Alf Gunvald Nilsen | Subalternity and Resistance in India's Adivasi Heartland: Historical Trajectories, Contemporary Scenarios

Date
Mon October 10th 2016, 12:30 - 2:00pm
Event Sponsor
Sociology Department, Center for South Asia, History Department
Location
Encina Hall West Room 219

Alf Gunvald Nilsen is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Bergen and Visiting Senior Researcher at the Society, Work and Development Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand. His research focuses on subaltern politics, state formation and the political economy of development and democracy in postcolonial India. He is the author of Dispossession and Resistance in India: The River and the Rage (Routledge, 2010) and We Make Our Own History: Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism (Pluto Press, 2014). He is also the co-editor of New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualizing Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India (Oxford University Press, 2015) and Social Movements and the State in India: Deepening Democracy? (Palgrave, 2016).

This lecture aims to contribute to discussions of subaltern politics in contemporary India through an investigation of the character and trajectory of democratic mobilisation among Bhil Adivasis in western Madhya Pradesh. Grounded in a critical dialogue with recent Foucauldian approaches to the study of popular politics in India, this lecture explores how subalternity is simultaneously constituted and contested in and through state-society relations.

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