Re-Assembly: Popular Politics, Mediation, and the Grammar of Repair

Session 1: Access

“Vivisect and Reassemble: Popular Politics in the Age of Overdevelopment”
Joshua Neves, Concordia University

If the original Subaltern-Popular Workshop (2004-2009) powerfully argued for a “new analytic of the popular” vis-à-vis subalternity, the present moment asks that we take up the reverse proposition. This matters because while the popular has been revitalized by a generation of engagements with globalization, networked technologies, populisms, and much else (per this cfp: “it has become an occupying force”), attention to subaltern politics and mediations have waned (now the recognizable product of state machinations). Taking up these concerns, this talk starts from the premise that understandings of the subaltern-popular remain too tightly bound to colonial imaginaries and attendant models of (under)development. Building on canonical and recent debates, I consider the subaltern-popular politics in the age of overdevelopment. Among many salient shifts (e.g., the rise of compulsory representation), this includes tracing how contemporary technocapitalism – and its unique forms of extraction, value creation, and aspiration – pose new problems and possibilities for re-animating the “politics of the people”.

“Imperfecto Assembly: Harry Gamboa Jr. and Public Access TV”
George Flaherty, University of Texas, Austin

At the end of 1982, East Los Angeles-based multimedia artist Harry Gamboa Jr. shot and edited his first narrative video work, Imperfecto, using equipment from a local public access cable television facility. The video was broadcast the following year and featured Humberto Sandoval, a sometime collaborator in Chicanx performance group Asco, as a “schizophrenic street preacher,” a peripatetic seeker of “the TRUTH!” among apathetic family, friends, and strangers. Sandoval’s journey is circuitous, recursive, and ultimately absurdist, an allegory of disillusionment and recalcitrance set in a neo-liberal, late-Chicano Movement Los Angeles, Reaganite U.S.A. This talk considers the ambivalent politics of mediation and assembly of Gamboa’s public access TV gambit and the video’s honing of impasse as a tactic for working through imperfect politics.

“‘Hye mish mabsuta’: Diagnosing Affect in a Vulva, Resolving Birth and Postpartum Afflictions through New Theologies of Birthing”
Camila Pastor, CIDE, Mexico City

I read representations of birth, midwives and the material and political contexts of their expertise in Muslim convert narratives in Mexico and in contemporary Arabic fiction against the increasingly sophisticated histories of colonial medicine and reproductive health in Muslim spaces and my own ethnography of Muslim midwives in Mexico. Midwife converts to Islam invoke the Quranic narrative of the birth of the prophet Jesus as paradigmatic of birth and their own role, naturalizing and sacralizing it as “instinctive” act that a laboring woman achieves on her own, with the help of God. They are companions and facilitators to this transcendental junction; claiming the midwife’s “cosmological-existential dimension” at the heart of Ibn Khaldun’s Muqadimat. Regarding postpartum, the core shift is their sexualization of birth and support of birthing mothers’ reclaiming of sexual pleasure. Birth emerges as a narrative tool in contemporary Arab fiction from Maghreb, Mashriq and the Gulf. Given their social role as arbiters of gender assignment, midwives are described as willing to twist the will of God, greedy accomplices to patriarchal desire for male heirs. Birth marks social status, supported to a burdensome degree for the shaikh’s daughters, a lone, efficient procedure among slave women. In Palestinian narrative, wasted milk, that there is no one to drink, embodies mothers’ unremitting grief for dead children.

Session II: Participation

“Phishing as Dhanda: Reassembling Mobile Money Networks in Digital India”
Rahul Mukherjee, University of Pennsylvania

Rural employed youth of Jamtara (India) impersonate bank officials and call customers in Indian cities asking for their credit card details on the pretext of offering gifts. The digital money from the duped customers’ account is then routed to e-wallets and the rented Jan Dhan accounts of the village elderly, bank accounts that were opened as part of financial inclusion drives. Such credit card phishing operations are facilitated by the entry of 4G cellular towers in Jamtara. Local opinion is divided about whether these youths are aspiring entrepreneurs indulging in phishing activity construed as dhanda (business) or they are engaging in cybercrime. In manipulating (pirating) the operative logics of the telecommunication and digital finance infrastructures, Jamtara’s scammers, like Jamaica’s lottery scammers or Nigeria’s “419” frauds, participate (or insert themselves) in “domains of capital and technology from which they were often thought to be excluded before” (Lewis 2020: 93; Larkin 2008). Jamtara’s fraudsters challenge the unevenness of rural-urban divides and reassemble distribution networks of mobile money in Digital India since the notebandi (demonetization) drives of 2016. I extend the “subaltern-popular” framework to understand the aspirational forces unleashed by access to and use of mobile money technologies for not just a politics of media representations but also media distributions (Chattopadhyay and Sarkar 2005). 

“The Subaltern, the Popular, the Carceral”
Althea Wasow, UC Santa Barbara

This paper investigates ways in which thinking the “carceral” with the “subaltern” and the “popular” illuminates current “political and media landscapes” and puts pressure on our understanding of access, participation, and location. Drawing on DuBois’s method of following and learning from those who are most directly impacted by institutional and systemic violence, I will focus on film and media produced by people who are incarcerated or were formerly incarcerated. In addition to drawing attention to critical distinctions between the three terms, these works open up new possibilities for building coalitions, expanding democratic participation, and attending to grammars of repair. I will argue, however, that the dramatic increase in their cultural currency and the longstanding linkage between criminality and black cultural authenticity — and the prison as its preeminent site of production — call into question their contribution to “reorganizing and realigning knowledge paradigms.” 

“Hindustani, Heterodoxy and the Politics of Creativity”
Dard Neuman, UC Santa Cruz

This talk explores the popular provenance of Hindustani music post 1857 through the analysis of rare Urdu manuscripts, recorded interviews, and performance recordings of five hereditary musicians: Anjanibai Malpekar (1883-1974), Faiyaz Khan (1886-1950), Kesarbai Kerkar (1892-1977), Vilayat Hussain Khan (1895-1962), and Chand Khan (1901-1980). This material was documented just after Independence and before the discourse of Indian classical music became canonized. Through narrative, genealogical, and musical analysis, I argue that hereditary musicians of the colonial-modern era hailed from diverse and predominantly marginalized backgrounds, and synthesized popular practices with elite repertoire, generating innovations that profoundly impacted a range of elite and popular expressive forms.

Session III: Location 

“Moorings and Voyages: The View from The Dhow” 
Nidhi Mahajan, UC Santa Cruz

This paper focuses on sailors from the Gulf of Kachchh, India as they voyage across the Indian Ocean on mechanized wooden sailing vessels known as vahans, or dhows. Taking a “view from the dhow,” it examines the social fabric of these invisibilized Muslim seafarers as they maneuver multiple regulatory regimes and the exigencies of life at risk with colonialism, neoliberalism, Hindutva, and climate change. Based on historical and ethnographic research, I examine how these voyages produce forms of accumulation grounded in historically sedimented practices or “moorings”, the ocean becoming a canvas across which sailors and their kin produce self and community identity.

“On Sabotage: Anarchy and Black Youth Subalternity in Mid-twentieth Century Philadelphia” 
J.T. Roane, Rutgers University

In order to gain analytic purchase on the Black anarchist potential of contemporary “flashmobs” in Philadelphia politics, I turn to archives of Black youth containment from the 1950s and 1960s. I examine Black youth subalternity as a dialectic emergence with the mid-twentieth century “welfare-warfare” order. Black youth, especially those inscribed as “girls” faced exclusion from the material worlds and infrastructures associated with breadwinnerism except through their violent entailment to its hegemony. Black youth inscribed as girls inhabited an impossible position within mid-twentieth century urban life as neither future breadwinners nor future “wives.” Analyzing arrest records and other city documents, I mobilize Sarah Haley’s conceptualization of “sabotage” as a means of considering the generative/destructive outsider formations that Black youth forged, through violence and effacement of racialized gender. Black youth challenged their homes, schools, and carceral facilities as sites of violent expropriation, violation, and containment. Their actions point towards a vision for the city outside property and its cognate, the proper, that might be useful in work to agitate new autonomous infrastructures in the age of platform capital and flashmobs. 

Session IV: Grammar

“We are creating a world we have never seen”: Repair and Worldmaking in eastern Congo”
Rachel Niehuus, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

This paper examines radical worldmaking in eastern Congo. Where violence has characterized the everyday for generations, Congolese have developed innovative and imaginative ways to live amidst and mend from repetitive harm. In An Archive of Possibilities, I explore five registers of healing and repair in regimes of Black death and chronic war. For people of African descent, it is an audacious and emboldened notion to envisage a collective future. But a new discourse is emerging in Congo, which questions and affirms how Congolese will survive in the future, not if they will. Drawing from the fifth chapter of the book, this paper interrogates uses of the poetic register towards an epistemology of Black/Congolese aliveness.

“A Permanent Social Crisis and the Remaking of Insurgent Emancipatory and Reactionary Possibilities from below in Post-Colonial Southern Africa”
Ricado Jacobs, UC Santa Barbara

The twenty-first century is characterized as the era of crisis and catastrophe. South Africa in particular, and Southern Africa in general, are experiencing an acute (permanent) social crisis. In response to the crisis, subaltern classes are engaging in struggles to resolve the multidimensional crisis of capitalism. The nature of the social crisis generates both reactionary and emancipatory possibilities. The post-apartheid/colonial state in Southern Africa must govern on the expectation from below of redressing injustices of the past (through redistribution), with the fundamental pillars of apartheid/colonial capitalism (racialized inequality) still intact, and implement neoliberal capitalist policies. It is the contradictory nature of the state that defines its various modes of rule at different levels of government, often in conflict with one another. These contradictory modes of rule and more than two decades of neoliberal policies are responsible for an explosion in anti-neoliberal and anti-capitalist social protest. The paper will approach this permanent crisis from the perspective of the oppressed, particularly their clamoring for emancipatory alternatives or “pulling the emergency break,” to use Walter Benjamin’s phrase. A focus on the struggles of the insurgent classes, particularly in Southern Africa, will allow us to examine the crisis from the perspective of the struggling classes and excavate a new grammar of the current crisis and the emancipatory and reactionary possibilities latent within these social uprisings.

“Can the Monstrous Reassemble?”
Utathya Chattopadhyaya, UC Santa Barbara

Can plants be monsters? If plants had monstrous body parts that grew seemingly deformed and out-of-place, what could they tell us about natural history? In the nineteenth century, these questions produced several answers among scholars and naturalists in the global world of anglophone empire. Monstrosity became a topic of analysis with a niche following after discussions on teratology, from the Greek teratos (monster or wonder), led to field-shaping works by St Hilaire on animals and Maxwell Masters on plants. Teratology eventually became the study of congenital deformities in plants and animals – monstrous bodily parts that could shed light on genetics, history, evolution, and ecology but also dissemble human from nonhuman. Over the 19th century, humanoid monsters became freakery or fabled, nonhuman monstrosities became textbook case studies, and congenital features revealed a vast spectrum of biological gender variance. This paper asks if we can return to monstrosity and its subaltern histories within the natural sciences to reassemble, even repair, plant and human in modern colonial studies?