Rashmi Varma

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, “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 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.

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: 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 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 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.

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 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 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.

Among the many resonant concepts and critical terms that Benita Parry evokes very powerfully in her work is that of " broken histories. " Even though it is not a term that she explores in any specific detail, its power is felt throughout her writings on the traumatic impact of colonialism on the lives of the colonized. For Parry, the subjects of these broken histories include " indigenous peoples subjugated, alienated and ultimately exterminated by early colonial conquest, African slaves sold to the new world " as well as " East Indian and Chinese indentured labour on the plantations " (2009, 33). As she suggests, the histories of these conquered people have not merely been interrupted by the violent force of colonialism, but have actually been torn asunder, broken apart. But if for Parry such a shattering of the histories of the colonized is one of the key effects of colonial violence, this does not imply that history itself constitutes an unbroken continuum— such thinking would be at odds with the historical materialist method that informs her entire body of work. But by way of Parry we understand that colonial violence is not only a force that vanquishes, annihilates, reduces to rubble a swathe of indigenous economies and cultures, but that it renders the colonized as passive subjects of history-making, splitting apart the relationship between history and agency. It thus also produces broken subjects of history, those thrown adrift or mutilated by the forces of colonial violence that engulf colonized spaces.

This essay elaborates upon the idea of what I call the " dissenting histories " of feminism and anti-imperialism. It aims to situate their historical trajectories within the contemporary political crises faced by both feminism and anti-imperialism. The most recent crisis (in a series of moments of disruption and rupture) seems to have been precipitated by the 9/11 attacks by Al Qaida on the World Trade Center buildings in New York City and the subsequent unleashing of the " war on terror, " as well as the ongoing war in Syria and a more generalized global turn toward populist authoritarianism. The global financial crisis of 2008 that for a while seemed to threaten the very foundations of the neoliberal order in the world has further challenged the projects of feminism and anti-imperialism as austerity and the evisceration of welfare have become common sense in country after country. Although both feminism and anti-imperialism have historically constituted themselves as projects of liberation, questions concerning liberation from what and toward what ends have been key to what has sometimes been a convergence, but also often involved separation and dissension. Specifically in this essay I identify four critical moments of simultaneous convergence and dissension where the concept of anti-imperialism came to constitute an important analytical resource for feminism and feminism challenged the limits of anti-imperialism: (1) what I call " the feminist international " of the first half of the twentieth century leading up to (2) decolonization and the establishment of postcolonial states. I then consider (3) the articulation of anti-imperialism by diasporic black feminists as part of the civil rights and second-wave women's movements in the West, and conclude with (4) the more recent formulations of anti-imperialism that have emerged among sections of the feminist Left, post-9/11, and the subsequent US-UK-led illegal invasion of Iraq. These more contemporary articulations of anti-imperialism, I will argue, do not do justice to the revolutionary aims of earlier anti-imperialist and Third World solidarity projects articulated through such fora as the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) launched in Bandung in 1955, and the more revolutionary formations such as the Tricontinental, the 1966 Solidarity Conference of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America held in Havana, Cuba. 1 In fact, I argue in conclusion that this last moment rolls back the many significant gains that were made in those earlier decades by anti-imperialist feminists, a decline that meshes with the more general diminishing of the Third World 9781350032385_pi-490.indd 463 9781350032385_pi-490.indd 463

... The article concludes with a reading of a literary text, Shashi Deshpande's That Long Silence, as an instance of a thoughtful artistic response to the ruptures within women's private and political identities precipitated by postcolonial urbanism. ...

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 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 ...