Fung Public Seminar Series | Theory from the Trenches: Decolonization and the Storm of Subaltern Marxism

Recently, we have seen renewed efforts to decolonize. From the toppling of statues to the revision of disciplinary canons, much of this effort has focused on overturning colonial residues in our cultural and epistemological landscapes. This talk offers a radically different vision of decolonization -- one driven not by bureaucrats, professors or social media activists, but by subaltern actors, a vision that was at once global and local, dedicated equally to dismantling the less visible structures of political economy as it was to fighting epistemic battles. I focus on how landless peasants in Pakistan -- participating in a global communist movement stretching from Oakland to Saigon, from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean -- reinvented revolutionary theory in their struggles against imperialist political economies. Joining a Mao-inspired party in the 1970s, these peasants not only occupied colonially-established estates, but also acquired a meta-recognition that theory -- now an emic category -- was essential to global revolution. I conceptualize these subaltern experiments in theory-making as trench theory, with the trench metaphor flagging a mode of subterranean theorizing born from the exigencies of political combat. Ultimately, this talk shows how subaltern actors drew on ideas spanning intellectual traditions, borders, and oceans to generate trench concepts aimed at heralding nothing short of a worldly, even other-worldly, liberation.. . . . The discussant for this public seminar will be Gyan Prakash, Dayton-Stockton Professor of History and Acting Director, Chadha Center for Global India, Princeton University. --- Event Details: https://my.princeton.edu/rsvp?id=1955559