusions, for both democratic as well as more hierarchical forms: “understanding the political functioning of elephant collectives . . . [both the leaders and those that are expelled] . . . lay at the heart of human monarchic military state building” (96). The book proposes in this sense not just a new way of doing politics that would integrate animal kin, but a recognition that the observation of animal behavior and practices is infrastructural to political theory, baked into early conjectures around collective behavior and forms of power, such that humans and animals can be understood as essentially co-creating politics. Not only is this genealogy or relationship largely forgotten in Western political theory, but to the extent that this study of animal socialities by humans was often intended to better manage them (think beekeepers, herders, fisherman), the colonization of animal politics could be considered the first imperialism. Capitalism then “transforms animals from political actors to commodities. . . . Only in this landscape can the political be thought of as a human monopoly, a transition from animal nature to human polity” (106).

In her own response to the volume, “The Next Steps: A Preface,” Gayatri Spivak characterizes the book as a rewriting of the work of the Southeast Asian Subaltern Studies Working Group. That is, there is a fundamental break, and not just an updating at stake. Banerjee and Wouters state that: “We draw from the Subaltern Studies tradition the central insight that community offers our best chance to resist state and capital” (4). But this is hardly an insight exclusive to Subaltern Studies, much less their central insight. The lesson I learned from Subaltern Studies was not just that alternate and rebellious forms of sociality manifest in peasant insurgencies under the British colonial state and after—not just a triumphant claim that the subaltern can resist state and capital—but the thorny questions of intelligibility and how such rebellions were being translated into other terms. The starting point, after all, is a critique of the way Marxist historians were reading such rebellions, according to an unquestioned matrix (including certain notions of agency and political consciousness), and how this produces fundamental misreadings of what was happening even as it excludes peasant rebels as subjects conscious of their own history, incorporating them as contingent elements in another history with another transcendental ideal subject (Worker and Peasant). Spivak’s point is not that the subaltern cannot speak, but that there is no structure of reception in place for such speech acts.

Subalternity is a category marked by negativity: it is the negation of an imposed identity, marked by falsification and distortion, in Ranajit Guha’s words. As it was developed by the Subaltern Studies historians, subalternity manifests as a semiotic break (a rebellion), but one in which peasants speak in a “borrowed language”: violating the semiotic code of power (Elementary Aspects 36). As Guha points out, one only has access to subalternity through a prose of counterinsurgency, hence the need to read it as a “writing in reverse” (Elementary Aspects 333). One has to read it, in other words, with an ear attuned to the places where intelligibility and sense strained under challenge or pressure and to understand that there was something beyond or outside, that doesn’t fit the categories, optics, or languages being used to grasp the phenomena.

In reading the book, I couldn’t help thinking of Spivak’s critique of the interview with Foucault and Deleuze in which they seem to unproblematically express what workers, delinquents, and prisoners want and say. In saying that “the masses know perfectly well, clearly,” Foucault and Deleuze are making a claim about what the speaking subaltern is: they are speaking for them; hence Spivak’s remark that “[t]he ventriloquism of the speaking subaltern is the left intellectual’s stock-in-trade” (Critique 265). Banerjee and Wouters write, for example: “Some yaks emit a special grunt to communicate with other yaks and disseminate insubordination. Often, yaks organize into a collective hard gaze, directed toward cruel herders” (150). Spivak’s point is that such comments erase the question of representation. To enchain words as a gathering or chorus, as emitted simultaneously, forgets the temporality of the relay race, the question of how transmission occurs, and the disjunction lodged within.

The erasure of time and what some want to call historicity is there too in the reaching towards a reversing which is also an unforgetting: “Truth is unforgetting, reversing the great oblivion that has made us forget what our ancestors knew” (5). The emphasis on unforgetting and reversing, a turning back of the clock, is also an erasure of everything that came in between, like a return to an original text as if there had never been a translation. And too: “We shall remember and globalize the animist social contract” (144). But what kind of remembering is this and what might be lost in it? I keenly felt the absence of the negativity—the probing of limits to intelligibility—that was so central to the Subaltern Studies project.

For this reason, I appreciate Marisol de la Cadena’s response to the volume, “The Gift of the Anthropo-Not-Seen,” because she brings together what is valuable in the intellectual and speculative challenges posed by the volume precisely with the question of negativity, limits, excess, and language. In earlier work, “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections Beyond ‘Politics,’” de la Cadena posits the idea of an “indigenous-mestizo aggregate” that is, borrowing words from Marilyn Strathern, “neither singular nor plural, neither one nor many, a circuit of connections rather than joint parts” (348, 347). De la Cadena characterizes the very notion of “indigeneity” as emerging through collaborative friction with practices and institutions other than itself. Indigeneity is a result of colonization. There is no “pure indigenous person,” therefore, as it is a category created by European expansion and one that remains partially connected to nation-state formations. Still, although indigeneity appears on the public stage through discourses such as class/ethnicity/confrontation with neoliberalism, it also exceeds such discourses to the extent that it includes “other than humans.” De la Cadena wants to think a pluriverse, but one that is constituted by a fractured, fragmented, or fractal set of relations. It is something other than a simple commons, because partial connections create no single entity; or “the entity that results,” de la Cadena writes, “is more than one, yet less than two” (347).

One of the sites of partial connections between the more than one and less than two is the notion of “equivocation” that de la Cadena takes from Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. In equivocation, homonymic terms refer to things that are not the same. “Water” or “agua” are seemingly equivalent to Quechua or Yanomami words, and as such they allow for conversation, for partial connections to happen. But ultimately the terms (yaku, water, agua) do not refer to the same thing. There is no singular thing in the world that simply has two names in different languages. Why? Because in one of those languages it is something other than H2O. De la Cadena cites Viveiros de Castro, writing that equivocation “is not a simple failure to understand, but ‘a failure to understand that understandings are necessarily not the same, and that they are not related to imaginary ways of “seeing the world” but to the real worlds that are being seen. . . . [R]ather than different views of a single world . . . a view of different worlds becomes apparent’” (350-51; de la Cadena’s emphasis). Verisimilitude or resemblance functions as a juncture, but also partly conceals the gap.

This fissure can be seen in the words of Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa, cited both by de la Cadena as well as Banerjee and Wouters. In the “written/spoken textual duet” Kopenawa produces with anthropologist Bruce Albert (The Falling Sky 446), he notes that he does not like the word “environment” and that, for the Yanomami, “what the white people refer to in this way is what remains of the forest and land that were hurt by their machines. It is what remains of everything they have destroyed so far” (397). Environment may approximate what the Yanomami call “forest,” but it is a fundamentally different phenomenon, a broken or severed thing. Kopenawa also says: “What the white people call ‘minerals’ are the fragments of the sky, moon, sun, and stars, which fell down in the beginning of time” (283). Although the word “mineral” may function as a connector and allow a Yanomami and white Brazilian to point to the same gold nuggets in a riverbed, there is more than one thing being indicated by that partial designation. One may say that in Guha’s analysis of peasant rebellions, the terms “peasant” and “rebellion” are also equivocations.

But relation coexists with the gaps between worlds. Upon seeing the Eiffel Tower, in a passage that Latinamericanists might want to call a reverse transculturation, Kopenawa finds it similar to the image of a spirit house:

[T]he people of the place must tell themselves: “Ha! How rich and clever we must be to have built such a beautiful thing!” That’s all. No one thinks beyond that. Yet though no one knows it, this construction is in every way similar to the image of our xapiri’s houses, surrounded by a multitude of paths of light. It is true! This sparkling brightness is that of the spirits’ metal. The white people of this land must have captured the light of the Yãpirari lightning beings to enclose it in this antenna. As I looked at it, I told myself: “Hou! These outsiders do not know the spirits’ words, but they imitated their houses without even realizing it!” It baffled me. Yet despite the resemblance, the light from this house of iron light seemed lifeless. It was without resonance. If it were alive like a real spirit house, the vibrant songs of its occupants would unceasingly burst out of it. (344)

This passage is a lesson in more than one and less than two: “spirit” is not really “xapiri” just as “light” and “lightning” are not really light, and lightning and the Eiffel Tower is not really a spirit house: what Kopenawa considers the lack of resonance and resemblance marks the distance between heterogeneous worlds. Yet those very words are also partial connectors, a place for touching, just as “the outsiders . . . imitated their houses without even realizing it.”

Like Banerjee and Wouters, Kopenawa denounces the avalanche of violence and destruction wrought upon the world by white modernity. But Banerjee and Wouters lay out a reversed world–which is also a non-world–in which the elimination of capitalism and the state would eliminate antagonism, conflict, negativity and inequality. Their manifesto is also a prayer, calling into imagination and being the possibility of a plurality of human and nonhuman beings “rooted in unity in Being” (117) governed by duty, care, and joyful hospitality to other beings, like roots and fungi that “cling to each other, cooperating and nourishing together” (115). To say that “Humans will co-create vegetal politics with plant, with plant well-being co-determining public policy” (122) so that “each being shall find their roots in another” (122) is to redefine what politics and public policy can mean, and to achieve in some measure the cognitive estrangement of fable or science fiction. But their words have the quality of declarations, where things mean what they say, and where there is no room for excess or non-coincidence, for impossible or encrypted meanings, for mistranslations or equivocations. A world as flat as paper.

Kopenawa’s words, on the other hand, reach us like a fragile junction between partially connected worlds, traversed by difference, opacity, and an elsewhere behind it. Epidemic beings, like the xawarari, he tells us,

[C]ook their dismembered prey’s bodies in big metal basins, like a pile of spider monkeys, sprinkling them with boiling oil. This is what makes us burn with fever! Finally, they store this cooked human flesh in big metal cases to eat them later. In this way they prepare a great number of human meat cans, like the white people do with their fish and their beef. Later, when they start to lack victuals, they send their employees to hunt new victims among us: “Go get me nice and fat human children! I am so hungry! I would happily eat a leg!” (292)

A Failed Manifesto
Richard Pithouse

Frantz Fanon observes that colonialism “dehumanizes the colonized. Strictly speaking, it animalizes him” (Les Damnés [2002] 45, my trans.). As this review is being written, people in Gaza are being referred to as “human animals” while being subjected to murderous assault by the Israeli military, backed in various ways by the major Western powers.

            The line between the human and the animal is not only deliberately blurred or undone by colonial ideology. This ideological maneuver has an ancient, enduring, and promiscuous history and was as available to the Interahamwe as to the Nazis. Nonetheless, excluding racialized people from the full count of the human via animalizing discourses has always been central to colonial ideology. In the Cape, the organized mass murder of the people now known by two unsatisfactory terms, “Bushmen” and “San,” largely perpetrated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was, in part, legitimated by referring to people as “schepsels” (“creatures” in Dutch).   

The last permit to hunt “Bushmen” was issued in Pretoria in 1936, but by the 1950s the white South African writer Laurens van der Post was winning great acclaim, including within mainstream white South Africa, for his significantly fabricated writings presenting the “Bushmen” in the now standard tropes of Hollywood films, New Age cults, and self-optimization and health podcasts in which people determined to be indigenous are revered while remaining oppressed. A central element of these tropes is that people determined to be indigenous are remnants of the few humans deemed to have escaped the fall from a primordial relation to nature and understood as simultaneously innocent and wise, as chronologically in this time but ontologically out of it while carrying important and often ultimately redemptive lessons for those deemed fully of this time. For Van der Post, and many more to come, we—modern people living after the fall—have much to learn from this wisdom. This can range from having one’s first meal later in the day to trying in some ultimately ineffable way to spiritualize the natural world and reanimate our being. Fanon would not have been surprised by Van der Post, or by his reception among many white people as a guru. After all, Fanon writes, noting the attitude of “metropolitan anthropologists and experts,” it is the colonialists who “rush to the rescue of indigenous traditions” (Wretched [2004] 175).

            In 1980, The Gods Must Be Crazy, an entirely racist film about “Bushmen” in the Kalahari intended to be comic for white audiences, was a massive success in white South Africa. It repeated some of the standard themes important to the way “Bushmen” had come to be understood in the white world in South Africa and elsewhere, including the understanding that they were part of the natural world in a way that other humans were not. They were depicted as wholly non-threatening to white supremacy, while guerrillas understood to be of Bantu descent were demonized. A year or two later the oil company Shell ran a promotion in South Africa that gave motorists a book for children in which cards, with photographs of African animals collected at Shell garages, were to be pasted in the appropriate places. The cards were referred to as “animal cards.” The photograph on one those cards was not that of an animal; it was of a person, a “Bushman.”

            White attitudes had shifted from genocidal desires to, after an effective genocide, desires to “preserve” and learn from what was thought to be an “ancient” way of life. Although the meaning ascribed to the idea that “Bushmen” are part of the natural world in a way that other people are not had changed, the idea itself endured. These kinds of continuities require very careful thought, something that is absent in Milinda Banerjee and Jelle Wouters’s manifesto, in which indigeneity and the idea of a set of falls from primordial being are central but never fully defined or examined concepts. There is no attempt to make sense of the points at which their conception of the indigenous intersects with that of a figure like Van der Post, and a set of views common among white people around the world. Of course, they are not obligated to accept Fanon’s modernism, but simply ignoring what to some readers may seem like echoes of key colonial tropes in their own work seems rash.

            They also fail to offer a clear sense of who is to be counted as indigenous. This question may be clear in Australasia and the Americas where the basis for who counts as indigenous and who does not is clear. This is not the case in South Africa, where dominant conceptions place a person who claims Khoi or “Bushman” descent as “indigenous” but exclude a Zulu or Xhosa person deemed to be of Bantu descent. The migration of Bantu people to what is now South Africa, thought to have begun around 300AD, is hardly the same thing as the arrival of European settlers in Australia in 1788. Across Africa the term indigenous tends to refer to minorities such as the Basarwa in Botswana or the Batwa in the Congo while excluding most people. Some sort of conceptual clarification is required, but this is not provided by Banerjee and Wouters.

            The idea that white people and other elites in terms of class, race, caste, etc., can be ontologically enriched by learning from often materially dispossessed and politically oppressed people deemed to be indigenous does not generally include the view that those who should learn from others understood to have a more “primordial” relation to the natural world should abandon their privileged place in colonial and capitalist modernity. Health and self-optimization podcasts, with their breathless claims about the wonders of “African tribes” (“They don’t have smart phones!”) do not call for the overthrow of global capitalism or reparations from colonial states.

            Banerjee and Wouters radically divert from the views that have a degree of genealogical entanglement with the sort of ideas made famous by Van der Post in that they call for some sort of absolute revolution which, following indigenous examples, undoes the line between the animal and the human and establishes a global interspecies democracy, marked by a new and magnificent plenitude of being. This revolution is overwhelmingly understood in ontological rather than political terms, with exclamation marks (‘Being!’) that substitute for conceptual clarity. This places the manifesto in the broader turn from politics to ontology that includes new schools of thought such as Afro-pessimism and some forms of decoloniality. It generally lacks any credible sense of the political, of the actual mechanisms of building alliances and power. The few scattered and always trite lines here and there asserting the need to connect different forms of politics do not do the required work.

            The problems that arise from the sublimated religiosity that so often marks the ecstatic substitution of ontology for politics extend beyond an incoherent conception of being. In a manner that is in some respects analogous to the way that the idea of social death has been reworked by Afro-pessimism, a complete annihilation of being is summarily declared, although in this case it is announced for the rich and powerful, the people whose lives have not been devastated in material terms by the accumulated weight of colonialism, racial capitalism, and imperialism, people who are not politically oppressed. Here it is the people who are among the most oppressed who will restore the vitality of being of those from the dominant groups. The many Black critiques of white fantasies about the redemptive ontological possibilities imagined to be offered by the consumption of Black culture are not noted.

            There are many problems with all this. One is that while bullshit jobs, crap TV, mindless scrolling, stultifying education, afternoons at the mall, and much more are all dispiriting and depressing, we are hardly ontologically dead when experiencing recognition by a lover, the birth of a child, driving into the sunrise, listening to great music, hearing a snatch of an anodyne but seductive pop song on the radio, reading Mahmoud Darwish or—as Darwish often affirms in the midst of catastrophe—taking our morning coffee. No humans are entirely ontologically dead, nor is ecstatic plenitude at the level of being possible outside of certain moments in certain situations. Another is that forms of radical theory that—like that of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in the conclusion to Empire—promise dissidents from among the dominating classes who identify with the oppressed unimaginable ontological wealth inevitably end up producing ontologically predatory forms of politics. It never ends well when people from the dominant classes expect oppressed people to renew their being in mystical and wonderful ways. All forms of politics that offer people from the dominant classes ontological pleasures or even redemption from the dominated classes must, without exception, be opposed.

            Of course, Banerjee and Wouters are right to reject the idea that the people and polities they discuss are, in Eric Hobsbawm’s phrase, “prepolitical,” and of course there are things that can be learned from all people, polities, and cosmologies. It should be equally obvious that everyone living in the present is of the present and that we must wholly abandon the idea that some people have a greater claim to the present than others. It is also clear that people living in the territories that became settler colonies have urgent and entirely legitimate political claims to all kinds of restitution. It is a plain fact that understandings of the natural world with pre-colonial origins can, as with the idea of Pachamama in Bolivia, become powerful and productive political ideas and material forces. But where does the claim, even if implicit, that largely rural people deemed to be indigenous have a special claim on the politics of the future leave, say, African Americans, Africans not deemed indigenous, or the huge proportion of impoverished humanity living in often very cosmopolitan shanty towns? In several countries in the Global South, these shanty towns are very significant sites of political innovation and, at times, popular counter-power.

            The ideas that are brought into these kinds of politics are frequently hybrid. They can simultaneously draw on pre-colonial ideas and practices, Marxism, and liberal ideas of rights. A dogmatically Eurocentric view of the political that sees precolonial ideas and practices as “prepolitical” is wholly inadequate to making sense of this. Here we could, at a stretch, suggest that Banerjee and Wouters’s insistence that ideas with precolonial roots can be important has value, but the point has been made much better by others, including Fanon and many Latin American theorists. And when they go beyond productive metaphors, such as, arguably, talking about animal politics, and speak of things like python collectives and assemblies, the abandonment of reason takes us onto the terrain of farce and undermines this important point.

            In some parts of the world, including Haiti and South Africa, popular urban politics is often fundamentally centered on a defiant affirmation of a universal humanism. In Haiti the declaration “Tout moun se moun” (sometimes translated as “Every person is a human being”) has long been an axiom around which popular politics is organized. Very similar declarations are made in South Africa, and it is common for people to assert a claim on humanity by explicitly rejecting animalization, making statements such as “We are human beings, not dogs.” There is, of course, a long history of an affirmation of humanity in the wider Black radical tradition, and many of its leading thinkers are radical humanists. If one wishes to make an argument for abandoning humanism and breaking down the separation between the animal and human, it needs to be done with an awareness of all this, and with great care. Certainly, if people are to be presented as close to animals, or part of an animal world, we should start with people whose humanity has never been in question, and not with those for whom it has long been in question.

            It is simply irresponsible to write, in rapturous terms, about borders being opened to animal migrations without noting that in Africa “trans-frontier” parks have led to Western-funded militarized violence against people living in or adjacent to these parks. It is careless to talk about rewilding without addressing the fact that the idea of reintroducing bears and wolves to England is seen as outrageous while Africans who do not wish to live with dangerous predators are criminalized and subject to organized violence.

            Manifestos are not required to have the same standards of evidence, argument, or nuance as other kinds of texts. And although the attempt at poeticism in this manifesto fails (Banerjee and Wouters do not have the poetic gifts of, say, Aimé Césaire), some latitude can be granted on the question of style. Nonetheless, the fact that a text is written in the genre of the manifesto does not mean that everything is permitted. This manifesto does not just largely leave out the well more than a billion people (some figures are much higher) living on occupied land in the cities of the Global South. It does not just leave out workers in Chinese factories. As Gayatri Spivak notes, it uses claims about South Asia to issues global declarations. It follows so many texts produced from within the Euro-American academy in largely leaving out Africa. It does not engage seriously with Latin America, the one part of the world where political claims made in part in the name of indigeneity have accumulated enough power to mount sustained and at times effective challenges to states and capital. This parochialism is wholly unacceptable. A proper examination of Bolivia would be essential for a credible political manifesto for the future that centers indigeneity.

            A manifesto that announces a new global politics must be global. A manifesto that announces a new politics must have a clear sense of the political. A manifesto that announces an end to the separation between the animal and the human must address the long and ongoing history of the ways colonized and other oppressed people have been animalized, excluded in full or in part from the count of the human. It must also address the fact that oppressed people have built and sustained movements in the face of murderous repression in the name of the human.

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Works Cited

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­–––. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. U of Chicago P, 2000.

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–––. “Orientalist Constructions of India.” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 20, no. 3, 1986, pp. 401-46.

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Lal, Vinay. “India and the Challenge of the Global South: Some Thoughts on Pluralism, the Categories of Knowledge, and Hospitality.” India and Civilizational Futures: Backwaters Collective on Metaphysics and Politics II, edited by Vinay Lal, Oxford UP, 2019, pp. 1-32.

Sachau, Edward C., editor. Alberuni’s India: An Account of the Religion, Philosophy, Literature, Chronology, Astronomy, Customs, Laws, and Astrology of India about A.D. 1030. Trubner & Co., 1888; reprint ed., Rupa & Co., 2002.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Harvard UP, 1999.

Notes

^[1] See, for example, my “India and the Challenge of the Global South.”